50 Years in Brazil

The Ford Foundation recently observed the fiftieth anniversary of its work in Brazil. Peter Bell, one of the early staff members in the Rio office, commented, “It would have been hard in the 1960s to imagine that the FF would one day actually be marking 50 years in Brazil.” Noting the anniversary, the Estado de Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest circulation newspaper, interviewed Peter for its Sunday edition of September 16. This article is based on Peter’s responses to questions posed to him by the Portuguese-speaking journalist. 

The Brazil office of the Ford Foundation was established early in the Foundation’s work in Latin America. At the time, the Foundation viewed itself primarily as making grants to advance Brazilian development through institutional support for programs in higher education and research.

In those days, “development” was conventionally understood in economic, engineering/infrastructure and scientific terms and measured in terms of increases in per capita income. Thus, the earliest grants of the Foundation supported graduate training programs in the sciences, engineering, public administration and economics.

These were all relatively “safe” areas for a foundation newly arrived in Brazil. Its ethos was technocratic and non-political, and it had little appetite for controversy; yet grants to universities, including the library of the experimental University of Brasilia, and to institutions such as the National Research Council (CNPq), a national program of fellowships (CAPES) and the Getulio Vargas Foundation, ultimately proved their worth.

Over time, the Foundation’s view of “development” evolved, as did our familiarity with Brazil. Moreover, the Brazilian context for our grant-making and for critical research and inquiry also changed. The Foundation turned its attention to the agricultural sciences, believing that agriculture was essential for development but that it had received scant support for training, research and extension. We also had the audacity to assist the generation of services for reproductive health and family planning.

Coincidental with my joining the Foundation staff in Rio in September 1964, and just five months into the period of the authoritarian regime following a military coup, we began exploring the possibility of institutional grants for research and graduate training in the social sciences, including political science, political sociology and social anthropology. We did so out of a belief, shared by some Brazilian colleagues, that social scientists could help to explore and illuminate the social and political dimensions of development.

It did not take long to discover that support for the social sciences could be as sensitive and controversial as that for family planning. In the midst of the Cold War, the military-dominated government conflated social scientists with “socialists” and curtailed their freedom of inquiry, expression and association. It was becoming clear to some Foundation staff that it was insufficient to presume that we were “nonpolitical” or “technocratic”. As a transnational organization, we had a responsibility to make explicit the values underlying our grant-making and essential for the advancement of the social sciences and even the natural sciences. At the same time, we could not be partisan.

In more recent decades, the Brazil office of the Foundation, increasingly staffed and run by Brazilians, even as Brazil was becoming more democratic, engaged more directly in supporting programs to advance human rights and to reduce poverty, often through grants to non-government organizations, or NGOs.

Many philanthropic foundations in the United States have suffered from the recessionary economy of the last five years and from the legal requirement that they pay out five percent of their total endowment each year. But the arrival of the Gates and Buffett foundations, which now dwarf the Ford Foundation, and the likely proliferation of other foundations, suggest that organized philanthropy will remain a vital contributor to pluralism within the United States and to innovation and dynamism among its non-profit institutions. Moreover, a growing number of foundations in the United States are making grants transnationally.

The number of philanthropic foundations in Brazil is also growing and will play an ever-greater role in the country. I would expect that foundations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa will sometimes work in partnership and learn from one another. I chair a foundation board right now in Europe that will be meeting soon with the leadership of a counterpart foundation in Brazil for just such an exchange. 

At the height of the Cold War, the United States government and its intelligence agencies viewed Latin America and much of the world through the prism of its ideological and power struggle with the Soviet Union and its Communist allies. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States too often viewed Brazil and other countries not on their own terms but as “battlefields” in the Cold War. A major reason that I chose to work at the Ford Foundation was that we, as an independent organization, did not have to participate in this mindset. We could seek to understand the aspirations of the people with whom we were working and support them on their own terms. 

In the context of the times, I could understand why some Brazilians might have been suspicious of me. I’ll never forget being greeted by an ear-splitting blast on my first visit to the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. The young professors with whom I was meeting tried to assure me that it was only a firecracker. One of them later confided to me, however, that it was a bomb detonated by students as a warning to stay away. Over the ensuing years, some of those young professors formed part of the core that developed the graduate program in political science at the university.

(One of the Foundation’s grants in Brazil helped create the social science research institute CEBRAP (the Centro Brasileiro de Analise e Planejamento, or Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning). It was founded in 1969 by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a young professor of political sociology, and a group of his social science colleagues. They had been expulsed from the University of Sao Paulo by the military government, apparently because of their alleged political beliefs and participation in the university reform movement. In Brazil, the tradition had been that professors ousted for political reasons went into exile, especially if they had a doctorate from a foreign university like the Sorbonne, as did Cardoso. He and his colleagues were determined, however, to remain in Brazil. In proposing the idea of CEBRAP, a free-standing center for social research (separate from any university), they gambled that they could create the intellectual space and build the funding for such a center, still an oddity in the Brazilian context. To start up CEBRAP, they showed considerable courage in the face of a regime that could clamp down on them again without warning. They turned to the Foundation for start-up funding. )

I was the program officer, together with Frank Bonilla, our program advisor in the social sciences, who worked with Fernando Henrique Cardoso in vetting the proposal and developing (with the support of Bill Carmichael, the Foundation’s representative) our Brazil office’s recommendation of the start-up grant. I cannot remember the exact amount, but I do regard it as one of the most important and rewarding grants during my tenure with the Foundation. Not only did it help to keep Fernando Henrique and his colleagues productively engaged within Brazil, but CEBRAP also became a leading center of social research and analysis in the country and throughout Latin America.

While Fernando Henrique was not a politician at the time, he eventually became a leading force in re-establishing democracy in Brazil, taming the country’s chronic inflation, and creating the space for national discourse on human rights and race relations. Democratically elected as President of Brazil, he is widely regarded to have been the country’s best President of the 20th century. This past July, the U.S. Library of Congress awarded Cardoso the Kluge Prize of $1 million, akin to a Nobel Prize for the social sciences, for his lifetime accomplishments as a scholar and as a political leader. Upon reading the announcement in the New York Times of his having been selected, I emailed Fernando Henrique a congratulatory note. I was touched when he emailed me back that in the most difficult of times in Brazil, the Foundation had made it possible for him to write what he wrote and do what he did.

All of this brought back memories from 1969: Soon after we had sent off the Brazil office’s recommendation of the grant for CEBRAP to our New York headquarters, I had received a phone call from the Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) at the United States Embassy in Rio. He started out by warning me: “If you know what is good for your career, you will desist from making the grant to CEBRAP.” I told him that we had worked long and hard on the recommendation, that we had carefully reviewed the proposal and plans of Fernando Henrique and his colleagues, and that we were convinced that it met our standards. Indeed, we were enthusiastic about the opportunity.

I did say, however, that if the DCM had information that was germane to our consideration of support, we would want to hear it. He responded by setting up a meeting for me the next day with an officer from the CIA. He came bearing a folder of memoranda and newspaper clippings. I went through the material one by one with him. Each item simply indicated that Fernando Henrique had been seen in the presence of a “known leftist”. I told my visitor that the folder was all about “guilt by association” and that I saw nothing that invalidated our recommendation to the officers of the Foundation. They, in fact, soon approved the grant.