DUNKIN' DONUTS WONT FEED THE HUNGRY

...These are what the economists call externalities, but they represent the essence of reality for most Brazilians, victims of a development strategy that for twenty years has aped the West, promising a miracle but delivering misery...

...Sometimes the foreman advances him 28 cruzeiros (worth three cents) to buy a roll, but otherwise he doesn't expect to eat until he gets home to his wife and two kids at seven or eight at night...

...The Brazilian people are in no mood to go along with such suffering imposed by foreigners and by the ineptitude, greed, and corruption of the local ruling clique...

...in October, Brazil's Congress echoed with condemnations of the IMF...

...Below the skyscrapers of downtown Sao Paulo, tens of thousands of unlicensed street vendors, some with university degrees, set up shop, selling tomatoes, dirty books, hard candy, tangerines, fried coconut strips, envelopes, bibles, and socks...

...In the "ABC" cities of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo, and Sao Caetano, Brazil's automobile capital and the heart of the aggressive new labor movement, the streets are strangely depressed and many houses remain half-finished, their inhabitants having run out of money...

...The rickety old airport in Rio de Janeiro has been replaced by a magnificent steel-and-cement monument rivaling the terminals at O'Hare or LaGuardia...

...The company has already sold dozens of its short-range turboprops to the United States...

...But the government strongly favored it, since it was the keystone of an agreement with the IMF...

...In Sao Paulo, Rio, and Minas Gerais, the wealthiest and most populous states, opposition candidates took office without incident...

...Folha de Sao Paulo, a daily newspaper, recently noted that "Delfim is the most powerful figure in the government and is widely regarded as the architect of its economic policies...

...The lack of domestic petroleum was ignored, and the heavy borrowing that made Brasilia possible was discounted...

...The Gazeta Mercantile Brazil's Wall Street Journal without the flair, reports that the government-owned aviation company is dickering for a deal to build 150 jets for the British Royal Air Force...

...Goodwrench...

...For the first time in memory, cigarettes are being retailed one by one...

...The International Monetary Fund, chief collection agency for the world financial community, has been demanding austere spending cutbacks and wage reductions...

...Railroads, that collective form of transportation, have fallen apart except where some overriding foreign interest is served, as in the export of iron ore...

...on an empty stomach, catches the first bus, and starts laying bricks two hours later, twenty stories up...

...The transportation mess exemplifies the decay of Brazil's economic model...

...Western banks, led by Citibank, keep on lending and Brazil's planners keep on spending...

...It was a surprise move, designed in Figueiredo's words "to prevent agitators from pressuring and intimidating members of Congress in the exercise of their functions...

...Inside Dunkin' Donuts a half dozen jelly rolls go for 1,250 cruzeiros, just under a day's legal minimum wage of $1.50...

...Citibank is Brazil's largest private creditor, and it earns 20 per cent of its worldwide income here...

...They are also upset that the United States, 'that pillar of Western Civilization,' would be trying to run Brazil's affairs by pushing for Decree-Law 2045...

...Strikes were outlawed, and the agricultural sector was transformed to meet foreign markets, not domestic needs...

...Not only has drought parched the north, but in May and June, southern Brazil was assailed by the heaviest rains of this century, with floods displacing a million people and devastating much of the rice and bean crop...

...Today, Brazil is exporting not just raw materials but manufactured goods as well...

...Last week an Army colonel accused him before a Congressional commission of inquiry of receiving a $6 million 'tip' while Ambassador to France, in return for granting a hydroelectric contract in Sao Paulo to a French company...

...Though drinking water is scarce, first-class hotels maintain fresh water swimming pools...

...Opposition parties also won a majority in the national Chamber of Deputies...

...The foreign debts continue to mount, precipitated by three successive leaps in oil prices in the 1970s...

...What remains to be seen is which side the military will choose to support...

...President Figueiredo, after meeting with military and civilian cabinet ministers, decreed an "emergency" in the federal district of Brasilia on the evening of October 19...

