Brazil, a Piebald Mastodon
Brazil is the land of the future—and always will be.—CARIOCA PROVERB
We piogiess at night when the politicians sleep.
—BRAZILIAN SAYING
MULTIFORM, variegated, prodigious, Brazil is one of the most spectacular of countries, the fifth-largest nation in the world, bigger than the continental United States, packed with bizarre characteristics and luminous with color. But its president at the moment of writing, Marshal Castelo Branco, is a man totally without flamboyance, as is Marshal Artur da Costa e Silva, who is scheduled to succeed him in the spring of 1967. Both are as homely as darned socks, although Costa e Silva is a more emphatic personality-a King Canute in dark glasses.
Presently I will attempt to describe these two dominant characters, together with other Brazilian men of affairs, and I will deal with a sheaf of cities too—like Rio de Janeiro, the Cidade Maravilhosa, and Sao Paulo, a kind of Detroit rising in glass and steel on a bed of red dirt and orchids. But first we must draw a broad general picture of Brazil's size and limitations, its overpowering physical presence, its fascinating racial mix, its energy and profuse charm and challenge for the future. And we must deal with urgent and immediate political affairs as well, the transformation now going on whereby Brazil, a reasonably free democratic republic until yesterday, is becoming rapidly a military dictatorship, largely because of an almost morbid fear, justified or not, of Communism. If present trends continue, free expression by the people will soon become impossible under a tawdry regime which will go to almost any length to impede the restoration of normal political procedures in order to avoid losing its own nation in the world in the production of coffee, the second in corn, cane sugar, and cocoa, the third in tobacco. Although predominantly agricultural, it has thirty-two cities with 100,000 people or more. It contains one-third of the total reserves of iron ore in the world, and is uncommonly well-stocked with other minerals, all the way from gold to nickel. It has 16 percent of the world's forest, the world's greatest hydroelectric potential, the biggest steel industry in South America, and fantastic wealth in semiprecious stones. It is the eighth country in the world in automobile production, and the second in volume of air traffic.
Why should a country so rich be so poor? One answer is bad government.
On an immediate level, aside from modernization at large, the princi¬pal Brazilian problems are—
1. Economic troubles, including a ravaging inflation. The shortage of foreign exchange is acute, because the country's agricultural exports do not bring enough revenue to pay for essential imports, like the petroleum necessary for industrialization. The climb in the price level, which rose by a terrifying 87 percent in 1964, has led to important events. The present government, under the stimulus of Dr. Roberto Campos, one of the ablest men in South America, is doing its best to be rigidly deflationary, and the inflation rate fell to 45 percent in 1965. But, even though this improved the basic financial situation, it made the government unpopular with many. Deflationary governments are seldom popular.
2. An extremely difficult political situation. Three different "elections" had to be scheduled late in 1966 so that the government could the more readily maintain itself in power. When Castelo Branco took office in 1964 after a military coup d'etat he earnestly hoped to be able to "reconstitutionalize" the regime, i.e., restore democratic or quasi-democratic processes, but he failed. A single government party now controls almost all political activity, and nobody can easily run for office without government approval. Indirect elections ensure the victory of "official candidates," and Congress appears to be on the way to becoming a rubber stamp. Effective opposition has been extinguished, and may remain so for many years. People grumble, but are helpless.
3. Breaking up feudal patterns and alleviating hardship in the northeast, which depends on land reform, a situation in which United States aid and technical assistance ate playing a helpful role.
4. Such basic factors as poverty and illiteracy.
5. Corruption. I will allude to this in passages to follow.
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