The Testing Place
(See Cover)
In the task of creating a new community of Latin American nations on their own, the leaders who met in Punta del Este will be looking to the U.S. and Lyndon Johnson for limited help, for encouragement and moral support. When it comes to the hard business of getting actual results, though, their eyes will be turned toward Brazil and its new President, Arthur da Costa e Silva. Brazil is the key to the success or failure of any attempt at economic integration in Latin America. Its influence and power are decisive; its vast land embodies all of the deepest problems and brightest prospects of the Southern Hemisphere. While Costa, 64, made his first appearance among his Latin American colleagues after only a month in office, Brazil itself was poised on one of the most challenging and crucial phases of its history.
The world's fifth largest nation (3,-290,000 sq. mi.) and the eighth in population (85 million), Brazil represents half of South America's landmass, half of its wealth and half of its people. With potentially more arable land than in all of Europe, it is first in world production of coffee, third in sugar, corn, cocoa and tobacco. Within the vast solitudes of its mountains, rolling plains, winding rivers and lush, tropical rain forests, it contains the world's largest hydroelectric potential, one-seventh of the world's iron-ore reserves, 16% of its timber and an incalculable wealth of gold, silver, diamonds and other minerals and semi precious stones.
The size and huge resources of their country have given Brazilians an almost mystical sense of destiny--a feeling that greatness has always been inevitable. Onetime Dictator (1930-45) and President (1951-54) Getulio Vargas cried: "We are marching toward a new future different from all we know." "We are doomed to greatness,"' lamented President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61). "This is the land of Canaan, unlimited and fecund," said President Janio Quadros, who only held office for seven months in 1961 and who also rashly declared: "In five years Brazil will be a great power." Everytime they strike up their national anthem, Brazilians join in a chorus of self-hypnotic confidence in the future:
Nature made you a giant,
A beautiful, powerful indomitable colossus,
And your future
Will match this greatness.
Stiffened Spine. Yet today is yesterday's tomorrow, and many of yesterday's fond hopes are still hopes. For all the hallelujahs, Brazil today--like all of its neighbors in Latin America--is faced with staggering problems that cannot be put off much longer. Brazil has South America's highest child-mortality rate (11.2%), its third highest illiteracy rate (50%), its third lowest per-capita income ($285), and one of its most ruinous rates of inflation (41%). About 1% of Brazilian landowners control 47% of the farm land. Side by side with a wealthy aristocracy dwell filth, disease and poverty so dismal that they rob men even of the urge to protest. The average life span is 55 compared with 72 for advanced countries, and 40% of all Brazilians have been afflicted with a major disease.
Such sobering facts require sobering words, and Arthur da Costa e Silva lost no time in applying them after he took office in the still unfinished and boldly modern capital of Brasilia last month. A lifetime professional soldier who headed Brazil's armed forces until he resigned to run for President, Costa is a pragmatic man whose army background has stiffened his spine and his resolve--and made him less dreamy than some of his predecessors. In a meeting with his Cabinet the day after his inauguration, he said: "Brazilian society is profoundly split. This cleavage is growing and deepening so much that all of us must work urgently to remedy it. I have the impression that while we all live in the same national space, we do not live in the same social time. Misery dominates large segments of the Brazilian population. If, as St. Francis of Assisi said, virtue cannot grow in misery, it is worth asking how democracy can flourish in poverty."
Democracy is not flourishing in Brazil, but it is lucky even to be alive. Brazil's military men believe that they saved it in the nick of time in 1964 when they toppled leftist President Joao Goulart, who seemed to be moving toward a Communist-type dictatorship, and installed Army General Humberto Castello Branco as President. Elected to succeed Castello Branco by a Congress subservient to the military and controlled by the government's ARENA Party, Costa e Silva has promised to humanize the revolution launched by his austere and humorless predecessor--but he has also made it clear that he intends to carry through on the many basic reforms that Castello began. So moved was he by the task facing him that at his first Cabinet meeting he broke into tears. "I hope to God," he said softly, "to live up to expectations and not to disappoint my country or my people."
