He told this to his fellow leaders at last month’s Ibero-American summit in Cartagena, who not surprisingly were unenthusiastic. Fujimori didn’t care: ‘It’s a new concept and a taboo theme, like that of the armed forces. But here in Peru it is I who control the armed forces, which is not true in some other countries round here.’ With these words he throws the last calendar out to an astonished-looking man at a bus stop.
He has less control, it seems, of his domestic affairs. Last week his wife Susanna, a professed admirer of Mrs Hillary Clinton, packed her bags and left him on grounds of ‘political differences’. Mr Fujimori had ordered Congress to pass a law preventing the spouse of the president from running for the presidency herself. The First Lady, it seems, had other ideas.
* Ironically it was a videotape showing Montesinos bribing opposition Congressmen to back Fujimori that led to both his and Fujimori’s downfall in 2000. Montesinos is currently serving a twenty-year prison sentence for supplying weapons to Colombian rebels. Fujimori fled to Japan and then to Chile, from where he was extradited in September 2007 to face trial in Lima for corruption and human rights violations.
The Rise and Fall of Fernando Collor
Before leaving London for my assignment in Brazil, I had enjoyed a long lunch with the genial Ambassador to Britain, Paulo Tarso Flecha de Lima. His wife was a close confidante of Princess Diana and they had become society figures in London, present at all the best parties. ‘My country is neither a threat nor an opportunity to yours,’ he said, pointing out how rarely Brazil appeared in British newspapers. ‘So the best thing is just to enjoy.’
He was wrong. I was about to witness the demise of yet another head of state. Fernando Collor de Mello, Brazil’s first democratically elected President in thirty years, had taken office just before I arrived, promising to shake up the elites. He had come from nowhere, or rather the small poor north-eastern state of Alagoas where his family controlled the local television station. But he had the support of the country’s most powerful media mogul, Roberto Marinho, and his TV Globo empire. Marinho wanted to avoid a victory for the main candidate Lula, a left-wing trade unionist who had lost a finger when he was a metal worker in a car factory. With Globo’s help, Collor ran a clever campaign appealing to the ‘descamisados’ – the shirtless, somewhat ironic for one always so well dressed.
Collor cultivated an action man image. As President, he liked nothing better than being photographed flying supersonic fighter jets, setting fire to great pyres of cocaine, or piloting submarines. In true Latin machismo fashion, he banned women from wearing trousers in the Presidency.
The main dragon he was intent on slaying was hyperinflation, then running at 20 per cent a month. Within days of taking office in March 1990, he had launched an economic plan which froze bank accounts so no one could withdraw more than $150. People jumped off buildings as weddings, holidays and operations were cancelled.
Later we would find out that the $150 figure had been chosen at random by the Finance Minister. It also transpired she was having an affair with the Justice Minister, using the head of the navy to pass billets-doux during Cabinet meetings. The pair were caught smooching to ‘Bésame mucho’ at a party and the next time the Finance Minister appeared in public, the presidential band struck up the song and watched her blush. The couple fled to Paris where the Justice Minister then abandoned her, claiming he needed urgent dental treatment.
Collor had a nickname – ‘Fernandinho do Pó’, ‘Little Fernando of the Powder’. Every so often he would invite select foreign journalists to breakfast (girls in skirts of course) and we would all comment afterwards on his occasional trips to the bathroom, from which he would emerge strangely focused. The following day we would all be sent commemorative videos showing him greeting us as we trooped in and out of the palace.
In those first two years Brazil revelled in Collormania. First he took on the entrenched business interests that had benefited from years of protectionism, and opened up the country to cheap imports. At last we could buy fax machines, computers and decent wine. He also declared he would save the Amazon – an astonishing turnaround for a country which had remained defiant in the face of worldwide censure for the burning down of its forests in the name of development.
