Boom In the Backlands

A narrow-gauge railway, wood-burning and rachitic, is the regular transport over the 1,000 miles between Rio and the boomtown of Anapolis, in Goiaz (see map). It takes four days & nights by rail to reach Anapolis, gateway to the rich backlands, and longer if the trip is made by road. But from the lush lowlands of the north and the coffee fazendas to the south, 50,000 Brazilians a year are passing through muddy, roughhewn Anapolis in search of new homes and new times, just as U.S. pioneers a century ago left the Atlantic coast and headed west.

Many who come to Anapolis are on their way to the new Government Colonia Agricola Nacional and its embryonic town of Ceres. The Colonia, one of seven set up by Dictator Vargas in 1941, and the most successful, is an experiment in agrarian socialism. To poor men it holds out the promise of free land, home, security.

The Engineer. In the Colonia the man who has made actuality of an idea is a strapping, suntanned engineer named Bernardo Sayao Carvalho Araujo.* He knows the backlands, understands their need for large-scale immigration, and knows all about their lack of good roads and railways. A leader who wants to know how a man gets along with his neighbors,, how his crops are coming, he calls by first name many of the 15,000 settlers in the Colonia. Last week he was in Rio seeking money for the Colonia, for the Government had paid not a cruzeiro of the funds appropriated for it for this year.

The Colonia's soil is the loamy terra roxa (red earth) that Brazilians prize most. After two years' full operation, the farms, for which the Government gives seeds and advice, burgeon with fat crops of rice, 15-ft. corn, sugar cane thick as a truck driver's wrist, beans planted among the corn to keep the ground rich and productive. Says Sayao: "They don't mind planting vegetables, but are horrified at the idea of eating them. 'Makes you sick,' they say." But they are catching on, and on better-balanced diets already look healthier. With good soil and modern methods, they surpassed their own food needs the first year.

Building a Lifeline. Engineer Sayao, an old Government roadbuilder, faced the crisis in communications in his own way. The first thing he did in 1941, when Goiaz rice sold for 15-c- a bag for lack of transport to markets, was to cut a trail to Anapolis through 100 miles of forests. He soon turned this into the state's best road. Down it last year the colony's trucks carried 30 different products to market--including 20,000 bags of sugar, 12,000,000 pounds of watermelon, 120,000 dozen eggs, 50 jaguar skins.

In 1945 it was different: the whole rice crop rotted for lack of gasoline to get it to market. The following year Sayao wheedled the Government into shipping an abandoned sugar mill from the coast, set it up in Ceres, and distilled enough alcohol from the colony's sugar to keep the trucks on the road to Anapolis. So in 1946 the colony marketed 160,000 bags of rice in Sao Paulo at prices ranging from $3 to $4.50 a bag.

Colonizer Sayao is well aware of the project's weaknesses. He wants to use some of the threefold increase Rio granted for his next year's budget to build more schools. The hospital, too, needs funds. So far, the colony has concentrated on rice as a cash crop; Sayao is not sure but that cotton or coffee might be better. Also, the road that was the colony's lifeline leads only to Anapolis' one-horse railway. Now Sayao is driving the highway some 130 miles beyond his colony's limits, to the banks of the Tocantins. There his trucks may meet boats that could carry the goods of Goiaz down to the Amazon and the sea.

* Cousin of Metropolitan Soprano Bidu Sayao.

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