Arbiter & Guardian. The army that created Costa and put him in office looks upon itself as the repository of order and stability in Brazil. Brazilians have never either hated or particularly loved the country's 200,000-man military, but have simply accepted it on its own terms as the arbiter of national politics and the guardian of the constitution. Unlike the bloody revolutions of most of the Spanish-American nations, Brazil's gentle wrench from Portugal in 1822 did not create a pantheon of army heroes or a military history that put its people in debt to soldiers. Today, Brazil's military organization is run by a bright, intellectual class of officers who are strongly influenced by the tenets of Comtian and Spencerian Positivism.* In a land that is being torn by a struggle between tradition and modernization, the army--frequently accused of being right wing--is actually a major vehicle for reform.
Costa e Silva represents the more liberal, reform-minded type of military leader who is coming to the fore in Latin America. Thanks partly to the $1.6 billion-a-year Alliance for Progress and partly to a gradual opening up of the continent, most of today's military officers recognize that the best defense against Fidel Castro and his threatened "wars of liberation" is to improve the degrading lot of the underprivileged and create a sense of community and nationhood in which everyone can participate. Like Brazil, Argentina has a military government that is trying to institute reforms; the army has also launched extensive civic-action programs in Venezuela, Peru, Colombia and Bolivia. Though Brazil's military shows little inclination at present to let civilians run the show again, army men in both Ecuador and Guatemala have recently returned their governments to civilian rule.
The Brazilian army is very much a part of the people, and has always welcomed all comers to its ranks. Of the country's $2.2 billion budget, $450 million goes to the military, and about $45 million of that is spent on civic action. "Our armed forces," says Costa, "are in a pioneering role. No civilian doctor will open his office in desolate country near the Bolivian border, so we send an army doctor. And the schoolteacher there may have to be an army man too." In fact, the military now runs an engineering institute and 33 elementary and secondary schools with a total enrollment of 11,500. Last year Brazil's soldiers paved 300 miles of road, laid 350 miles of railway tracks and worked on dozens of other national projects. Military pilots log 3,000,000 miles a year in the trackless interior, flying in supplies and helping peasants get their crops out to market.
Some Nerve. As a leader of Brazil's army, Costa e Silva has been involved in revolution on and off for many years. One of nine children of a shopowner in the small gaucho town of Taquari in Rio Grande do Sul State, he went to military school as a youngster and was at the head of his class almost from the first. As a student lieutenant colonel, he had as his subcommander a native of the poverty-stricken Northeast, a stubby ugly duckling named Humberto Castello Branco, who was destined to remain in Costa's shadow throughout most of his career.
While he was attending Brazil's version of West Point, where he finished third in his class, Costa took a shine to a very young girl named lolanda, the daughter of an instructor, and mentioned her to a fellow cadet one day as "the girl I am going to marry." "But she is only ten years old," said the cadet. Replied Arthur: "She'll grow up." While he was waiting, 2nd Lieut. Costa e Silva fell in with a group of officers fed up with the powerful landowners who were running Brazil, and later joined a brief and abortive rebellion that landed him in jail aboard a freighter in Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay. Through a friend, Costa smuggled out a note to lolanda's father, asking permission to marry her. "You have some nerve," the father said--but he finally consented.
Costa was released after six months. When Getulio Vargas led a coup that pushed the landowners out in 1930 and set up a mild, semi-Fascist dictatorship, Costa came aboard as an aide to one of Vargas' Cabinet ministers. Over the years, Costa worked his way up in rank and, during a postwar wave of democratic feeling in Latin America, joined a group of officers who booted Vargas from power in 1945--only to see him return to office after the 1950 elections. Four years later, as Vargas drifted back toward his old corruption and dictatorship, the army again ordered him out; this time Vargas went to his palace bedroom and put a bullet through his head.
