Antônio Delfim Netto, the Brazilian finance minister who was credited for the high-growth economy known as the “Brazilian miracle” during the early years of the country’s 21-year military dictatorship, but then excoriated for the hyperinflation and recession that followed, died on Aug. 12 in São Paulo. He was 96.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by his office.
Mr. Delfim was a bundle of contradictions, variously categorized as a technocrat, a neo-capitalist and a promoter of greater state control over the economy. His portly profile, oversize owlish glasses and penchant for white shirts, black suits and ties were in stark contrast to the suave aristocratic Rio style of his day. Though his policies endeared him to business leaders, he also introduced price controls and inflation-indexed wages that brought short-term relief to the working poor.
To his detractors, Mr. Delfim was an opportunist who supported both the repressive military regime that lasted from 1964 to 1985 and the civilian governments that replaced it until public opinion turned against them. His policies, critics pointed out, brought only short-lived economic gains while exacerbating vast income inequality.
But according to his defenders, Mr. Delfim presided over the transformation of a backward agrarian nation into Latin America’s industrial and exporting powerhouse.
“Brazil realized its extraordinary growth in exports even though the experts said we couldn’t,” Mr. Delfim bragged to The New York Times in 1979, recalling a hallmark of the so-called miracle years, between 1968 and 1974, when he was finance minister and annual growth averaged 10 percent. “It happened because the exporters knew that the government was completely behind them.”
But when the economy turned sour under his aegis, he was quick to blame external factors beyond his control, including a steep rise in international oil prices and higher interest rates on global capital markets.
More than a purveyor of economic theories, Mr. Delfim was a man drawn to power. Like Henry Kissinger, another academic turned power broker, Mr. Delfim became a media superstar, stalked by photographers and discussed nightly on television.
It was a meteoric rise from humble roots.
Antônio Delfim Netto was born into a barely middle-class household on May 1, 1928, in Cambuci, a blue-collar neighborhood of São Paulo. His paternal grandfather was an Italian immigrant who worked as a road construction laborer. His father, José Delfim, died when he was an infant, and he was raised by his mother, María Netto, a seamstress.
After receiving a doctorate in economics from the University of São Paulo and becoming a faculty member there, Mr. Delfim joined the São Paulo state government and led a team that restored order to its chaotic finances. As a reward, Brazil’s military government appointed him finance minister in 1967 when he was only 38 years old.
Long in the doldrums, the nation’s economy was starting to expand thanks to the policies of Mr. Delfim’s predecessors, the planning minister Roberto Campos and the finance minister Otávio Gouveia de Bulhões, from 1964 to 1967. But it was Mr. Delfim who reaped the glory for the next six years of the “Brazilian miracle.”
The cost of global capital was low during those years, and Brazil was able to borrow billions of dollars to launch badly needed highway, airport, telecommunication and hydroelectric projects. Domestic banks lent generously to commercial and industrial enterprises that serviced markets at home and abroad, and foreign investment poured in to a country that finally seemed on the road to development under stable political rule.
But behind the miracle was repression. Labor discipline and low wages were enforced by union-busting decrees and fearsome security forces. Dissidents, peaceful protesters as well as violent terrorists, were arrested, tortured and sometimes executed. The news media was muzzled, or censored itself.
Mr. Delfim played an often duplicitous role during the period of the worst excesses under his main political benefactor, Gen. Emílio Garrastazu Medici, Brazil’s president from 1969 to 1974. While Mr. Delfim portrayed himself in off-the-record chats with journalists and dinner guests as a relative political moderate, he fully supported the so-called AI-5 of 1968, the most infamous and repressive decree of the military era, which essentially institutionalized censorship and torture.
Mr. Delfim emerged as the most important civilian figure during the lengthy military dictatorship, which stirred his hopes that the generals might someday appoint him president. As a step toward that goal, he tried to get Mr. Medici’s successor, Gen. Ernesto Geisel, to name him governor of São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous and economically powerful state. Instead, President Geisel sent him into virtual exile as ambassador to France from 1975 to 1978.
The installation of a new military president, Gen. João Figuereido, rescued Mr. Delfim from political oblivion. Appointed to the low-profile post of agriculture minister in 1979, he again stepped into the limelight with promises to modernize farming and raise rural incomes. Within months he was named minister of planning, promising a return to the high-growth years.
But Mr. Delfim’s second term as economic czar, from 1979 to 1985, proved a disaster that hastened the demise of military rule. Oil prices had been rising since 1973, and Brazil produced little petroleum of its own while capping fuel prices for consumers. Interest rates on loans from abroad soared, and so did Brazil’s foreign and domestic debt. Mr. Delfim’s expansive policies, and his inability to rein in government spending, only worsened the growing crisis. Inflation exploded past 100 percent, and Brazil was unable to service its foreign debt.
After the end of the military dictatorship and the return of democratic politics in 1985, Mr. Delfim was elected to Congress for five consecutive terms between 1987 and 2007. His economic advice was sought even by the left-wing politicians who had once denounced him, including two presidents, Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.
Mr. Delfim led a complicated personal life. His first wife, Mercedes, apparently accepted his longstanding affair with his secretary, Gervásia Diório, with whom he had a daughter. Mr. Delfim recognized his paternity and often accompanied his daughter to school. Shortly after his wife died in 2011, he married Ms. Diório. His survivors include Ms. Diório and their daughter, Fabiana Delfim.
Well into his 80s, Mr. Delfim continued to work as a consultant to large companies. On the wall by his desk hung dozens of framed magazine cover, both flattering to him and not. An Institutional Investor cover from the miracle years portrayed him as Superman; a cover headline a decade later from the Brazilian newsweekly Veja declared, “The People Demand Delfim’s Head!”
“They are all true,” Mr. Delfim said in an interview for this obituary in 2011. “That’s why I keep them on the wall.”
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