World Notes BRAZIL

It was a project so simple even an undergraduate could do it. But what Maria Aparecida de Oliveira, a student at the University of Brasilia, learned in the $ course of her research was enough to send all Brazil into a furor. She found that nearly half the country's 570 Deputies and Senators have relatives squirreled away on the government payroll, many of them in cushy, high-paying jobs. Worst-case abusers included a former Senate president who provided jobs for at least nine family members, and a Deputy who hired his wife and three daughters.

News of such nepotism hardly came as a surprise to David Fleischer, chairman of political science and international relations at the same university, who says, "It's part of the Brazilian culture." In fact, Fleischer believes Oliveira's study was not thorough: "There's a lot more nepotism going on than she reported."