In his new role as defender of the environment, Collor hosted the world’s first ever Earth Summit in June 1992. Suddenly everyone was talking about ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biodiversity’. It was to be the biggest ever gathering of heads of state – 103 of them, from John Major to Fidel Castro – and a proud Collor commissioned the world’s largest wooden conference table.
Rio had been scrubbed and polished for the occasion and was at its sparkling best. No one knew what the authorities had done with the street children. There was even an alternative conference in a beachside park which attracted everyone from Olivia Newton John to the Grand Mufti of Syria. At the specially convened Earth Parliament of spiritual leaders, a giggling Dalai Lama turned up to tell everyone he was having ‘fun, fun, fun’. Inside the tents, groups discussed diverse topics such as ‘Breastfeeding is an Ecological Act’, ‘Mental Pollution in the Inhabitants of Large Cities’ and ‘The Culturing of Worms in the Process of Organic Fertilisation’. So moved was the Prime Minister of Barbados that he penned an ode.
But it was all about to go horribly wrong. On day two of the Earth Summit, I got a phone call that I could hardly believe. Collor’s younger brother, Pedro, had lodged a video with a bank in New York exposing a web of corruption with the President at the centre. For good measure he also revealed how Collor held black magic sessions in the palace, cutting the heads off chickens and drinking their blood.
His timing was impeccable. The Earth Summit was wiped off the front pages and proceedings set in place for Latin America’s first ever impeachment.
An awful lot of trouble in Brazil
The Spectator, 12 September 1992
Brasília
THE TAXI DRIVER in Brazil’s futuristic capital releases his Senna-like grip on the wheel, jerks his thumb towards the presidential palace and mutters darkly, ‘We’ve got a thief living in there.’ He is referring to the country’s dashing young President, Fernando Collor de Mello.
The frequency of such comments illustrates the sad demise of the rich former playboy who swung into office in March 1990 – a political unknown with a mission to modernise the capitalist world’s most protected and regulated economy. His daredevil stunts, which ranged from riding jet-skis and piloting supersonic fighter planes to freezing the population’s bank accounts, quickly won him record popularity and for a while he seemed set to go down in history as the man who led Brazil into the First World.
Yet only two years on he sits isolated in his office, condemned to be remembered in the history books as the first president to face impeachment, after the publication of a damning congressional report accusing him of raking in millions of dollars from a massive influence-peddling scheme.
Remarkably, Mr Collor’s aides say he seems unruffled by the daily demands for his resignation issued by everything from chambers of commerce and the Bar Council to football clubs and bishops. The karate association wants to strip him of his black belt and the usually passive Brazilian populace has taken to the streets en masse clad in black. Amongst the many protest marches was even one entitled ‘Babies against Collor’.
The amazing nonchalance of the man at the centre of the Brazilian equivalent of Watergate is attributed by critics to immense arrogance or even illicit substances. Others say the usually temperamental President simply refuses to believe what is happening. In his one television appearance since the report came out on 24 August, he appeared controlled, though with narrowed pupils and blinking eyes, and in his only interview he insisted that he had ‘no trouble sleeping at night’.
George Bush once called Mr Collor ‘Indiana Jones’, impressed by his swashbuckling style and exaggerated promises to ‘defeat the inflationary tiger with a single bullet’. The tiger is stil
l alive and kicking, but Mr Collor has never before been so deserving of his nickname as in his current desperate fight to buck the Brazilian tradition of presidents not completing their mandates. The republic’s first President, Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, was forced to resign in 1891; Getúlio Vargas shot himself in 1954; Jânio Quadros resigned abruptly in 1961; in 1985 Tancredo Neves died before he assumed office.
Perhaps the odds were always stacked against Mr Collor. He was the country’s first directly elected president for thirty years and his voters were the ‘shirtless and shoeless’, wanting change, which was the last thing Brazil’s ruling elites had in mind. Originating from an inconsequential poor north-eastern state and a party which has only 23 out of 503 seats in Congress, Mr Collor nevertheless took on Brazil’s formidable cartels and monopolies, ending thirty years of price controls and protectionism and allowing the import of items such as cars, cement and fax machines.
