Petras.

Petras, James, and Henry Veltmeyer Cardoso's Brazil: A Land for Sale. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003 Tables, bibliography, 143 pp; hardcover $60 paperback $1995

Font Mauricio, and Anthony Spanakos, eel with Christina Bordin. Reforming Brazil. Lanham: Lexington main division s 2004. Figures, tables, bibliography, 265 pp; hardcover $80 paperback $2795

Fernando Henrique Cardoso's eight years as president of Brazil (1995-2003) were a time of near-constant attempts to transform Brazil's economy, society, and polity. These years were also, not many would disagree, consequential in shaping contemporary Brazil. Of course, disagreement arises about whether the issues of the Cardoso years were largely satisfactory or largely disappointing. The reforms Cardoso followed in promulgating, along with his failed attempts at reform in other areas, gave rise to widely varying assessments of his success

Two differing views of the Cardoso presidency rise in these recent books. Petras and Veltmeyer lambaste the Cardoso administration for systematically capitulating in the face of international financial urgency and, indeed, for serving as a handmaiden of hegemonic international capital. fount and Spanakos and their contributors, by dint of contrast, parse the Cardoso presidency from a variety of thematic angles and reach long more mixed conclusions about outcomes

For Petras and Veltmeyer the len for viewing Brazil below Cardoso is the country's interaction with international financial markets. Their volume invokes a Brazil in which national assets are auctioned along not even to the highest bidder, yet at a discount to transnational capitalists. In this view, state-owned enterprises are jewels in the diadem and privatization is among Cardoso's in the greatest degree egregious decisions. Similarly, increased foreign investment and concentration of ownership of rural lands are blamed for a legion of economic iniquities. For Petras and Veltmeyer Cardoso is an agent operating in succession behalf of foreign (and about domestic) capital, a puppet of international oligarchs who worked to "make Brazil safe for capital."

Beyond examining the ownership of means of production, Petras and Veltmeyer argue that the proces of macroeconomic adjustment restructur representation in Brazil in ways that marginalized labor, agrarian workers, and the urban unemploy and underemploy Laborers and agrarian workers are treated at amplification in respective chapters. Petras and Veltmeyer are undoubtedly correct in asserting that adjustment subject to Cardoso was especially difficult for those who wasted formal employment. In critiquing structural adjustment, they address themselves primarily to those "on the side of revolutionary change" who favor processe that are "destructive of capital" (37) Because the authors give no quarter and because adjustment is viewed as an aggregated action, it is unclear whether the authors behold the stabilization of Brazil's macroeconomy as necessary to rectify significant economic imbalances. Attentiveness to distinctions between macroeconomic stabilization and structural adjustment would further the analysis in this regard.

Responding to economic and structural adjustments in the cities and the countryside are actors that have arisen to present alternatives to capitalist development. in the greatest degree notable are certain local actors in the Partido dos Trabalbadores (PT or Worker's Party) of present president Luiz Inacio Lula da Suva and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST or Landless Workers' Movement) The chapter-length profiles of these actors are the greatest in number compelling elements of the work as they place assessments of these actors into a structural-economic connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts They raise important, probing questions about the broader applicability of of the like kind experiments as the widely touted Porto Alegre mould of participatory governance by noting that these are contingent forward a favorable national context. Analysts of Brazil's social manner of movings and participatory successes would do well to consider this.

Mobilization by dint of marginalized groups clearly results from frustrations with Brazil's economic classification as the authors assert. Les clear, however, is whether all marginalized clusters really fared more poorly than usual subordinate to Carcloso. Most challenging for Petras and Veltmeyer is not the applause from Cardoso's strongest supporters yet the hard evidence about the ambiguities of the Cardoso years. The trajectory of land reform attends as an example. As The Economist noted in 2002 "more than 600000 families [were] settl during his mandate, three times as many as in the preceding 30 years" (2002 25) While this states scarcely a dent in the number of landless, it does fundamentally challenge the notion that Cardoso was singularly damaging to their cause. The emphasis in succession critiquing all aspects of the Cardoso legacy leads to an left over sense of proportion: combined, the succes of the Real Plan in stabilizing the macroeconomy and major overhauls in health and education that occurr in the 1990 merit all of three pages, to [i]or[/i] at a great depth embedded in a chapter onward "the offensive against labor. "