The Face of Brazil
PASSOS, JOHN DOS
Tradition of moderation and tolerance insures country's stability and encourages its rapid development The Face of Brazil By John Dos Passos The Brazilians love to tell stories on themselves. In...
...Brazil in 1807 suddenly found itself at the head of what was left of the Portuguese empire...
...Brazil grows at night when the politicians sleep...
...Here is an instance of typically Brazilian moderation...
...tiny Portugal, a country which during the great period of Portuguese colonization numbered at most a couple of million souls, manage to occupy and assimilate one half of the South American continent...
...Rondon personally mapped and surveyed more undiscovered territory than any Brazilian of his era, and at the same time inaugurated an Indian Protection Service that is unique...
...None of the development of the interior could have occurred if the Brazilian doctors had not improvised American privies while waiting for sewage systems to be put in...
...It will cost 30 million cruzeires ($1,620,-000), of which five million has already been raised...
...Since much of the ore taken from this region went to Pittsburgh, this meant a stoppage of much-needed dollar exchange...
...The greatest obstacle to progress in Brazil lies in the fact that tropical and equatorial regions are better suited to the health of disease-producing bacteria than of the human organism...
...Although Brazil is predominantly Catholic, it is one of the few South American countries where Protestant missionaries are not interfered with...
...We have settlers from everywhere in Brazil, refugees from Eastern Europe, and we even have a few Japanese gardeners...
...That was expensive...
...Thinking he had landed on an island, he took possession in the name of Dom Manoel the First, King of Portugal...
...To get people to take chloroquin, Dr...
...You find Episcopalians, evangelists of every stripe, Christian Scientists, followers of August Comp-to, spiritualists and votaries of various African cults brought over by the slaves...
...The Portuguese, a mixed people to begin with, cleave to the patriarchal family...
...When a flood hit a railway project in the iron-rich Rio Doce valley and took the piers out from under a steel bridge, traffic was stopped...
...In spite of the virtually complete elimination of yellow fever, tuberculosis and the various dysenteries are still widespread...
...Even in some of the temperate zones a nasty little parasite carried by fresh-water snails infects human beings...
...When they began to ship home gold and diamonds, the Portuguese kings woke up to the fact that Brazil was a valuable possession and clamped down on the colony's freedom...
...In these same regions it is malaria, however, that takes the greatest drain on human energy and is the greatest obstacle to the exploitation of natural resources...
...The transition from monarchy to republic took place without bloodshed...
...They expect to wipe out malaria in three years...
...The roads are bad, the railroad service undependable and the state and national governments far away...
...Portuguese culture flared into sudden brilliance...
...When Dom Pedro was forced to abdicate in 1889 in favor of a federal republic, he went into exile, leaving behind him habits of compromise and moderation in political affairs...
...How did a handful of settlers from John Dos Passos has recently returned from a trip to Latin America...
...Never be the first to shoot," was his motto...
...Everybody will be immunized without fuss or expense...
...As early as colonial times the Jews discovered so little prejudice against them that they had trouble preserving their cultural identity and soon married into the rest of the population...
...In the south there was Arab and Berber blood...
...There the peasantry, though Christian in religion, retained habits and customs acquired during three centuries of subjection to the Moors...
...Now we cure the disease much more cheaply...
...Brazil is a country of gusty oratory, but the bark of the politicians has usually proved worse than their bite...
...and Brazilian trade had to be channeled through Lisbon...
...His American engineers said they could repair the bridge, but they would have to get an extra-sized crane from the United States...
...Though the Brazilian republic since then has suffered its share of the uprisings and military dictatorships that have plagued Spanish America, the Brazilians have retained a respect for the legal way of doing things that seems quite English...
...A Negro stepped out from one of the work gangs and offered a solution...
...Rio took on a cosmopolitan cast it has never lost...
...In Brazil, as in the Old Testament, the patriarch had power of life and death over every member of the family group and was responsible for its welfare...
...When the fateful day came, Dulles proceeded into Rio without incident...
...That means it's a United Nations...
...He dropped anchor in a beautiful bay near the present port of Santos, south of Rio de Janeiro...
...Napoleon's armies were sweeping Europe...
...Dom Pedro II, still a small boy, to succeed him...
...Wait," says the Lord Jehovah, "until you see the people I'm going to put there...
...For 16 years he reigned in Rio de Janeiro as John VI of the Kingdoms of Portugal and Brazil...
...It will be the tallest in South America: a concrete cone 372 feet high, set on 12 pointed gables, one for each of the apostles...
...Meanwhile, the Government and the moderate factions among the students worked quietly to have everything go smoothly...