Humberto Souto, the leader of the government in Congress, believes it is these ‘vested interests’ that are now campaigning against Mr Collor. ‘Imagine the money at stake. In the context of Brazil, Fernando Collor was dangerous. I would compare him to John F. Kennedy,’ he says.
His wife Rosane, a buck-toothed Barbie doll, caused her own scandal by favouring her family with contracts to supply the government charity which she headed. She was sacked. Mr Collor’s subsequent two-stone weight loss caused a reporter to ask him if he was suffering from Aids.
Yet by May this year, having appointed a new more experienced Cabinet, things seemed to be looking up. Brazilian business actually seemed to be learning the art of competition and for the first time ever there were price wars between petrol stations. But in a Dallas-style saga of fraternal vengeance it was all brought tumbling down by Mr Collor’s younger brother, Pedro. It was he who set ‘Collorgate’ in motion with an interview accusing the President of coke-snorting and of using his position for large-scale personal enrichment through the services of his friend and former campaign treasurer, Paulo César Farias, known as PC.*
A congressional inquiry into Mr Farias was set up and, with hearings televised live, quickly became the hottest thing on the box in the land of soap where more people have access to television than clean water. It even took precedence over football, the national sport, though one channel tried splitting the screen to show the hearing and Brazil v France simultaneously.
Instead of the expected cover-up, the emergence of key witnesses enabled the commission to piece together an alleged multi-million-dollar scam. PC had placed people in ministries and state companies to secure government contracts for companies, particularly in the area of construction, which were paying him enormous kickbacks – usually around 30 per cent of the contract. Most of the proceeds are believed to have left the country in PC’s plane, the Black Bat. However, after banking secrecy was lifted, the inquiry discovered that a sizeable chunk had ended up in the accounts of Mr Collor and his family through phantom account holders.
Mr Collor’s situation was made worse by the dubious defence given by his former private secretary that the mystery deposits were the remains of a $5 million loan raised in Uruguay to fund his campaign and used to buy gold. After eighty-five days of investigations, the inquiry concluded with a direct accusation. The man who had come to power on an anti-corruption platform had made at least $6.5 million through the PC scheme, it said. Even Rosane’s expensive taste in dresses and haircuts had allegedly been funded by PC, to the tune of an average $240,000 a month. One of the most bizarre items was $2.5 million for the landscaping of Mr Collor’s private garden. The landscaper said last week that the Collor garden ‘made the hanging gardens of Babylon look shabby’.
And so the world’s third-largest democracy now has a moral and political crisis to add to its economic and social problems. Thirty years of high inflation have yet to be resolved and for the last year inflation has stuck at more than 20 per cent a month. Partly as a result, Brazil has the world’s worst income distribution, according to the World Bank. The effects of this are obvious in the poverty-stricken north-east, parts of which resemble famine-struck Africa, and in the streets of Rio de Janeiro where people live in trees and it is possible to be shot for a pair of sneakers. Not surprising, then, that there should be indignation over the President’s millions.
Way behind the rest of Latin America on the road to stabilisation, Brazil is bankrupt. Schools and hospitals are closing daily; 1.2 million are unemployed in the industrial capital, São Paulo; and the private sector is suffering so much that businessmen are already sending out next-year calendars, having given up on 1992.
Such is the weight of the task of resolving these problems that the army has remained securely in its barracks, to which it returned in 1985, showing democracy may be more firmly rooted than in some of Brazil’s neighbours. Admiral Flores, the Navy Minister, points out that ‘this is the first time in a hundred years that the military has not intervened in a political crisis’. Moreover, if any of the key characters are jailed this could be the end of traditional impunity, leading to cleaner administrations in future.
Whether Mr Collor survives the impeachment process will be determined in the next few weeks by a congressional vote in which he needs the support of a third of the house or 168 deputies. If he fails he will be tried by the Senate for ‘crimes of responsibility’. The Attorney General is studying 40,000-plus documents to decide whether to start a criminal case.
