Dilson Domingos Funaro (October 23, 1933 – April 12, 1989) was a Brazilian businessman and politician, owner of the toy company ''Indústria de Brinquedos Trol''. He was also CEO of the
Brazilian Development Bank
The National Bank for Economic and Social Development ( pt, Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social, abbreviated: BNDES) is a development bank structured as a federal public company associated with the Ministry of the Economy of Bra ...
and later
Finance Minister of Brazil during the term of President
José Sarney
José Sarney de Araújo Costa (; born José Ribamar Ferreira de Araújo Costa; 24 April 1930) is a Brazilian politician, lawyer, and writer who served as 31st president of Brazil from 1985 to 1990. He briefly served as the 20th vice president of ...
, from August 1985 to April 1987. During his tenure as Finance Minister he was responsible for the creation of a plan for the stabilization of Brazil's monetary policy, the ''
Plano Cruzado
Plano may refer to:
Native Americans
* Plano cultures, the Late Paleo-Indian hunter-gatherer societies of the Great Plains of North America
** Plano point, the chipped stone tools of the Plano cultures
Places in the United States
* Plano, Califo ...
''. He also was responsible for the unilateral suspension of payments on the Brazilian Republic's
external debt
A country's gross external debt (or foreign debt) is the liabilities that are owed to nonresidents by residents. The debtors can be governments, corporations or citizens. External debt may be denominated in domestic or foreign currency. It incl ...
to foreign financial institutions, which was implemented on February 20, 1987. With Brazil's financial crisis continuing with seemingly no solution on the horizon, Funaro was asked to resign from his post just a few months later.
Personal life
Funaro was the son of Paschoal Funaro and Helena Kraljevic, and grandson of Domingos Funaro (a native of
Catanzaro
Catanzaro (, or ; scn, label= Catanzarese, Catanzaru ; , or , ''Katastaríoi Lokrói''; ; la, Catacium), also known as the "City of the two Seas", is an Italian city of 86,183 inhabitants (2020), the capital of the Calabria region and of its ...
,
Calabria,
Italy
Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
). Coming from a wealthy family, he studied engineering at
Mackenzie Presbyterian University
Mackenzie Presbyterian University ( Portuguese: ''Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie'') is a private university in São Paulo, Brazil.
The Mackenzie Presbyterian University is an institution of higher learning that has strong tradition and hist ...
, and while still at a young age joined CIBRAPE, an industrial concern specialized in plastics. Not long after he acquired ''Monitora'' and later ', a major manufacturer of plastics for industry, domestic use, and toys.
In October 1982, Funaro discovered that he was suffering from
lymphatic cancer
Lymphoma is a group of blood and lymph tumors that develop from lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell). In current usage the name usually refers to just the cancerous versions rather than all such tumours. Signs and symptoms may include enlar ...
,
and that it was a particularly serious form of the disease. Despite receiving treatment, he suffered a number of relapses that eventually led to his death in 1989.
He was married to and survived by
Ana Maria Matarazzo Suplicy (daughter of Paul Cochrane Suplicy and Filomena Matarazzo, and sister of noted politician
Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy), with whom he had six children.
Plano Cruzado
After serving in a number of posts in both industry and government over two-and-a-half decades, Funaro was appointed head of the
Brazilian Development Bank
The National Bank for Economic and Social Development ( pt, Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social, abbreviated: BNDES) is a development bank structured as a federal public company associated with the Ministry of the Economy of Bra ...
in March 1985 at the request of President Sarney. That August, Sarney promoted him to head the Finance Ministry, the first minister that the president personally appointed after inheriting his cabinet from late President-elect
Tancredo Neves
Tancredo de Almeida Neves () (4 March 1910 – 21 April 1985) was a Brazilian politician, lawyer, and entrepreneur. He served as Minister of Justice and Interior Affairs from 1953 to 1954, Prime Minister from 1961 to 1962, Minister of Finan ...
. Funaro was quickly recognized as the most powerful member of Sarney's government in the first months of his tenure,
and used his wide-ranging power to tackle Brazil's explosive monetary inflation problem. These reforms were packaged as the Plano Cruzado, after the
new currency that was introduced as the centerpiece of the initiative. It also included a freeze on wages and prices and an end to the system of automatic price increases known as indexing.
When the plan proved unable to stem inflation, Funaro switched tactics and introduced what was dubbed "Plano Cruzado II" which undid many of the previous reforms as well as raised taxes to curb the public demand for goods that had been generated by the revoking of indexing. This turnabout made the minister increasingly unpopular among the common citizens as well as politicians from rival parties, both the left and right. When Funaro became convinced that Brazil's debt to foreign banks was making it impossible to generate economic growth, he convinced the Government to suspend interest payments on $67 billion worth of loans on February 20, 1987. This created panic in the international banking community, especially in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...
, over concerns that Brazil would be able to repay any of its loans.
By April 1987, Funaro's position became untenable and he resigned on the 29th. He was unable to recover politically from this setback before his death just two years later.
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Funaro, Dilson
Finance Ministers of Brazil
1933 births
1989 deaths
20th-century Brazilian businesspeople
Brazilian people of Italian descent