wikimedia commons/David Hume Kennerly, courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford LibraryNelson Rockefellerwikimedia commons/David Hume Kennerly, courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford Library
During Brazil’s “years of lead”, the devil had a first name and a last name, even though many people did not know how to spell it properly: Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1908-1979), the grandson of one of the most notorious robber barons of American capitalism, John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), who established the Standard Oil company. Historian Antonio Pedro Tota, from the Catholic University of São Paulo, recalls his reaction – when he was still a student – to the “repugnant Yankee’s” trip to Brazil in June 1969, and the group of students who scrawled the words “Rockfeller (sic) go home” on the walls of the Igreja do Calvário church in São Paulo. (The historian did not participate in this protest because he was too busy trying to destroy the Rockefeller’s Esso logo at a nearby service station). “They certainly didn’t know that, thanks to Nelson, corn on the cob was a popular food at the June festivities held every year at that church. Thanks to the business activities of such companies as Agroceres, in which he held an interest, Brazil was able to avail itself of high-productivity hybrid corn crops. The students also didn’t know that Nelson had established the foundations of tropical agronomy research with the help of FAPESP grants and that the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária/Embrapa would not be a center of excellence if Nelson had not established the foundations referred to”, explains Tota, who is writing a biography of Nelson Rockefeller’s Brazilian adventure.
“Nelson’s list of contributions includes the chicken and the pork we purchase at supermarkets. In a certain way, he was responsible for the extensive raising of both poultry and swine, and it cannot be denied that, thanks to his initiative, the country was introduced to supermarkets and shopping malls. In the 1950’s, Rockefeller also brought American engineer Robert Moses to São Paulo. Moses had been involved in the urban renovation of New York and prepared a Program for Public Improvements for the City of São Paulo, which later on resulted in the beltways that run along the Tietê and Pinheiros Rivers. Rockefeller also launched the Fundo Crescinco de Investimento investment fund in Brazil, considered as being one of the first steps towards the creation of a more modern capital market in this region. His Ibec Housing provided solutions for low-income housing, along the lines of similar solutions used in the USA; his farming implements company supplied the rural regions with tractors, plows, combine harvesters and credit for farmers. The historian says that the Programa de Metas goals program devised by Juscelino Kubitschek refers to Nelson as being the person who inspired the idea of rural credit. Perhaps English poet Samuel Butler (1612-1680) was not being facetious when he wrote: “An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books”. “He is an example of the unsubtle and prejudiced view that many people, including those in the academic community, have of the United States. Understanding the United States is irrelevant to many of us and in general is restricted to the sterile concept of “imperialism”. Nelson was an imperialist; he was a philanthropist seeking to redeem the sins of his family and his social class and, above all, he considered himself an instrument for the transformation and modernization of the construction of modern nations in Latin America; he felt this was his mission, the paradigm of which was the American way of life. He was all of this.
Healthy
Tota spent six months digging in the Rockefeller Archive Center in the USA to leave with another version, a documented one, of Nelson’s story. “His basic premise was the idea that US society was healthy, democratic, stable and therefore unquestionable. He believed that the time of wild capitalism, of the kind exerted by his grandfather, had been overcome during the Administration of Franklin Roosevelt, his major reference. He was an unusual example of the “Republican New Dealer”, and he had no doubt that this American system should be shared with other nations, which he respected, and should not be a unique privilege of the United States. He was a Calvinist believer and the power of faith does not leave room for doubts. He had the faith of a missionary. “For Rockefeller, Latin America was part of an attempt to find the new frontier again, which no longer existed in the United States. He was the “white man” who intended to civilize nations as ‘salvation’ . He was ingrained with his saving mission, which was to lead Latin America out of underdevelopment and indicate the way to civilization. He did not come to South America to found New Jerusalem, which had already been founded in the Northern part of the continent, but rather to talk about the existence of a new Garden of Eden, partially built by his family and by others like him, which was supposed to act as the emulator to be extended to all of Latin America”. This of course did not stop him from thinking about profit, a lesson he had learned from his father, Rockefeller Jr. (1874-1960), while trying to clean up the debris caused by the excesses committed by his father by means of a “pragmatic philanthropy that sought to produce results”.
