Conclusions

The specter of Latin America's greatest popular leadership in the early 21st century is still around the Brazilian political scene. Celso Furtado explains the fate of the Latin American colossus, for whom a development project in the tropics was doomed to an 'interrupted construction'. The construction that Furtado refers to is a more just, democratic and egalitarian country. The logic of his collectivist discourse derives from Keynes, and his ideas definitely inspired the lefts in power in Brazil, from Goulart, the president deposed by the military coup in the 1960s, to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, the president deposed by the judicial plot, 50 years later. The diagnosis of this perspective on development is that the elite paradoxically resist the modernization of the country. Its fundamentally anti-national nature – the first to ally with foreign capital – subverts the working class to harsh conditions of exploitation, sharpening distributive conflict.