International financial negotiations and political actors: the breakdown in IMF-Brazilian negotiations during the administration of Juscelino Kubitschek (1957-1959)

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, Fernanda Conforto de
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/101/101131/tde-13052019-110501/
• topic: Acordo standby; Ajuda financeira; Estados Unidos; Financial assistance; Fundo Monetário Internacional; International Monetary Fund; Juscelino Kubitschek; Juscelino Kubitschek; Standby agreement; United States

This Master\'s thesis analyzes the relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Brazilian government during the administration of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961). It focuses on the years of 1957-1959, at the time when the Brazilian government was negotiating the country\'s first and second standby agreements with the Fund. The objective is to identify the conditions that led the Kubitschek administration to break down negotiations with the IMF in June 1959. Relying on IMF, Brazilian and North-American official documents, Brazilian newspapers and interviews with Brazilian officials, this study reveals that the Brazilian government only opened negotiations with the Fund in 1958 after Washington\'s intense pressure. The American government conditioned U.S. loans to Brazil to the signature of a standby agreement between Brazil and the Fund, instead of negotiating financial assistance directly with Rio de Janeiro as it had been doing until then. Washington employed the IMF as a way to advance its foreign economic policy agenda in Brazil. This harsh U.S. position remained consistent despite increasing Soviet overtures to Latin America. Given the Fund\'s stabilization demands and Brazil\'s poor stabilization performance, disagreements between the IMF and the Brazilian government built up, leading to the breakdown in the negotiations in June 1959. As a consequence, U.S.-Brazilian relations seriously deteriorated, encouraging President Kubitschek to embrace a more globalist foreign policy. These conclusions are relevant because they brought to light aspects that usually have been neglected by the literature: the crucial role played by the U.S. as to why Kubitschek\'s Brazil sought IMF financial assistance; the insufficiency of a narrow Cold War framework to explain why Washington took a hard stance on Brazil; and the link between the IMF-Brazilian breakdown and the roots of President Jânio Quadros\' Independent Foreign Policy in the early 1960s.