With just a few weeks left until his return to the White House, . He was 100 years old and governed from 1977 to 1981. Beaten by Ronald Reagan, he served only one term. He took office carrying the flag of democracy and human rights, but was crushed by inflation of 9.9% and by his virtues as a simple man.
The assessment of his presidency followed the obituaries that gave him the credit denied in the 1980 election. Brazil owed Carter and Washington’s approval.
In 1971, when General Emílio Médici visited Washington, President Richard Nixon said: “We know that wherever Brazil goes, there will go the rest of Latin America.” Two years later, the military governed Uruguay and Chile. In 1976, it was Argentina’s turn.
Carter governed the small state of Georgia and his national experience was nil. In March 1976, in a lecture at the Council of Foreign Relations, he associated his political future with the defense of human rights, but no one paid attention. Months later, he named one of the cattle: “Brazil does not have a democratic government. It is a democratic government. In many ways, it is highly repressive towards political prisoners. Our government must correspond to the character and moral principles of the American people, and our foreign policy cannot circumvent them in exchange for temporary advantages”.
The charanga was guided by conventional wisdom. That was candidate talk. He was elected and placed nurse Patricia Derian, a historical activist in the struggle of black Americans, in the human rights area of the State Department and professor Brady Tyson as a senior delegation official at the UN. In the 60s, he had been asked to leave Brazil. If that were not enough, Carter, who called himself a nuclear engineer (which he never was), was opposed to an agreement signed by Brazil with Germany. If he went ahead, nuclear power plants and a uranium reprocessing plant would be built.
Carter scrapped the Nuclear Agreement and, in 1977, sent his . Passing through Recife, she interviewed, live and in color, with two American missionaries who lived among the city’s poor and had been arrested.
In March 1978, it was Carter’s turn to come to Brazil. He received a cordial but cold reception. As he wanted to hear from people from civil society, a meeting was arranged in Rio, after the official part of the visit had ended. Carter met, among others, with the president of the OAB, Raymundo Faoro, with the director of O Estado de S. Paulo, Julio de Mesquita Neto, and with cardinal d. Paulo Evaristo Arns. The choreography of the conversation foreshadowed a studied irrelevance: everyone stood up.
The scheme failed. Carter invited d. Paulo to accompany him to the airport and, sitting down, they talked for half an hour.
Footnote: Years later, when Carter and Geisel had left the governments, he returned to Brazil. He tried to arrange a meeting and was unable to do so. He called Teresópolis, where the former president lived, and he didn’t answer. It was the payback he owed for sending his wife to investigate him.
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