[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[October 15, 1997]
[Pages 1367-1371]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to Business Leaders in Sao Paulo, Brazil
October 15, 1997

    Thank you very much, Mr. Miller, for your introduction and your 
statement. Thank you, Governor, for your moving words. And thank you all 
for coming out this morning. I am delighted to be here and to be joined 
by a distinguished delegation of Americans, including the Secretary of 
State, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Education, the United 
Nations

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Ambassador, my Special Envoy to Latin America, the National Security 
Adviser, and four distinguished Members of the House of Representatives: 
Congressman David Dreier, Congressman Jim McDermott, Congresswoman Nydia 
Velazquez, and Congressman Ruben Hinojosa. We also have the Brazilian 
Ambassador to the United States here, the minister of the Brazilian 
Government, and the mayor, and I thank them all for coming.
    I think this bespeaks the importance of the relationship between the 
United States and Brazil. I'm delighted to be in Sao Paulo, the economic 
engine of this great nation and the commercial heart of the new Latin 
America. I often hear it said now that Brazil is the land of the future. 
I think that in this city, the future is here. I thank you for giving me 
the opportunity to discuss the partnership that I hope our two nations 
will forge for the 21st century.
    All of you know that over the last decade, a genuine revolution has 
swept across this hemisphere. As never before, the Americas are coming 
together in the embrace of common goals and common values. We have a 
special responsibility and a special ability, Brazil and the United 
States, to work together with the other nations of the Americas to lead 
this process, with the largest populations and the largest economies, 
rich natural resources, enormous and fascinating diversity among our 
peoples. Most important, both of us cherish the same ideals: freedom and 
equality; respect for the individual and the integrity of the family and 
community; social justice; and peace.
    Our partnership is already broad in scope and ambition. We fight 
drugs and the spread of nuclear weapons together. We work to protect the 
rainforest and to explore the heavens together. We work to help others 
in our hemisphere turn from conflict to cooperation together. But 
nowhere can we make a greater difference for our people than by leading 
all the Americas down the path to prosperity in the new economy of the 
21st century.
    The United States has worked--watched with respect and admiration as 
Brazil has embraced strong reform. With President Cardoso's Real Plan, 
with the support of the public and the Congress, Brazil has slashed 
inflation from 2500 percent to 5 percent in only 5 years--a truly 
astonishing accomplishment. In the course of so doing, 13 million 
Brazilians have been lifted above the poverty line, growth of more than 
4 percent a year has been achieved. Brazil has become a magnet for 
billions of dollars of foreign investment, a good deal of it from the 
United States.
    Brazil's growing prosperity is good news for Brazilians but also 
good news for Americans. Last year our bilateral trade totaled more than 
$21 billion. The United States is Brazil's largest single trading 
partner, larger than the Andean Pact, the Central American common 
market, CARICOM, and MERCOSUR combined. We buy about a fifth of Brazil's 
exports, and our exports to Brazil have more than doubled since 1992. As 
Mr. Miller said, American businesses know that Brazil is a great place 
to bet on for the future, it's a good place to do business, and today 
there is, I understand, also in this audience a first-rate trade 
delegation from Seattle trying to support that proposition.
    Our big trade numbers sometimes mask a lot of individual stories, 
not always from large companies. The Snider Mold Company of Mequon, 
Wisconsin, sells molds for making water tanks to companies in Brazil. 
Brazilian firms use the equipment to replace old tanks with safer 
models, supporting jobs in both countries and providing healthier 
drinking water for families in Sao Paulo. The lives of real people are 
changed for the better by this kind of trade.
    And in Brazil, we see a large snapshot of what is happening indeed 
throughout our region, where barriers are falling, trade and investment 
are booming, trade among MERCOSUR countries has more than quadrupled 
since 1990. In that same period, the United States exports to Latin 
America have grown by more than 100 percent. This all promotes greater 
efficiency in economic growth in the Americas and brings people better 
opportunities to build better lives for themselves and their children.
    Early in the next century, as open markets continue to spread, 20 
nations around the world, home to half the world's population, will lift 
themselves from the ranks of the poorest countries into the ranks of 
middle-income countries. Their gain in skills and jobs and wealth will 
be our gain as well.
    I want America to lead the process of economic integration and 
rising living standards here in our hemisphere and around the world. In 
the last 4\1/2\ years, we have concluded more than 220 separate trade 
agreements with expanding trade accounting for one-third of our