...However, for a picture of the typical boom-town that is popping up all over Brazil, we must turn to Maringa, a new city in the western part of the State of Parana in south-central Brazil, where seven years ago there was only primeval forest...
...The average Brazilian city offers almost as many religious sects as Los Angeles...
...In Brazil we have to improvise...
...Although Brazil is free from hurricanes and earthquakes, geographically and topographically it is one of the most inconvenient regions in the world...
...The cream of this little joke is that the opposite is more nearly true...
...The master's mulatto children enjoyed a certain status...
...When the scarcity of hands was remedied by the importation of Negro slaves, the slaves were considered part of the family...
...The northern Portuguese had a lot of Celt in them...
...One of her great military heroes was Can-dido Rondon, three-fourths Indian, who died a field-marshal in 1957 at the age of 92...
...Attending a political barbecue in the back country of Minas Gerais, you will find that manners, attitudes and relationships are almost laughably similar to those you'll find at a political barbecue in Texas or an oyster roast in Virginia...
...European immigrants started arriving and investors from abroad set up industries...
...The archangel asks if it is fair to give all these benefits to one part of the world...
...Maringa seems indeed like what one reads of our North American frontier of 100 years ago...
...They forbade schools, colleges, printing presses or any industry which might compete with the home country...
...Henrikue Penido of the Special Public Health Service in Rio, a bi-national organization that has close ties with the Rockefeller Institute in New York...
...The rivers run the wrong way...
...It was largely due to Dom Pedro's foresight and moderation that, while Spanish America split up after independence into turbulent and warring regimes, Brazil enjoved comparative internal peace...
...A British development company had obtained title to these hundreds of square miles of land, but during the war they had to sell out their holdings to a Brazilian company...
...Irked by such high-handed restrictions, the independent miners of Minas Gerais decided to follow the lead of the English-speaking colony in North America that had thrown off the mother country's yoke...
...Now that the land is almost all sold to private owners, the company is turning to producing and marketing agricultural products: coffee, long-staple cotton, corn, beans, rice...
...They named the Kings son, Dom Pedro I. as constitutional emperor of an independent Brazil...
...Improvise," says Israel Pinheire...
...The influence of the rough democracy of the frontier on the development of both Brazilians and Americans is basic in this kinship...
...In public health, for instance, Dr...
...Os-waldo Cruz, the first great Brazilian public health officer, eliminated yellow fever in Rio—then one of the un-healthiest cities in the world—by adapting to the Brazilian scene the methods developed by Walter Reed and William Gorgas in Panama...
...Halfbreeds, whether of Indian or Negro blood, were drawn into the family, instead of being discarded from it as they were in America...
...The distinctive ultra-modern architecture of its public building is the product of one man's brilliant imagination: Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil's internationally known architect...
...Last year, when John Foster Dulles was expected in Rio, the Communist faction among the university students breathed fire and brimstone in an effort to stir up disagreeable incidents...
...There are residences and office buildings in the newest architectural styles, newly planted parks, a jockey club for horse racing, a swimming club with a beautiful tiled pool and a playground for the children...
...We used to kill the mosquitoes," says Dr...
...Transitions from one regime to the other have tended to be by compromise instead of by violence...
...Printing presses were set up...
...When he failed to suit them, they sent him packing off to Portugal and chose his son...
...Another facet of this homogenizing process is Brazil's leadership in the concept of conciliating and preserving primitive peoples, instead of exploiting and exterminating them...
...Cities have to be planned in a hurry and, as a result, architecture has become the national art...
...Pinheire had to get traffic going fast...
...After Vasco da Gama's rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, African slaves, and all the arts and complexities of India, Persia, China and Japan started pouring into Lisbon...
...The 50 years of his administration consolidated into a unified nation the Portuguese-speaking settlements spread over the enormous terrain of over three million square miles...
...In the Amazon Basin six per cent of the population suffers from leprosy, that ancient concomitant of poverty and filth...
...The health services are extremely hopeful for a new drug named chloroquin, developed for the American armed forces, of which only a small amount is needed to destroy the malaria parasite in the blood...
...The mountains are in the wrong places...
...Brazil's ports were opened to world commerce...
...Because Brazil plans in a big way, some improvised projects fail and are abandoned...
...Left to their own devices, the colonists married into Indian tribes and began early to think of themselves as Brazilians...
...Maringa is purely Brazilian...
...Until the coming of air transportation—which a Brazilian named Sanies Dumont did almost as much as the Wright brothers to promote—most of the interior was virtually inaccessible...
...Out here we don't wait for the Government...
...The ranchers and the slave-owning sugar planters ran the country...
