[Marxism] Celso Furtado

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Obituary
Celso Furtado

An economist who offered radical interventionist policies for Brazil

Sue Branford
Friday November 26, 2004
The Guardian

Celso Furtado, who has died aged 84 from a heart attack, was Brazil's 
most renowned economist, internationally revered for his political 
commitment. He maintained his lucidity to the end, signing a petition 
calling on the government to keep Carlos Lessa on as president of 
Brazil's state-owned development bank the BNDES.

Lessa was one of the few remaining voices, in an increasingly orthodox 
government with market-oriented economic policies, to defend the 
growth-orientated interventionist policies that Furtado had proposed for 
50 years. Lessa still lost his job, but President Lula felt obliged to 
phone Furtado to justify his decision.

Furtado was born into a well-to-do family in Pombal, a town in the 
drought-ridden north-east. One of his earliest memories was hiding with 
his father, the local magistrate, when cangaceiros (bandits) invaded the 
town. "I was shocked by their violence," he recalled. "I remember the 
corpses on the streets."

He also had vivid memories of the 1924 floods that inundated the town 
after a long drought. "I finished up with the idea that danger was on 
all sides, either from nature or from humans. Perhaps this explains why 
I am a very cautious man. Although at times I have defended what may 
seem radical action, this has always been after very carefully 
considering all points of view."

After studying in Rio de Janeiro, Furtado served with the Brazilian 
expeditionary force in Italy during the second world war, where he was 
hurt in an accident during the final offensive.

A voracious reader, Furtado made a point, when he was in Lisbon, of 
having his picture taken in front of the statue of one of his favourite 
novelists, Eça Queiroz. This photograph (in which he is revealed as a 
handsome young soldier) became one of his prized possessions.

Postwar, Furtado took an economics doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris. 
In 1948, he married Lucia Tosi, an Argentinian, with whom he had two sons.

In 1950, he moved to Santiago, the Chilean capital, where he joined the 
new Economic Commission for Latin America (Ecla). Under the inspiration 
of John Maynard Keynes, the industrialised countries had just created 
the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, institutions that 
were intended to herald an era of steady economic growth and prosperity.

Latin America, too, was infected by the climate of hope. Thinkers such 
as Raul Prebisch, Jorge Ahumada, Juan Loyola, and Anibal Pinto began to 
produce exciting ideas about overcoming the region's structural problems 
of underdevelopment. Furtado's most important contribution to this 
debate, written at King's College, Cambridge, in 1957-58, was The 
Economic Formation Of Brazil. Using a Keynesian approach, he combined 
profound knowledge of Brazilian history with an analysis of the 
structural constraints on the economy to formulate a project for 
national development.

One of his particularly far-sighted conclusions was that the 
transformations in capitalism, particularly the formation of huge 
transnational groups, presented serious risks to this nation-building 
project. He recommended that Brazil should becautious before integrating 
into the world economy.

Back in Brazil in 1958, Furtado joined President Juscelino Kubitschek's 
government, which was building the new inland capital of Brasilia and 
promoting industrialisation under the slogan "50 years in Five". He set 
up the Sudene development agency for his beloved north-east.

In President João Goulart's government in 1962, as the country's first 
ever planning minister, he drew up a three-year development plan. But in 
April 1964 Furtado was forced into exile by the military coup.

In 1965 he became the first foreigner to be appointed head of the 
economic development faculty at the University of Paris. After the 1979 
amnesty he began to pay frequent visits to Brazil, while retaining 
residence in Paris. Divorced from his first wife, he married a Brazilian 
journalist, Rosa Freire d'Aguiar.

With the 1985 return to civilian rule, he became Brazil's ambassador to 
the European Economic Community. In 1988, he was appointed culture 
minister in José Sarney's government.

When I met Furtado in Rio in 2001, he was already having to be helped in 
and out of his leather armchair, but his green eyes sparkled with 
delight when he spoke of Brazil's landless movement, the MST. "It is 
Brazil's most important social movement ever," he enthused. Despite the 
repeated setbacks, he never lost hope that eventually Brazil would find 
the path to development.

He is survived by his wife and by two sons from his first marriage.
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