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own strong growth. Now I'm working to persuade our Congress to renew the 
President's fast-track negotiating authority so that we can do more.
    In the past few weeks, the Senate Finance Committee and the House 
Ways and Means Committee, on which Congressman Dreier and Congressman 
McDermott who are here with me sit, have approved this legislation with 
bipartisan support. And we're going to do all we can to pass the bill 
this year. I hope, if I might be forgiven this on foreign soil, I hope 
that those of you representing American companies will urge Members of 
Congress of both parties to support the legislation. I need all the help 
I can get. [Laughter]
    I have also attempted to see that the United States puts special 
emphasis on Latin America. We hosted the Summit of the Americas in Miami 
in 1994. I appointed my longtime friend and former Chief of Staff Mack 
McLarty to be a Special Envoy to Latin America to send a signal to the 
continent that we are serious about a long-term sustained and 
comprehensive partnership. The United States welcomes all constructive 
efforts by others to bring our hemisphere together and, especially, 
Brazil's leadership role in those efforts. Brazil and Argentina, through 
their strategic alliance, are providing a decisive impulse for 
democracy, economic reform, and regional security cooperation. MERCOSUR 
has expanded trade among its members and with the outside world. It has 
also bolstered democracy and promoted peace as a growing integration and 
interdependence make yesterday's hostilities unthinkable today.
    We hope every step in the process of hemispheric integration, 
whether in MERCOSUR, NAFTA, CARICOM, or elsewhere will build momentum 
toward our common goal of a free-trade area of the Americas by 2005, 
first endorsed at the 1994 Summit in Miami.
    Our nations are committed to launch comprehensive negotiations at 
Santiago in April and, as we agreed at the Miami Summit, to achieve 
concrete progress by the turn of the century. Just imagine the potential 
of an American market with 800 million people, from Alaska to the 
southern tip of Argentina, buying each other's goods, spurring each 
other's creativity, enriching each other's lives, investing in each 
other's future.
    But even as we seize these possibilities, we must also work even 
harder to bridge the gap between the haves and the have nots. The age-
old curse of Latin America, the constant undercurrent of all advanced 
economies of the last 20 years, has got to be dealt with more seriously 
not only by government but by people in the private sector working in 
partnership with government. We have to give everyone who will work for 
it a place in the future we are trying to build.
    In your country and mine and throughout the hemisphere, many people 
still question our course, fearing the pressure of competition, feeling 
as yet no benefit from the changes underway. Knowing that as yet, no 
nation has found the perfect formula for both embracing the global 
economy while preserving and extending the social contract. 
Globalization is irreversible. Protectionism will only make things 
worse. But while we cannot turn back the winds of change, we can and 
must do more to harness their force to everyone's advantage and make 
sure that the benefits and burdens of expanding trade are fairly borne.
    That means deepening democracy and the rule of law, including a free 
press and an independent judiciary. It means insisting on worker 
protection so that trade enhances working conditions and living 
standards instead of undermining them. It means equipping all our people 
with the education, training, and skills to succeed so that progress is 
everyone's friend.
    Since 1993, we in the United States have been working hard to come 
to grips with these two competing challenges. We have more than doubled 
our worker training funds directed at those in the work force who may be 
displaced by technology or trade. We have established the North American 
Development Bank to try to make investments in communities that have 
been displaced by our increasing integration with Canada and Mexico. We 
have worked to improve joint environmental inspections and enforcement 
and to jointly agree to stop using some kinds of chemicals and other 
things which are damaging to the environment.
    We have set up special empowerment zones to give our private sector 
incentives to invest in communities which are not touched by trade one 
way or the other because their economies have developed so little. All 
these things have not had perfect results, but they are making a 
difference, and they show that there is a way to have strong economic 
growth, an open economy, an openness to trade and investment, and

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still care about extending opportunity so that more and more people who 
are willing to work have a chance to work and succeed.
    We must also do more to protect natural resources and the 
environment. The United States rejects the false choice between economic 
growth and environmental protection. We believe in sustainable 
development, making sure that today's progress does not come at 
tomorrow's expense. Trade-driven growth need not bring environmental 
quality down. Indeed, trade must maintain and improve the quality of our 
environment.
    Brazil and the United States share a commitment to meeting these 
challenges, all of them, head on. We can set a standard of success for 
the Americas, showing that democracy and free markets deliver, 
protecting our planet for future generations, making education and the 
wonders of technology the modern birthright of every citizen.
    I am especially impressed with President Cardoso's determination to 
improve education. Both of us are working to ensure that every school 
has high standards, that every child, rich or poor, has the knowledge to 
succeed in the new economy. America's new balanced budget includes the 
biggest new investment in education since 1965. Our agenda is sweeping 
but straightforward. We expect every 8-year-old to be able to read, 
every 12-year-old to be able to log on to the Internet, every 18-year-
old to be able to go on to college, and every adult to be able to 
continue learning for a lifetime.
    Brazil spends nearly 6 percent of its GNP on education and is 
working hard to increase enrollment and to help more children complete 
their early years of school. Now, through our new partnership for 
education that President Cardoso and I signed yesterday, our nations 
will work together to teach our children for tomorrow.
    This afternoon I look forward to visiting the Mangueira School in 
Rio, where Brazil is proving every day that every child has the 
potential to succeed. I commend the Brazilian business community for 
investing in education, and I thank the Sao Paulo American Chamber of 
Commerce for your leadership in this effort which Mr. Miller referenced 
in his remarks.
    Even as we speak, the First Lady is visiting one of the schools you 
have adopted so that she can see your success first hand. Your programs 
have helped to keep children in school, helped teachers to learn, and 
helped to raise standards. Now they will help to broaden access to 
educational technology. I urge you to do as much of that as you can.
    Brazil and the United States share the vision that all our citizens 
should be connected to the information age. We have both adopted 
ambitious programs to link our schools to the Internet. We are 
attempting to make sure that every classroom and library in the United 
States will be hooked up to the Internet by the year 2000. When we do 
that and when Brazil does that, no math, no book, no tool of learning 
will be beyond the touch of our children, regardless of the wealth of 
their families or the part of town where they live. And when that 
happens, no dream will be beyond their reach.
    Already, Brazilian-American partnership is bringing world-class 
technology to boys and girls in Brazil. Ashford International, a small 
firm from Stone Mountain, Georgia, recently launched a project with Sao 
Paulo's local government supplying 5,000 multimedia computers for 1,000 
area schools. That's good for the students and good for the Stone 
Mountain company and its workers.
    Even as computers and the Internet are expanding the world of 
learning, they also bring new opportunities for electronic commerce. 
When I took office in 1993--just think of it, in 1993--only high-energy 
physicists had heard of the World Wide Web. Now, even my cat, Socks, has 
a webpage. [Laughter]
    I was meeting with one of the young men who has made a small--
perhaps a large--fortune in figuring out how to commercialize the 
Internet in California the other day, and he said that the Internet was 
the fastest-growing organism in human history, that no one could measure 
its expansion.
    Today, there are as many as 50 million people on the Internet, and 
for Brazilian net browsers, the surf is up. Since 1996--since 1996--the 
number of Internet hosts in Brazil has risen by 535 percent. Electronic 
commerce can improve productivity, facilitate global communications, 
help small companies sell to a worldwide market, create a revolution in 
the way we all market and sell. But in order for this digital economy to 
flourish, it must not be weighed down by the heavy hand of government 
regulation and fees.
    President Cardoso and I discussed the importance of creating a 
market-led environment in