wikimedia commons/David Hume KennerlyNelson, at the White House, between Kissinger (on the left) and President Gerald Fordwikimedia commons/David Hume Kennerly
“The key to understand Nelson’s relationship with Brazil might perhaps be found in a text in Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805-1859) Democracy in America: “In the United States, virtue is almost never a thing of beauty. It is stated that it is useful. American moralists do not preach sacrifice for others because making sacrifices is a noble act. But they boldly say that such sacrifices are as necessary for those who benefit from them as for the ones who make them. This is the doctrine of self-interest, well-understood”. In Nelson’s opinion, at the end of the 1930’s, the big American companies – especially the ones with business activities abroad – had veered from the tradition of this doctrine which was so dear to the Calvinist spirit. Nelson believed he had come to this world to put businessmen back into their traditional place, with more social responsibility, to make sacrifices for their ‘own interest, well-understood’.” Rockefeller’s interest in Latin America started in 1935, when he attempted to find a niche for himself in the family business. To this end, he exchanged the shares he held of Standard Oil for shares in Creole Petroleum, a company based in Venezuela. “He was shocked when, as he was talking to the wife of an American executive based in Caracas for more than eight years, he realized that the woman did not speak any Spanish. Much to Nelson’s astonishment, the woman explained: ‘After all, who would I speak Spanish with?. In Rockefeller’s opinion, this was a grotesque example of the lack of responsibility of Americans abroad who, he felt, should behave like missionaries to implement a more equitable society around the globe and retrieve the United States’ good reputation”, says historian Darlene Rivas, from the US’s Pepperdine University, and author of Missionary capitalist: Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela. “Nelson extolled a regulated and reformed capitalism and hoped to create a model based on this vision of ‘progressive’ capitalist behavior, which would bring together American, Brazilian and Venezuelan investors. He knew a businessman could be responsible and even so, or in spite of this, still do good business and make a profit.” After scolding the directors of the company for the way they had been treating the local people and for their general lack of interest, he brought an army of Spanish teachers from Berlitz to Venezuela.
Based on the knowledge he acquired from his contact with Latin Americans, Rockefeller, at the age of 32, and with the world on the brink of war, proposed an economic policy for the hemisphere to President Roosevelt. The proposal was accepted and Nelson was invited to head the Office of Inter-American Affairs, which would implement some of his ideas on the strengthening of ties with South American countries, either in propaganda or cultivation, which is the field which he was most interested in – the increase of agricultural productivity. After all, the troops needed to be fed. But he was also interested in the development of industrial sectors and even in issues related to health and hygiene. “He was sure that he was planting seeds, because he saw no reason for the USA to change its policy towards Latin America at the end of the Second World War nor for Roosevelt to change his good neighbor policy”. When the president died and the war ended in 1945, Nelson was astonished by the US Government’s total lack of interest in the region and about the replacement of the good neighbor policy with a policy of universalism based on the majority of the votes at the United Nations”, explains Brazilian specialist Elizabeth Cobbs-Hoffman, from San Diego State University, and author of The rich neighbor policy. “Brazil felt especially abandoned, having been the US’s most constant ally during the war. But the new policy focused on Europe, which was viewed, in the context of the Cold War, as more important politically and economically. Nelson’s response to this negligence was to create the American International Association (AIA), a non-profit organization, and the International Basic Economy Corporation (Ibec), the business arm of the operation”. By means of these two organizations, Nelson concentrated his efforts on the task of increasing agricultural productivity, which would prevent the rural exodus, and on the modernization of the cities. From 1950 onwards, his interest was focused on the development of the middle class in these countries, with plans such as the Fundo Crescinco fund and others, the objective of which was the opportunity for the growth of this social class and to motivate its interest in the development of Brazil, a country which he visited for the first time in 1937. “He wasn’t prospecting for oil – which did not exist at that time, as many of his critics state, but for opportunities”, says Tota.