As the candidate of Vargas' Social Democratic Party, Juscelino Kubitschek was swept to power in the next year's elections, promising "50 years of progress in five." He doubled cement and steel production, tripled power generation, expanded petroleum output 15 times and, with visionary foresight, started the $600 million capital of Brasilia 600 miles to the northwest of Rio and the 1,360-mile Belem-Brasilia highway to open up Brazil's virginal interior. The gross national product spurted--but so did the government deficit. By the time Kubitschek's term was up--Brazilian Presidents cannot succeed themselves--the cost of living was climbing 29.4% a year and corruption was everywhere.
Like Hoodlums. Promising to "wield the broom," incoming President Janio Quadros threw the national machine into reverse, firing 35,000 government workers and slashing salaries of top government officials 30%. When President Quadros persuaded the Sao Paulo legislature to vote down a pay raise for the state militia, the militiamen rebelled and prepared to storm the governor's palace. Now a general, Costa e Silva ordered his troops to surround the rebel barracks, then rushed alone to the palace, where he found rebels in charge and the governor hiding in the basement. "You're acting like hoodlums," Costa shouted at the rebels. "Get in line, all of you. You're under arrest." Fortunately, the army arrived moments later to back up Costa's threat, and the revolt was over.
When the erratic, increasingly moody Quadros suddenly swung to the left, calling Castro a "great statesman" and even pinning Brazil's top medal on Cuba's visiting Che Guevara, the public and army raised an angry clamor. In a fit of pique, Quadros simply resigned one day and sailed off to Europe. In came Vice President Joao Goulart, a leftist demagogue who at the very moment of Quadros' resignation was in Peking chatting with Mao Tse-tung. The army considered pulling a coup, but finally decided to give Goulart a chance. Asked to serve as Goulart's army chief of staff, Costa refused. "I cannot," he said, "take a position of trust in a government that I distrust and oppose." The job went instead to Castello Branco.
Costa's worst fears were soon borne out. Corruption spread through every level of government, Brazil's cost of living rose 81% in 1963, the cruzeiro plunged from 280 to the dollar to 1,720, and foreign investment froze in the face of Goulart's sporadic fits of nationalization. After rare and alarming protest marches by 500,000 Brazilians in Sao Paulo and 100,000 in Belo Horizonte, Costa and his generals finally rose up and sent Goulart packing off to exile in Uruguay. Costa took over the country's military.
When the state governors met and asked Costa to head the new government, he refused; Castello Branco took the job instead. Often bypassing Congress altogether, Castello Branco launched a massive cleanup of inflation, corruption and Communism. He issued more than 3,000 decrees, stripped almost 800 Brazilians of their political rights and had hundreds more arrested and grilled for hours. To cool off Brazil's badly overheated economy, he cut government spending by 30%, quadrupled income tax revenues, held down wages and did his best to woo foreign investment.
Vigor & Passion. Though the results were not so spectacular as the army had promised, they were notable. The rate of inflation dropped in half, to 41% last year. Foreign investment bounced back from $709,000 under Goulart, to $200 million. The growth rate of the gross national product went from 1.4% a year to 5%. For the first time in years, the World Bank sent a mission to Brazil, and last December came up with $230 million in loans and financing. Washington, which had cut aid to Goulart's government, now came across with $560 million in assorted aid, loans and food donations.
Castello Branco had far less success in keeping his army united. On one side were the so-called soft-liners, who wanted to operate within a constitutional framework; on the other the hardliners, who demanded even more aggressive "revolutionary government." The hard line at one point considered Castello Branco's ouster, was dissuaded from acting only by Costa e Silva. Acting as a buffer between the two sides, Costa then persuaded Castello to issue a tough new set of decrees to appease the hard line. They tightened national-security laws, dissolved all 13 of Brazil's political parties in favor of a single opposition called the Brazilian Democratic Movement (M.D.B.) and the government-controlled ARENA party, and provided for indirect presidential elections by Congress--which would obviously be stacked in the government's favor.
By this time, the hard line was calling all the shots, and demanded that Costa run for president. Costa himself, no longer content to play Brazil's great grey eminence, was more than willing. Though Castello Branco was not very happy about the choice of his successor, Congress dutifully elected Costa last October.