...Many of the landowning families were the offspring of blue-eyed Visigoths...
...When the Bragancas were restored to the Portuguese throne after Napoleon's abdication, the Brazilian magnates refused to go back to a colonial status...
...Instead of being an exploited colony...
...In Portugal, when the French advanced on Lisbon, the ruling Braganca embarked his whole administration on a fleet said to be of a thousand sail, and took off for Brazil...
...A university was established...
...but others succeed on a grand scale...
...These wandering groups of men called themselves Bandeirantes, flag-carriers...
...Brazil also offers a picture of racial tolerance unusual in the world...
...In the north they raised sugar cane, and since the Indians were hunters who couldn't adapt to agriculture, the Brazilians imported slaves from Africa to plant and cut the cane...
...Brasilia, the new capital, is a planned city—right off the drafting board into the bush, 600 miles northwest of Rio...
...The eastern bulge is cursed with perennial droughts...
...Communist students draped their building in black and moved their headquarters to a back street...
...says the resident, bringing his fist down on the table...
...That is my answer when people tell me that we are engaged in a crazy project...
...His complaint was that they are so accustomed to perfect machinery that they had forgotten how to improvise...
...Brazil teems with improvisation as well as adaptation...
...Of course they have their difficulties...
...The boom-speculating spirit, the happy-go-lucky confidence in the future is like our old West, but the carefully planned city is completely up to date...
...We do it ourselves...
...It was at this explosive moment, in 1500, that Pedro Alvares Cabral, sailing a westerly course to India, found himself quite by accident in Brazil...
...In the backlands they raised cattle, and in their search for fresh pastures the ranchers scoured the hinterlands, fighting or absorbing the Indians as they moved...
...The towns had a large Jewish population, possibly descended from Phoenician and Carthaginian colonists whose language and culture were Hebraic...
...An unassuming man of scholarly tastes, he dedicated his life to developing responsible parliamentary government on the English model...
...There are schools, a hospital, 22 banks...
...For a couple of centuries the Brazilian coastal settlements—which grew up through the efforts of Jesuit missionaries and traders in the red-dye brazilwood from which the country gets its name—were regarded by the authorities in Lisbon as mere way-stations to the East...
...A preserve of primeval jungle is alive with birds, butterflies, monkeys and tropical flowers...
...The Brazilians have learned a great deal from us which they have ably recast in their own terms...
...From the time of the first recorded conversation in France between Thomas Jefferson and a Brazilian revolutionist in 1782, there has been a special cordiality in the relations between Brazil and the United States...
...Israel Pinheire, the energetic president of Novacap, the Government corporation that is building Brasilia, the new federal capital-to-be in 1960, tells about his friendly quarrel with the American engineers engaged in the construction work...
...Though the southern third of the country has a mild, even climate, the northern third is an equatorial rain forest that no civilization has yet tamed...
...With a hundred oxen, levers, jacks and winches he got the bridge back on its piers and open for traffic in 19 days...
...Cattle-raising flourished...
...Since his time, American foundations and American doctors have done a great deal to finance and help organize public health services in the most disease-ridden areas, but the day-today drudgery has been carried on by Brazilians...
...The result has been a society where racial tensions are few...
...In the back country, once the problems of public health, roads and bridges are solved, towns start mushrooming...
...says one resident...
...To begin with, Portugal was made up of more various cultural strains than the other colonizing nations of Europe...
...Exports of sugar and forest products soared...
...Their first revolutionary movement was crushed, but a few years later Brazil attained independence in a quite different way from any other of the American nations...
...Dom Pedro II grew up to be an extraordinarily able ruler...
...The same thing is happening to the Germans and Italians who colonized the southern states and to recent European immigrants arriving in Rio and Sao Paulo...
...The thing that is unique about Brazil is the character of its people...
...This would have taken months, even if he had had the dollars to buy it...
...Since their headquarters was on the airport road, they threatened not to let "warmonger" Dulles pass...
...His methods for civilizing the wild tribes without destroying them are used today by the men he trained...
...In one tale the Lord Jehovah is describing to an archangel the wonderful country He is creating in Brazil—beautiful beaches, delicious climates, mountains full of singing birds, an abundance of tropical fruits, gold and diamonds and precious stones...
...Opposite the shining new hotel the foundations for a cathedral are being laid...
...Religious toleration follows virtually in the footsteps of moderation and racial homogeniety...
...Mario Pinetti, Minister of Health, has worked out a method of mixing it with salt...
...Maringa got its start only seven years ago, and already the city proper has 8,000 inhabitants, 15,000 in the environs...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 40
