BRAZIL: Red Trade Defeat

After blowing hot and cold for months over a barter deal with Russia—Brazilian cocoa for Russian oil—Brazil decided last week to say no. The backout was a victory for anti-Red advisers of President Juscelino Kubitschek, led by Foreign Minister Francisco Negrão de Lima.

Aligned against Negrão de Lima was a faction that included Kubitschek's kitchen-cabinet foreign-affairs adviser, pudgy Augusto Frederico Schmidt. Schmidt's clique insisted that Brazil accept Russia's repeated offers of trade and aid, largely to lever the U.S. into greater generosity. Last October the government announced it was trading 20,000 bags of cocoa for 60,000 tons of Soviet crude....