Even though he is the candidate of the hard line, Brazilians welcomed Costa as a relief after the drab and dour Castello Branco. As a man who wants to reinterpret the revolution in human terms, Costa emerges as the essence of the middle-class Brazilian. He likes to play the horses now and then, appreciates good cognac, enjoys his family (Wife lolanda, a son, four grandchildren) and laughs at the latest jokes about his military ways. Among his favorites: one concerning a contest that Costa plans to hold for the best joke about him--first prize is 20 years in jail.
Costa is also a man of vigor and passion. A hardy, 200-pounder who keeps fit doing knee bends and arm exercises, he once gave a bear-hug abraco to an old army chum and cracked two of the officer's ribs. He is just as good at cracking knuckles. When, as commander of the military, he finally accepted the dinner invitation of a particularly insistent congressional deputy, he arrived at an opulent apartment on Copacabana beach, watched silently after dinner while his host showed off a gallery of possessions: 50 suits, 25 pairs of shoes, bulky silverware, art treasures. "Wait till you see my wife's wardrobe," said the deputy. "No thank you," replied Costa, "I have seen enough." Within the next few days, he canceled the deputy's mandate and suspended his political rights "for ostentatious and conclusive evidence of corruption."
One Huge Lottery. In Costa's hands now is the fate of Brazil at a time when the country stands at a critical point in its growth and development. It can either slip back almost effortlessly into its old "land of tomorrow" ways or, if Costa carries the torch, finally begin to live up to its prophesies and take its place as a power and mover in Latin America.
Costa's biggest problem is the economy. On top of last year's 41% rise, the cost of living has shot up another 7.3% in the first two months of this year, making Brazil little more than one huge, hectic lottery. Just before leaving office, Castello Branco devalued the currency and issued a new cruzeiro worth 1,000 of the old ones. Even so, people still deal in hundreds of cruzeiros for the most simple needs. To beat Brazil's inflation, whose inexorable rise is caused by overloaded budgets and overworked money presses, many Brazilians rush to put their money into material possessions that hold their value, particularly real estate--thus, of course, driving prices up even further.
Costa says that he will continue Castello Branco's tight-money program--but not at the expense of development. In the Northeast, the government's regional development agency, called SUDENE, is luring new industry with special tax incentives and is helping build a $37 million potassium-fertilizer factory, a $44 million caustic-soda plant and an $11 million tire plant. Brazil is building the new $25 million, 15-story Panorama Palace Hotel on a Rio hill side overlooking Copacabana Beach; it will be Latin America's largest and lushest hotel. The massive 4,000,000-kw. Urubupunga Project going up on the Parana River in south-central Brazil, one of the largest hydroelectric complexes in the world, is part of a program to push Brazil's hydroelectric capacity from the current' 8,150,000 kw. to twelve million kw. by 1970, compared with the U.S.'s present 45 million kw.
Some fear that Costa may try to build too much, or that he will be more concerned with winning friends than winning the battle against inflation. He was no sooner in office than he counter manded a Castello Branco order and rehired--at least temporarily--1,500 surplus social security workers who had just been fired. He also suspended a special 15% profit tax that Castello Branco had put through, held up a fare hike on some government rail lines and hinted that he might even double the country's minimum wage to $148 a month. But the military hard-liners are there to see that he does not slide too far.
Uprooting Bushes. The inflationary rise is getting a strong tail wind from the country's primitive agriculture, which is failing to keep up with the annual increase in the birth rate. Last year, Brazil's population increased almost roughly by the equivalent of the total population of Uruguay (pop. 2.7 million). Yet Brazil's farm tools and techniques are so antiquated that the country actually produces less corn and wheat per acre than it did 30 years ago. Moreover, one-fourth of what it does produce spoils before it reaches market because of poor transportation and storage facilities. One of the few crops that Brazil produces in abundance--coffee--is too abundant; saddled with $220 million a year in coffee supports, Costa's government is paying farmers to uproot thousands of acres of coffee bushes and cut production 18% by 1968.
