(FORTUNE Magazine) – FOR MOST of the year Brazil's finance minister was one of the most popular men in the country. Dilson Funaro, 53, put together economic reforms that tamed inflation, which had risen to a 500% annualized rate, and promoted growth. But by late November he had become one of the country's least popular officials. Brazilians protested the second, more stringent stage of his program, which slapped on drastically higher taxes. Funaro's daunting double task now is to quench a domestic crisis while renegotiating $107 billion in foreign debt. His efforts will attract plenty of attention. Because of Brazil's economic importance, he will, if he succeeds, set a pattern for countries throughout Latin America. Funaro led a team of U.S.-trained economists that came up with the Cruzado Plan, named for a new currency that sliced three zeros off the value of the old one, the cruzeiro. The plan, which President Jose Sarney announced on national television in February, also called for a total price freeze, increases in minimum wages, and an end to Brazil's complex cost-of-living indexes. The idea: to stop inflation without creating a recession. It worked, at least for a while. The economy added a million new jobs, inflation stayed near zero, and Brazil's GNP surged at about a 10% annual rate, probably the world's highest. But as consumer spending boomed, the frozen prices turned to a slush of black-marketeering. Politically the Cruzado Plan was a major success. In November, Brazilians, voting in the first elections since the end of military rule almost two years ago, gave the government party a stirring victory in state and congressional elections. Less than a week later a sober-faced Funaro -- not his boss -- went on TV to announce the tougher measures. The new package, quickly dubbed Cruzado II, was full of bad news for consumers. Though the price freeze officially continues, rates for government-owned utilities went up, and steep taxes almost doubled prices for cars, fuel, cigarettes, and alcohol. Funaro figures these charges, together with cuts in government outlays, will cool consumer spending and just about eliminate the budget deficit. Brazilians were furious. When street protests turned violent, the police used tear gas to win what the papers called ''the Battle of Brasilia.'' Trying to quiet the rising outcry, Funaro offered his resignation. Sarney refused it and voiced confidence in his longtime personal friend and most powerful minister. Funaro comes from the wealthy elite of Sao Paulo. While winning his engineering degree from the city's Mackenzie University, he started working in plastics. He ended up as the head of Trol SA, a leading maker of plastic toys and industrial parts. (His son Dilson, the oldest of his six children, runs Trol now.) He took time out in 1970 to serve as secretary of finance of the state of Sao Paulo. The job whetted his interest in economic issues. During the last years of military rule, Funaro emerged as a critic of the austerity measures that the International Monetary Fund had prescribed to curb Brazil's inflation. Those policies led to a cruel recession; the jobless poor could not buy milk or meat, and malnutrition and infant mortality increased. As finance minister, Funaro continues to disdain the IMF. Early in 1986 he persuaded foreign banks to reschedule debt that had come due, without a loan from the IMF and without the usual IMF oversight. He is working on another, larger rescheduling to cover payments that are due over the next few years on Brazil's total foreign debt of $107 billion. Again Funaro wants to leave the IMF out. He hopes to cut yearly interest payments on the debt from about $10 billion to $7 billion. Some Brazilian labor leaders urge a more radical idea: default. Funaro's serene manner seems more fitting to a minister of the faith than of the state. While being treated for lymphatic cancer a few years back, he says he had felt himself ''half here and half a step from eternity.'' After that ordeal, Funaro says, he was ''able to gain a new dimension on things.'' Others maintain the experience left him with an almost messianic zeal to secure Brazil's future. He has a reputation for deep personal integrity in a capital almost inured to greed and opportunism. This quality led some admirers to call him a saint. Some critics bitterly joked that he offered to resign so he could start his own religion. If Funaro can do what he is setting out to do -- maintain , Brazil's economic growth, halt inflation, and lift the burden of debt -- he will qualify as a worker of miracles.