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Fernando Henrique Cardoso

President of Brazil from 1995 to 2003

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Cardoso was inaugurated as president on 1 January 1995. He continued the economic reforms that had been initiated by the previous administration, inflation rates remained low, several state-owned companies were privatized, and market liberalization increased the country's visibility in the international market. The government succeeded in passing economic and administrative laws, including one that allowed for the reelection of executive officeholders. In 1998, he won the presidential election in the first round, becoming the first president to be reelected at the time. During his second term, international crises, a significant devaluation of the Real, the energy crisis, and other events led to a significant drop in his popularity. Currently, he heads the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation, which he founded in 2004, and serves on various advisory boards for different organizations abroad, such as the Clinton Global Initiative, Brown University, and the United Nations Foundation. He is also a member of The Elders, the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and the honorary president of the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party).

Cardoso was also the 10th president of the International Sociological Association (1982–1986).

Personal and professional life

Cardoso descends from wealthy Portuguese immigrants. Some were politicians during the Empire of Brazil. He also has African ancestry, through a black great-great-grandmother and a mulatto great-grandmother. Cardoso described himself as "slightly mulatto" and allegedly said he has "a foot in the kitchen" (a nod to historical Brazilian domestic slavery).

Born in Rio de Janeiro, he lived in São Paulo for most of his life. Cardoso is a widower who was married to Ruth Vilaça Correia Leite Cardoso, an anthropologist, from 1953 until her death on 24 June 2008; they had three children. Educated as a sociologist, he was a professor of political science and sociology at the Universidade de São Paulo. and president of the International Sociological Association (ISA), from 1982 to 1986. He is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has written several books.

Cardoso was also associate director of Studies in the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, then visiting professor at the Collège de France and later Paris Nanterre University. He later gave lectures at British and US universities including Cambridge University, Stanford University, Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley. He is fluent in Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish, and can express himself in Italian and German.

After his presidency, he was appointed to a five-year term (2003–2008) as professor-at-large at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, where he is now on the board of overseers. Cardoso is a founding member of the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy's advisory board. In February 2005, he gave the fourth annual Kissinger Lecture on Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress, Washington DC on "Dependency and Development in Latin America.

In 2005, Cardoso was selected by the British magazine Prospect as being one of the world's top one hundred living public intellectuals.

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