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technocrats. The domestic market was dominated by luxury goods for the rich. None of this will be unfamiliar to others subjected to the same doctrines, including North Americans during the “Reagan revolution.”
    Brazil became “the most rapidly growing of major overseas markets of American manufacturers,” Evans observes, with high rates of return for investment, second only to Germany during the late ‘60s and early 70s. Meanwhile, the country became even more of a foreign-owned subsidiary. As for the population, a World Bank study in 1975—at the peak of the miracle years—reported that 68 percent had less than the minimum caloric requirement for normal physical activity and that 58 percent of children suffered from malnutrition. Ministry of Health expenditures were lower than in 1965, with the expected concomitant effects. 11
    After a visit to Brazil in 1972, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington urged some relaxation of the fascist terror, but with moderation: “relaxation of controls” might “have an explosive effect in which the process gets out of control,” he warned. He suggested the model of Turkey or Mexican one-party rule, playing down the importance of liberal rights in comparison with the more significant values of “institutionalization” and stability.
    A few years later, the bubble burst. Brazil was swept up in the global economic crisis of the ‘80s, particularly ruinous in Africa and Latin America. Terms of trade now rapidly declined, eliminating this crutch for those who held the purse strings and the whip. Inflation and debt raced out of control, income levels dropped substantially, many firms faced bankruptcy, and idle capacity reached 50 percent, “giving a new meaning to ‘stagflation’,” Skidmore observes. Delfim’s neoliberal growth strategy was in “total collapse,” he adds. After 4 years of severe economic decline, the economy began to recover, in large part thanks to the import-substituting industrialization decried by neoliberal economic doctrine. The Generals bowed out, leaving a civilian government to administer the economic and social wreckage.

    5. “A Real American Success Story”
    Writing in 1989, Gerald Haines describes the results of more than four decades of US dominance and tutelage as “a real American success story.” “America’s Brazilian policies were enormously successful,” bringing about “impressive economic growth based solidly on capitalism.” As for political success, as early as September 1945, when the “testing area” had barely been opened for experiment, Ambassador Berle wrote that “every Brazilian now has available to himself all of the resources available to any American during a political campaign: he can make a speech, hire a hall, circulate a petition, run a newspaper, post handbills, organize a parade, solicit support, get radio time, form committees, organize a political party, and otherwise make any peaceable bid for the suffrage and support of his countrymen”—just like “any American.” We’re all equal, one happy family in harmony, which is why government is so responsive to the needs of the people. And so “democratic”—in the doctrinally approved sense of the term, referring to unquestioned business rule.
    This triumph of capitalist democracy stands in dramatic contrast to the failures of Communism, though admittedly the comparison is unfair—to the Communists, who had nothing remotely like the favorable conditions of this “testing area” for capitalism, with its huge resources, no foreign enemies, free access to international capital and aid, and benevolent US guidance for half a century. And the success is real. From the early years, US investments and profits boomed as “Washington intensified Brazil’s financial dependence on the United States, influenced