These and similar views grounded opinions such as the one that was to be expressed, in one of Francis' obituaries, by his late political friend,Due to his business-friendly policies, Campos had been one of Francis' most enduring bêtes noires, about whom he had written, in his June 25, 1983 column, that "anything is preferable to [Campos'] pedantry, his self-satisfaction masquerading as bonhomie [...] his feral face" (Diário da Corte, 165). Less than two years later, Francis suddenly was to state, on his 9 February 1985 column, that Campos was an unsung champion of the Free Market, as well as of "the entry of capital and technology our miserable country so direly needs": Diário da Corte, 209. financial tsar and former Minister of Planning of the Castelo Branco military administration Roberto Campos: in Campos' condescending view, Francis' columns were intellectually worthless, but made nevertheless good propaganda; they were "a weird bouquet of [...] economic guesswork" but nevertheless a good "boxing for ideas".O Globo, February 9, 1997. Francis' views were actually very simple, consisting in an extreme variety of Marxist historicism-cum-Reaganian supply-side economics: in order to liberate the forces of production and develop Brazil, it was, in his view, necessary "to surrender the country to people who want and know how to make money – private capital".O Estado de S. Paulo, April 25, 1991. An essay published in 1985, O Brasil no Mundo, identifying Brazilian authoritarianism with an absence of Capitalism, expressed this ideological shift.Daniel Piza, "Paulo Francis, o texto que fica", Revista Cult February 1, 2007. Accessed May 9, 2011. In his last book, Trinta Anos Esta Noite (1994), a memoir published on the 30th anniversary of the 1964 coup, he would argue that a socialist transformation of Brazilian society at the time was not achievable, and that Brazil should develop into the American sphere of influence.cf. Paulo Eduardo Nogueira, Paulo Francis, 107/108. Notwithstanding his jagged relationship with the various post-dictatorship Brazilian presidencies (specially those of Fernando Collor and Fernando Henrique Cardoso), the fact is that the later Francis' neoliberal commitment was never directed towards a particular government, but towards an ideal of government.Blankl Batista, 12.
