ABSTRACT
The political “see-saw” games that the left and the right have been playing since 1985 have considerably weakened Brazil’s chances for implanting firm roots of democratic stability. Since the founding of the New Republic in March 1985, efforts to find a solution to Brazil’s debt crisis have taken place within the context of debates over organizing and consolidating a new constitutional system. Indecision and politically-convenient policy choices have prolonged Brazil’s business recession and pushed the country into social upheaval. Such massive indebtedness can be explained in terms of Brazil’s historic propensity to borrow externally for economic development. Brazil lacks a constructive political culture in which each politician, economic technocrat, businessman, academic, and private citizen has a role in the new democracy. Agricultural and ranching interests, the backbone of Brazil’s export economy and cozy beneficiaries of the government subsidies, refused to support the Cruzado Plan.