Costa has made a point that he will vigorously push "all measures that increase agriculture and cattle production, as well as raise productivity." To expand Brazil's backward agriculture, he plans to step up the pace of a two-year-old land-reform program, aimed at extending credit to small farmers, providing them with technical guidance and breaking up the country's huge estates. It will be a much harder and longer task to eradicate the inevitable result of Brazil's farm troubles: the sprawling belts of poverty and misery throughout the countryside, where 50% of Brazil's people try to scrabble out a living. In the Northeast, a barren, beaten land more than twice the size of Texas, average per-capita income is down to $100 a year, illiteracy runs 75% and the life span of the area's 28 million people has been cut by hunger and disease to an appalling 35. As the Northeast's Composer-Singer Geraldo Vandre wails:
I've seen death without weeping.
The destiny of the Northeast is death:
Cattle they kill.
But to people they do something worse.
Looking for a better life, thousands of peasants pack up every month and head for the big cities, where they find only deeper poverty and despair. In the Northeast's bustling port of Recife, 40% of the city's 1,000,000 people live in squalid, malodorous mocambos (shanties) strung out along the city's Ca-piberibe River. There is no fresh water, sanitation or electric light, and crime and disease are as oppressive as the millions of horseflies that swarm everywhere. In Rio, more than 600,000 people--15% of the city's population--live in the festering favelas that pock the surrounding hillsides.
Signs of Awakening. At the heart of many of Brazil's problems is its long neglect of education, which is responsible for its high illiteracy. Not until 1922 did Brazil even create a university--and then only because Belgium's King Albert was making a state visit and had asked to address some university students. Today, there are only 170,000 students in Brazilian universities, slightly fewer than in Argentina, which has only one-fourth of Brazil's population. Half of them are majoring in philosophy and law, few in the skills that Brazil really needs. Among his first orders of business after taking office, Costa instructed all universities to ignore the results of admission exams and admit any students who wanted into their medical, engineering and other professional schools. He also promised to double the current capacity of Brazil's 41 universities.
A good part of the blame for the parlous state of Brazil's education belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, which has always opposed the public-school system, runs 80% of secondary schools and, in most cases, has shown considerable apathy toward education for the really poor. Though the church has lately exhibited signs of awakening to the necessity of social revolution, it is still a bastion of traditionalism in Brazil, where 95% of the population is at least nominally, and rather relaxedly, Catholic. Of Brazil's four cardinals, only Sao Paulo's Agnelo Rossi is an active promoter of social reform. The country's 226 bishops range from hard-core reactionaries to the liberal likes of Dom Helder Camara, who calls himself a "padre" and suggests that bishops doff their gold crosses and purple stockings and get nearer to the people.
The church, in effect, allies itself with Brazil's aristocracy, which controls an incredible amount of the country's wealth; indeed, the church is heavily entrenched in real estate ownership, holding a large but secret percentage of Brazilian land. Because Brazil's church is not nearer to the people, it is in a steadily weakening position. The country has fewer than 11,000 priests, or only one per 8,000 people, and 40% of them are foreigners. The number of Protestants is growing, having increased from only 40,000 in 1900 to more than 3,000,000 today, according to the Brazilian Protestant Council. The Protestants have almost 9,000 ministers, who may before long outnumber the priests. An even faster growing form of worship is spiritualism, which has more than 10 million followers who practice everything from African fetishism and nature rites to macumba, the Brazilian version of voodoo.
Stone-Age Conditions. The country itself shows just as much diversity. It is a nation of great racial variety--and harmony--in which 65% of the people are white (though often of mixed blood) and the rest range over a varying spectrum from cocoa brown to black. In the remoter reaches of the Amazon, which makes up about half of Brazil and stretches like an endless sea to the west, there are more than 150 different Indian tribes who speak scores of dialects and live in Stone-Age conditions. On top of its racial mix, Brazil has absorbed many immigrant nationalities, ranging from the more predominant Portuguese and Italian to Japanese, German, Bulgarian, Lebanese and even Icelandic. Sao Paulo alone boasts 90 different nationalities.
