LATIN AMERICA : Brazil’s President Veers to the Right : Cardoso’s calls for lean government, privatization seem to conflict with leftist past.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, president of Brazil since Sunday, has traveled a long road from the university campus where he once lectured as a leftist sociology professor--and there have been some changes along the way.

The Cardoso who has promised to slash official spending and privatize government corporations is a far cry from the Cardoso who once steeped himself in Marxist theory and wrote anti-capitalist treatises.

Cardoso, 63, is the son of a nationalist general who campaigned for the creation of the government oil monopoly, Petrobras. But since his election in October, Cardoso and key members of his economic team have vowed to speed up privatization.

Still, true to at least part of his old ideals, the new president vows that “social justice” for Brazil’s poor majority will be the top priority in his administration.

As a graduate student at the University of Sao Paulo, Cardoso joined an informal study group that concentrated its reading and discussions on Marxist theory. He received his doctorate in sociology in 1961, then did post-doctoral studies at the University of Paris.

He was back at the University of Sao Paulo as a professor when the Brazilian armed forces seized power in a 1964 coup.

As the right-wing regime consolidated its power, he went into exile in Chile, where he worked at the Latin American Institute of Economic and Social Planning, a United Nations agency.

Returning to the University of Sao Paulo in 1968, Cardoso became director of the social science department. He and several of his academic friends were fired that year in an anti-leftist crackdown by the military government. But they regrouped to form a social science think tank called the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning, or Cebrap.

Cardoso helped arrange for funding from the Ford Foundation to finance Cebrap. Officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development tried unsuccessfully to discourage the foundation from granting the funds because of the leftist ideas of Cardoso and his group.

Cebrap kept a low profile. But its members could not avoid detention by government political police.

While treated by officials like a political pariah, Cardoso became one of Brazil’s most widely known intellectuals. He taught as a visiting professor at Stanford and UC Berkeley in the United States, Cambridge in England and the University of Paris in France.

He published more than 20 scholarly books, including two expounding a “theory of dependency” that became famous among academics and leftists around the world. According to the theory, Third World countries were kept from developing by a debilitating economic dependence on U.S. and European capitalism.

“I don’t think Cardoso believes this anymore,” said Alexandre Barros, a political scientist and private consultant in Brasilia.

While Cardoso moved with ease in leftist circles, he was known to be ideologically flexible rather than doctrinaire or militant. Perhaps it was that kind of flexibility that helped ease him through the transition from academic intellectual to successful politician.

In the 1970s, the professor became active in the opposition Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, which designated Cardoso as the alternate for a national Senate seat. He filled the seat when it became vacant in 1983.

The armed forces gave up power in 1985, and Cardoso won reelection in 1986. He served in the Senate for 10 years, earning a reputation as an honest and open-minded negotiator. In 1988, he and other politicians bolted the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party and formed the center-left Brazilian Social Democratic Party.

After the impeachment and suspension in 1992 of President Fernando Collor de Mello, acting President Itamar Franco appointed Cardoso as foreign minister. In May, 1993, Cardoso became Franco’s finance minister.

In that post, he launched an economic stabilization plan that reduced Brazilian inflation from nearly 50% a month last June to between 1% and 3% a month in late 1994. Although the plan yielded results only after Cardoso gave up the Cabinet ministry to run for president, his role in its success catapulted him to victory in October elections with 53% of the vote.

Cardoso has emphasized often that he plans to press forward with anti-inflation measures and market reforms. But some analysts question whether he can successfully buck Brazil’s notorious patronage system, which has big stakes in bloated bureaucracies and government corporations.

Others wonder whether Cardoso, the former leftist, really believes in lean government and private enterprise.

Barros, the political consultant, worries that Cardoso’s commitment to government programs for improving the lot of poor Brazilians could lead to the creation of inflationary “bureaucratic tumors” that absorb government funds without doing much good. “That’s my great fear,” Barros said.