Pffft!

Rio de Janeiro's parking problem is about as acute as New York's might be if everybody drove to work. Since there are no parking lots, garages or meters, and since Rio traffic cops have always regarded parked cars with compassion, Rio motorists park anywhere. They double park and triple park; they park on sidewalks, in crosswalks, at intersections, on center islands. Every place but on top of another car. Now Brazil's revolutionaries are taking the matter in hand--the stern hand of Air Force Colonel Americo Fontenele, 43, Rio's new traffic director.

With the righteous indignation of a Renault-owner boxed in between two Buicks, Fontenele commenced by hiring a fleet of trucks to tow off all illegally parked cars. When police garages were full, offending cars were simply stashed away on isolated streets. No records were kept of what went where. If the car was in a police pound, the owner paid maybe a $4 fine; if it wasn't --shrug. One army captain wailed that it took him three days of searching to find his Volkswagen; other owners found that vandals had followed the tow trucks, stripped their cars bare.

Colonel Fontenele was only warming up. When he learned that parking violaters were escaping before the tow trucks arrived, he sent his men through downtown Rio to descend on the front tires of illegally parked cars, unscrew the valves--and pffft! "Vandalism," cried Rio papers in shocked unison, quoting eminent jurists' opinions that "Operation Pffft!" was illegal. "This campaign will continue until motorists begin to cooperate with the authorities," answered Fontenele.

Pffft went the tires of the Ghana Ambassador, three federal Congressmen, one state assemblyman, and a plainclothes detective shadowing a suspect. One squad of cops was discovered gleefully flattening the tires of 35 legally parked cars, until someone pointed out the error. When police moved in on six illegally parked official cars they almost came to blows with some marines on guard; a squad of battle-dressed tommy gunners was eventually called up to protect the wheels' wheels.

Fontenele remains airily unperturbed. Traffic is moving right along these days, and the colonel is now prohibiting parking on almost every main street. "The public is on my side," says the colonel, "except those, of course, who have had their tires flattened."

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