Itamar Franco

Itamar Augusto Cautiero Franco was born in 1930, by most accounts at sea off the coast of Bahia, and grew up in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, where he worked as an engineer and was elected mayor in 1966 for the opposition MDB. He was a senator for Minas Gerais from 1975 and became Fernando Collor's running mate in 1989. He took over as acting president when Collor was suspended in October 1992 and became president when Collor resigned that December. His government held the 1993 plebiscite on the form of government and, with Fernando Henrique Cardoso as finance minister, introduced the Real Plan. He later served as ambassador to the OAS and Italy, governor of Minas Gerais from 1999 to 2003 and again as senator in 2011. He died in São Paulo in July 2011.

Itamar Franco is remembered above all as the president who launched the Real Plan, which brought annual inflation down from thousands of percent to single digits within a few years and remains the basis of Brazil's currency. Admirers praise his personal honesty and his role in calming the country after Collor's impeachment. Critics described him as temperamental and unpredictable, noting frequent cabinet changes, and some economists argue that the success of the Real belonged mainly to Fernando Henrique Cardoso's team. His later break with Cardoso, including the 1999 Minas Gerais debt moratorium, was criticized for unsettling markets during a currency crisis, while supporters saw it as a defense of the states against federal power.