Brazil's cities are as varied as its people. The Brazilians of Rio--better known as Cariocas--are a lively, loving lot who live for the beach, the fast and easy deal, the artful fix (jeito) and fun and sloppy sports clothes. Nothing seems to bother the Cariocas. Because of power shortages, the lights in various parts of Rio are turned off at various times each evening. Instead of worrying about it, the carioca has invented a game called carioca roulette, in which he climbs into an elevator around shut-off time and takes his chances on making it to his floor. Thousands lose every night, often spending three or four hours in stifling, pitch-black gloom. Not long ago, seven Rio cops hit on a particularly Brazilian solution for ridding Rio of its 17,000 beggars; they began leading the mendigos into a truck, lugging them out to the Guarda River west of the city and drowning them. Did the beggars riot when the scandal broke? Many simply showed up in their usual places the next day wearing big grins--and life preservers.
In contrast to Rio, Sao Paulo is all business. Brazil's biggest and fastest growing city (pop. 6,000,000), it has 25,000 industrial enterprises that account for 30% of Brazil's total production. Sao Paulo considers itself the Brazilian Wall Street, and Paulistas act and dress accordingly, favoring dark suits and somber miens for all occasions. When he is not at one of the city's 500 sports clubs, Sao Paulo's favorite recreation, the Paulista will usually be in his car fighting Latin America's worst traffic jam (416,000 vehicles on the road). He can also pick from any one of 464 nightclubs, nine times more than Rio, or from some 1,000 restaurants, more than in all the rest of Brazil.
Up the coast, Salvador, Brazil's oldest and fifth largest city (850,000 people) is the quintessence of African Brazil, a mellow, languorous city of rich, luminous colors that smells of dende oil, coconut milk and malagueta pepper and resounds to the throaty, metal-stringed strum of the African berimbau. To the north, once-sleepy Belem has turned into a throbbing mainstream of the Amazon's economic life, thanks to the highway linking it to Brasilia. In the remote Amazon city of Manaus, Brazil's fabled old turn-of-the-century rubber capital, life moves almost as languidly as the deep black waters of the nearby Rio Negro.
Crown of Thorns. No city in the world is quite like Brasilia, the seven-year-old vision of tomorrow carved out of the wilderness. Its unfinished cathedral is designed in the shape of a gigantic crown of concrete thorns. Its Congress building looks like a huge cup and saucer. Its population areas are laid out in Orwellian modules, with all the foreign-ministry officials living here, the bank employees there, the military officers over there. Artificially created to open up the frontier and shift the country's balance westward, Brasilia was long considered the "mad city" that Ku-bitschek built, was shunned by officials, who preferred to spend their time in Rio. But Brasilia has been made more attractive with bright colors and expensive trees and shrubs, and its fine university draws students from all over Brazil. Even its night life has picked up, and fully 30 of the federal deputies defeated in last year's elections decided to remain in Brasilia and make their homes there. "Brasilia," says Costa, "is indispensable for national integration."
Uncompleted, ambitious, yet troubled--as the already growing slums at its outskirts attest--Brasilia symbolizes all the hopes and visions of Brazil, and the distance yet to go. The tug of modernization is strong and compelling, but tradition and apathy are fighting hard rearguard actions. The economic indexes show that, broadly speaking, Brazil is falling behind many other advancing countries, including some of its neighbors in Latin America. But this is not the final judgment, for Brazil has reached a middle stage in its development at which the dynamics of modernization can work wonders if the country can only channel its energy to employ them. Perhaps that channel will be provided by Arthur Costa e Silva and by Latin America's new awareness that it must act now--and together--to solve its problems. But optimism of the sort that has drenched Brazil in the past like blinding sunshine must wait on surer signs that, having reached the take-off point, the giant of the south will really take off.
*Which holds that man can achieve a sound, viable society only by recognizing conditions for what they are and dealing with them scientifically and pragmatically, rather than engaging in metaphysical speculation on what society should be.
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