The State of Minas Gerais
“He came back in 1946, as an ordinary citizen, to launch the AIA, trying to do, on the private level, what the US Government was not interested in putting into practice. In 1948, he met with the State Governor of Minas Gerais, Milton Campos, who wanted to implement a local New Deal. He repeated the partnership with Juscelino Kubitscheck, when the latter was instated as state governor. Juscelino took many of Nelson’s ideas with him when he took office as the President of Brazil; among these was the need to penetrate Brazil and to avoid concentrating only on the coast, a bottleneck that had been detected by Nelson’s team”, says the researcher. “Rockefeller viewed democracy as a money issue (wealth and industrialization), that is, economic development was the first brick of a free and stable society. Likewise, he was very enthusiastic about the middle class, which he viewed as being at the forefront of this democracy. This is why he was unhappy about the US’s move away from Wall Street to the bureaucracy of Washington as the center of power. So he dressed up – as a businessman wearing a diplomat’s suit – to fill the void left by the government which, in his opinion, was losing all the investment opportunities that Latin America had to offer, especially Brazil. In his opinion, Brazil was the most important nation and was prepared to establish a partnership with America’s business community”, says Elizabeth. Tota goes even further. “Nelson dreamed of turning Brazil into a USA south of the Equator and thus prevent the country from becoming a bridgehead for communism, a menace that had surfaced in the aftermath of Cuba. He really wanted to bring the American dream – which he believed was a consumer society with direct access to happiness – to Brazil, says the historian. I think that his dream of the Brazil of agribusiness, of big oil companies, of ordinary people crowding supermarkets and shops somewhat resembles the Lula Government’s policy of Casas Bahia for all. Even the Bolsa-família program is similar to the Food Stamp, a program implemented during the New Deal, which Nelson implemented later on when he was the state governor of New York in the 1960’s. I’m sure that Lula and Nelson Rockefeller would have gotten along very well”.
folha imagemTalking about art with Ciccillo Matarazzo, in glasses, and Yolanda Penteadofolha imagem
Above all, Nelson wanted to educate Americans and Latin Americans. “American executives would learn that it was lucrative to invest in the basic development of other countries instead of concentrating only on exploiting raw materials, and that this kind of investment could be made in a way as to benefit local interests”, Elizabeth points out. “The Latin Americans, in turn, would learn that cooperating with US business interests would facilitate their development and not only exploit them. In the process, Nelson would establish himself as the figure head of external economic expansion and development and, in this way, create followers in the USA in business and politics”. In the spirit of business is business, Rockefeller never failed to negotiate political issues and got along very well with dictatorships, including the Brazilian one. “His life experience in Brazil after 1964 and after Brazil’s economic miracle years led him to realize that economic growth does not always result in everlasting prosperity and the middle class is not always at the forefront of democracy. Above all, the profits he gained when Brazil’s inflation rate was several digits high showed him that a monetary market could exist, as a paradox to extreme poverty, financial downturns, and bankruptcies of industries and cities”, says the Brazilian specialist. This was the beginning of the conservative version of the ‘leftist Republican’, as he was referred to by the US’s political community. “He began to forget Brazil and his reform plans, as he became increasingly unhappy by realizing that he would never become the President of the United States, which was his dream”, adds Tota. The lowest point of his career as “the diplomat of private initiative” came in 1969, when he came back to Brazil representing Nixon and his visit caused turmoil and student protests. “Nobody cared about what he had done to promote agricultural development, scientific research, rural extension and investment opportunities for the middle class. The young people didn’t know about this or didn’t care”, says Elizabeth.
Latin American academics and liberals were also not interested in Nelson’s report on his trip, as he insisted on telling US government officials that they shouldn’t turn their backs on dictatorial regimes, and merely keep up the old non-interventionist spirit of the Good Neighbor Policy. “In 1968 and 1969, this attitude no longer had any support. In the aftermath of the referred Policy’s demise in the previous decade, Latin American revolutionaries and reformists no longer believed in the possibility of non-intervention. The issue was simply to know on whose side the USA would position itself. Rockefeller’s words merely legitimized normal economic and diplomatic relationships with dictatorships”, explains the Brazilian specialist.
However, it cannot be denied that Nelson had already done most of his homework. “NGOs and other non-profit organizations concerned about foreign economic development proliferated, stating their right to represent, as Rockefeller had done in the past (the Peace Corps and Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress were also Nelson’s heirs), the US’s ‘mission’ around the world frequently held highly critical points of view on Washington’s foreign policy”, Elizabeth adds. This was private diplomacy following the “doctrine of own interest, well understood”. “The government, acting alone, is unable to compete with the resources and the expertise of the private sector. A responsible private venture can help build the kind of world in which violence and social turmoil no longer have any functions. For underdeveloped economies, private initiative is the great galvanizing force, releasing ideas, injecting capital, bringing together talents and creating incentives”, Nelson wrote.
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