Odd this day
It is, today, the 30th anniversary of a memorable television interview for Brazilian finance minister Rubens Ricupero. A month before the country’s second election after the end of its military dictatorship, he told the nation:
I have no scruples
Ricupero thought he was having an informal chat with the TV Globo reporter before they went on air — mind you, so did the reporter. Unfortunately, “the comments were inadvertently broadcast nationwide”.
According to Sam Jordison’s Annus Horribilis — 365 tales of comic misfortune, he had been in a break between two interviews, and was taking the opportunity to “relax and amuse reporters” — which he did by informing them that
he frequently lied about the health of the economy to make his government look good and boasted that his party used government resources to boost their own presidential candidate. Not only was he on the record, however, but his words were broadcast live to an astonished nation.
And he went further
‘Listen, just between us, it might seem presumptuous, but the government needs me a lot more than I need it’, Mr. Ricupero began, little realizing that viewers all over the country could hear him. ‘I have no scruples’, he announced proudly, when the conversation moved on to economic indicators. ‘What is good, we take advantage of. What is bad, we hide.’
According to the LA Times, these remarks were
particularly stunning, because opposition candidates had been claiming for weeks that the government was diverting funds and using other measures to help support presidential candidate Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Only hours before Ricupero’s slip, presidential candidate Luis Inacio Lula da Silva of the leftist Workers’ Party had claimed in a Sao Paulo press conference that he had fallen behind Cardoso in the polls largely because of government and media efforts to aid Cardoso.
“When we were making these claims, they said we were radicals,” Lula said. “His statements point out the gravity of the involvement of the government and the TV Globo in the benefit of the candidacy of Fernando Henrique Cardoso.”
(Yes, that is the same Lula who’s now president — but who found that this scandal wasn’t enough to get him the role in 1994. Mind you, his opponent had got inflation down from 2,000% to 5.48% in about a year, so did have something of an advantage.)
Apparently, Ricupero even said, in answer to a question about lowering petrol prices during the election campaign:
Every once in a while, you have to create confusion. There is no doubt about it — this isn’t a rational country.
He resigned the following day.
Mind you, Brazilian football commentator Fernando Vanucci once said
I hate football. It’s a stupid little game
…apparently. Which was perhaps less scandalous than his colleague Galveo Bueno’s observation about Pelé:
Open mikes, eh?
