Resumo:

Veja, a national weekly magazine, had the following news on its June 13th, 1979 issue: “This time we won: CDE closed the case and Proalcool is now irreversible”, as a close friend heard it from the Minister of Industry and Commerce, João Camilo Penna, ecstatic, upon exiting the meeting. In fact, CDE1 decided to invest 5 billion dollars in Proalcool2 until the end of President Figueiredo’s term, in exchange for an equally grand figure: 10 billion liters of alcohol per year. With this volume, government expects to fulfill the additional demand for gasoline in the future, as well as completely fuel 475,000 vehicles with adapted engines plus 1.225 million of originally alcohol-fueled ones for the next six years. The minister’s euphoria on that moment was explainable for Proalcool – albeit having been created four years before by the previous General Ernesto Geisel government, by means of Federal Decree n. 76 593 of 1975 – not having yet, according to the magazine, “left the realm of vague promises, far away from the path that could free Brazil from the petroleum nightmare”.