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Roberto de Oliveira Campos (17 April 1917 – 9 October 2001) was a Brazilian economist, writer, diplomat, politician and member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He served in a number of capacities, including Brazilian ambassador to the United States and to the United Kingdom, minister of planning for the government of Castelo Branco, during the Brazilian military dictatorship, and congressman.
In 1939 Campos entered the Brazilian Foreign Service. Three years later, he was sent to the United States, where he took graduate courses in economics at George Washington University and Columbia University. During this period, he also represented the Brazilian government in international economic meetings, such as the Bretton Woods conference.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Campos presented himself as a promoter of "pragmatic, democratic nationalism," as when he tried, as Brazilian ambassador in Washington, to reach an understanding between the John F. Kennedy administration and the left-leaning João Goulart government. Eventually, disagreements with Goulart's policies led to his resignation in August 1963.
Roberto Campos sided with the military regime installed by the 1964 coup, which was greatly backed by Jorge Flores, a business partner of his. The first military president, Marshall Castelo Branco, appointed Campos as his Minister of Planning – and chief economic policy maker, jointly with the Finance Minister Octavio Gouvea de Bulhões – in which capacity he enacted various pro-business and pro-foreign capital – as well as anti-organized-labour – reforms that aimed to modernize the Brazilian economy in a liberal sense. His sympathies for an inconditional pro-American foreign policy and foreign-capital-friendly economic policies earned him, already during the 1960s, his lifelong sobriquet: "Bob Fields" (an Anglicisation word-to-word rendering of his actual name).
During the late 1960s and 1970s, he disagreed with the increasing amount of state intervention in the economy included in the process of authoritarian modernization achieved by later military administrations and remained at the sidelines, working mostly as an adviser in private enterprise. In 1975, he was appointed Brazilian ambassador to the United Kingdom, remaining in this office for nearly seven years.
At the demise of the dictatorship, he regained political influence and became a politician in his own right. In 1980, soon after the end of the two-party regime, he joined the newly formed pro-government PDS. Two years later, he won the election for an eight-year term as senator for his native state of Mato Grosso. As a member of the electoral college in the 1985 presidential election, he voted for the defeated PDS candidate, Paulo Maluf. Starting in 1991, he served as federal deputy for the State of Rio de Janeiro during two legislatures. In 1998, he was defeated when trying to return to the senate, thus ending his political career.
In 1999, he was elected member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters by a thin margin of four votes.
He died of heart attack on 9 October 2001 at his apartment in Rio de Janeiro. His papers reside at the Universidade Positivo.
He was married. From his marriage resulted two sons and one daughter.
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