An 'Accidental' President's Saga

F ernando Henrique Cardoso grew up in a world of refined wealth and academic study, was forced into exile during military rule, returned to help overthrow a junta, became a senator and reached the peak of power as a two-term president of Brazil from 1995 to 2003.

Now, in an honest, personable and engaging book, "The Accidental President of Brazil," Cardoso takes the uninitiated on a historical and intimate tour of his vast country, following its long and tortured journey from iron-fisted military dictatorship to diverse and troubled democracy.

"Brazilians would find this very superficial. For them, I have just finished a 700-page book [in Portuguese] about the process of governance," Cardoso said, still glowing from a presentation and book signing Wednesday at Georgetown University. "The Accidental President," a relatively slim 280 pages, addresses his mistakes and controversies in office. "I don't know if it is the truth," he said, but added, "It is my truth."

Cardoso, 75, was born when Brazil had one paved road, 80 percent of the people lived on farms and Rio de Janeiro was covered with lush green hills, where he played as a child. Now the country has 40,000 miles of highways, but the population has exploded to 186 million and the hills have been transformed into dense, crime-ridden slums called favelas , a synonym for brutal urban poverty.

Under other circumstances, Cardoso might have spent his adult life as a sociology professor and comfortably retired a few years back. But as he explained in an interview Wednesday and describes at length in his book, fate intervened in the form of a military coup in 1964. Suddenly police were bursting into academic gatherings and friends were kidnapped without a trace. Forced to "retire" at age 37, he fled into exile in Chile.

"Here I was, a professor on the run, transformed overnight into some kind of Che Guevara in a tweed jacket," he wrote in a chapter called "The Bitter Caviar of Exile."

At the time, Chile was a regional center of culture and intellectual ferment. There he socialized with poet Pablo Neruda , who he said would recite his poems as he walked into parties, and Salvador Allende , the socialist leader who became Chile's president and died in a 1973 military coup. Later, Cardoso enjoyed visiting professorships in Paris and Berkeley, Calif., and at Cambridge.

The most riveting parts of the book, co-written with Brian Winter in English, describe what happened after Cardoso returned home in 1978 to help derail the military. In 1984, the call for "Diretas ja" -- "Rights Now" -- began blossoming into a nationwide movement. Mass protests for democracy and presidential elections erupted in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, with as many as a million people in the streets.

"Thousands of people drove their cars around, honking their horns to show their support for democracy," Cardoso wrote, while the military commander of Brasilia, mounted on a white stallion, "galloped around the jampacked streets of the city, beating cars with his riding crop to try and make them shut up."

In 1986, Cardoso ran for the Senate as a protest candidate and was legally barred from the race, but an unexpected Supreme Court decision held up his right to run, and the soft-spoken academic entered Brazil's heated political world.

After the military government stepped down, he was appointed foreign minister and then finance minister, working to curb Brazil's rampant inflation. By the time he left the presidency, 97 percent of Brazil's children were enrolled in school. Now he says he wishes he had done more to reform government institutions and moved faster to devalue the currency.

"I could have done better," he said.

An especially timely aspect of "The Accidental President" concerns Cardoso's long and complex relationship with Luis Inacio Lula da Silva , the current president. Always friends, they have alternated between political allies and rivals. Cardoso praised Lula for galvanizing labor unions in the fight against dictatorship. He faulted him for dealing with controversial economic partners, dragging his government into a mire of corruption charges.

He stressed that his successor was not, as some critics charge, a radical leftist in the mold of Fidel Castro of Cuba or President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Instead, he described Lula as a "pragmatist who worries about salaries and health care. He is not a rabid ideologue."

In the interview, Cardoso expressed frustration that Brazil, a country with enormous economic potential and natural beauty, had been held back from achieving modernity, equity and global influence by its deep-seated traditions and wild, ungovernable vastness.

"To be developed today, you cannot be unjust socially; you cannot have inequality and poverty," he said. "Our future will be better than our past. We are a melting pot." Cardoso pointed out that both Arabs and Jews hold important political posts in Brazil. "We are on the right track, but we have to go fast."