Meanwhile, inside his palace, Brazil’s pin-up President straightens his designer tie, sucks on the Cuban cigars sent by Comrade Castro and refuses to listen to the voices outside clamouring for his exit. He ignores the numbers flashing on his computer screen showing the fall in the stock market every time he reaffirms his determination not to quit. Nor does he take notice of the exodus of his supporters now beating a path to the door of his Vice President, Itamar Franco, until recently more of a liability than Dan Quayle, but the man who will take over if Mr Collor succumbs.
In a nation addicted to soap opera, the greatest fascination was why Collor’s brother had betrayed him in such a way. It turned out that the President had had an affair with Pedro’s glamorous wife, Teresa. That hardly endeared him to his own less glamorous wife, Rosane. Such was the state of animosity between the First Couple that Collor emerged one day from their house, the Casa da Dinda, to wave a ringless finger at TV cameras and reveal that he had thrown his wedding ring in the lake.
Horrified at seeing her sons tear each other apart in public, Dona Leda, the matriarch of the Collor family, flew down from Alagoas in a fury. She demanded that Pedro take a sanity test, which he duly did and passed, brandishing the results at reporters and renewing his charges against his brother.
It was all too much. Dona Leda suffered three heart attacks and ended up on a life-support machine in a Rio hospital. TV cameras outside filmed each son coming and going at different times.
By then the move for impeachment was unstoppable. Collor’s attempts to appeal to the public with an emotional TV address were to no avail. Every day there were demonstrations against him.
After he was suspended from office I went to see him in the Casa da Dinda and found him sitting at his desk while his secretary inserted signed photographs into envelopes. Rosane was nowhere to be seen.
A suitable case for treatment
The Spectator, 21 November 1992
Brasília
ON THE TABLE in front of Fernando Collor sits an embossed leather presidential pen-stand and a ‘President of Brazil’ name plaque from a United Nations conference – the forlorn remains of his former life as head of the world’s ninth-largest economy. Suspended from office by a landslide congressional vote six weeks ago amid Brazil’s biggest corruption scandal, today Collor faces criminal charges and an impeachment trial.
Now a recluse in his lakeside home in Brasília’s ‘Mansion Sector’, every morning Collor walks the few hundred yards to the rudimentary library where he works without the benefit of air conditioni
ng to relieve the oppressive summer heat. Only the solitary police car outside and the two security men clutching walkie-talkies in the yard suggest this is a man of any importance.
Surrounded by books on his favourite subjects, modern government and mind control, Collor presents a tragic figure. With an ear of wheat placed in front of him for luck next to an empty presidential agenda, he is left with nothing to do but dwell on how in two and a half years he threw away what appeared to be the most promising political career in Latin America.
As I waited in the small anteroom with its scratched terracotta floor tiles and paint-smeared windows, its white walls bare except for a few ship prints – in sharp contrast to the rich oil-painted battle scenes in the plush Presidency – I wondered what to expect. That morning the Brazilian press had carried cartoons of Collor in prison uniform, alongside the news that the Attorney General had recommended criminal charges against him for running a patronage-trafficking scheme with an alleged personal benefit of $55 million.
Would he be a touch repentant? Maybe. Twisted with bitterness over the younger brother who initiated the scandal with his allegations, and the politicians who had taken ‘his’ money, promising their support, and then betrayed him? Surely.
What I had not expected was what happened: we sat talking for more than two hours, competing with the angry chorus of crickets and swatting the occasional fly, as the conversation wandered into areas such as the size of Einstein’s brain and Collor’s memories of eating waffles and honey with his grandmother in Rio.
As I listened to these rambles, I recalled with a shock that as recently as June, when Brazil played host to the Earth Summit, Collor had presided successfully over the planet’s biggest gathering of heads of state, and seemed on top of the world.
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