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which this new medium can succeed. I feel very strongly that all nations 
have a responsibility to facilitate, not undermine, this process; it 
will have enormous economic implications that are quite positive for 
every country if we can do so.
    Working together on behalf of new technologies, by the way, has long 
been a mark of our relationship. You may know that in 1876, Brazilian 
Emperor Don Pedro II came to our Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia 
where he helped draw attention to a new invention of Alexander Graham 
Bell, the telephone. Today, Brazil's telecommunications sector is the 
largest in Latin America. Your Government predicts it will net 
investments close to $70 billion by 2003. And earlier this year, 
America's Bell South, teaming up with respected companies in Brazil, won 
a bid to provide cellular telephone services here in Sao Paulo.
    A century ago, Brazil saw promise in our technological future. 
Today, we are proud to be investing in yours. New education and new 
technologies will help carry our nations forward. But we will soar only 
if we also maintain our oldest values. Your country and mine have a 
generous tradition of welcoming people from all around the world. One of 
our greatest strengths is our commitment to live together and work 
together and learn together, regardless of our backgrounds of race, 
religion, or ethnicity. I commend President Cardoso for his human rights 
plan and his emphasis on racial equality.
    In our country, in one public school district across the river from 
Washington, DC, which I can see from the White House, there are students 
from more than 150 nations--in one of our school districts--speaking 
more than 100 different languages. The neighborhoods of Sao Paulo are a 
window on the world. The colors of Italy enliven Bexiga. The flavors of 
Japan infuse Liberdade. The spirit of the Middle East fills Bom Retiro. 
The rhythms of Africa pervade every quarter. People from everywhere call 
this place home.
    It must be truly mysterious to you as it is to many of us when we 
see people from Bosnia to Central Africa, from the Middle East to 
Northern Ireland still determined to hate one another and fight and 
sometimes rob people of their freedoms and their very lives because of 
their differences. Our differences make it much more interesting to live 
in our communities and our Nation and, frankly, much more profitable to 
go into the future.
    So, as we make the most of this age of opportunity, we ask 
ourselves, which nations will do best in the global economy? The nations 
with the globe inside their borders. This, too, is a lesson that Brazil 
and the United States must, first, never forget for ourselves and, 
second, try to impart to the rest of the world.
    In the 19th century, we forged a friendship grounded in our common 
love of freedom. The United States was honored to be the first nation to 
recognize Brazil's independence. In the 20th century, we fought side by 
side to prevail in World War II and to preserve freedom's light. The 
United States is still honored that Brazil came to provide soldiers to 
fight with us for freedom in both the great World Wars of this century. 
Now, on the eve of the 21st century, a bold, new challenge awaits us: to 
secure the blessings of freedom and prosperity for all the people of our 
hemisphere and throughout the world.
    Our nations share a vision for the future of the Americas, where 
every child has quality education, all our people reap the benefits of 
modern technology, open societies linked and lifted by open markets 
create new opportunities for all people and protect their freedom to 
seize them. That is the future we are working to build. And together, I 
am quite confident that we will succeed.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 7:30 a.m. in the Auditorium at the Memorial 
America Latino. In his remarks, he referred to Daniel Miller, president, 
Sao Paulo American Chamber of Commerce; Gov. Mario Covas of the State of 
Sao Paulo; Brazilian Ambassador to the United States Paulo Tarso Flecha 
de Lima; and Mayor Celso Pitta of Sao Paulo.