...Since the 1950s, the process of economic The Miracle Worker Brazil's planning minister, Delfim Netto, declared in late September that "there are many good-for-nothings speaking in the name of workers...

...When the generals took over in 1964, the Western-style development model was sanctified...

...Now Brazil can't pay its debts, and can hardly manage to pay the interest...

...The generals smashed the labor movement and took other measures designed to make Brazil safe for international capitalism...

...today it costs 189 hours...

...The potholed road to town, which threatened to dissolve with every downpour, has been transformed into a divided freeway...

...Last year, even the weather seemed to be conspiring against the people...

...Apparently untroubled by its debt exposure and unruffled by popular demands for default, Citibank has just plunked down $ 16 million for a lot on Av-enida Paulista, where it will build its new headquarters...

...But these political advances have occurred against a bleak backdrop: The economy is falling apart and the country is sinking deeper into chaos and despair...

...The measure, which would have limited salary and rent adjustments, was opposed by unions and most business leaders...

...President Juscelino Ku-bitschek, who reigned in the late 1950s, was most proud of two accomplishments: the creation of Brasilia as a center of industry, and the development of a "Brazilian" automobile industry, actually owned by General Motors, Ford, and Volkswagen...

...in September, consumers ransacked supermarkets in Rio...

...Never were the poor poorer or the rich richer, and we don't understand how the president's son could get involved with the whole Tucurui business [a multi-million dollar national scandal involving an Army retirement fund...

...Prices for beans and rice, the country's staple food, have almost tripled in the past year, and inflation runs at a double-digit monthly rate (more than 200 per cent a year) while wages have risen by about 80 per cent...

...One twenty-seven-year-old laborer leaves home at 4:00 a.m...

...I have yet to see a pot-bellied construction worker in Brazil...

...The impoverished Northeast is suffering from its worst drought in history, the population sustained only by two million fifty-cent-per-day government "work front" jobs...

...Soybeans and beef require few farmworkers and large tracts of land, so millions of farmers and laborers who produced food crops for domestic consumption were replaced...

...Brasilia is a visual ode to the private car and the freeway...

...Press censorship and predawn raids by the police have for the most part ceased, but people are poorer than ever before...

...Figueiredo accepted the defeat of his plan to limit wage increases, even though it jeopardized his government's attempt to renegotiate Brazil's $90 billion foreign debt...

...The rotund minister is the symbol of the government's economic policies and is probably the most disliked man in Brazil...

...We don't see how the poor are going to eat, if that law passes.' The Movimento de Arregi-mentaqao Femina, a conservative women's group, decided something had to be done when one of its members found out that a friend's daughter, with an advanced degree in psychology, had been forced to take a job as a full-time baby sitter...

...Seventy per cent of Brazil's freight tonnage moves by inefficient diesel truck, compared to 23 per cent for the United States and 9 and 7 per cent, respectively, for Canada and the Soviet Union...

...Even more remarkably, President Joao Baptista Damian Burnham is the pseudonym of an American free-lance writer in Brazil...

...The opposition has even begun—in fits and starts—to oppose...

...From Rio, you can now dial direct to Sao Paulo or New York as easily as you can get Hartford from Boston...

...Last September, for the first time since the military grabbed power in 1964, the Chamber of Deputies voted down a presidential decree...

...A debt moratorium is in the air...

...Virtually nothing is shipped by water, though most major cities are strung out along Brazil's seacoast and rivers...

...The cabs cost them between $5 and $6 for twenty-four hours, and they may spend $15 for fuel...

...The "emergency" decree, in force for sixty days, gave the army the authority to suspend freedom of assembly, to take over any labor or professional groups, to fire any person from public employment, to enter households, and to search and seize evidence without a warrant...

...Outside Brazil's first Dunkin' Donuts in downtown Sao Paulo sits a squalid young woman surrounded by four ragged children...

...The general mood of the people I talked to was one of sadness more than surprise...

...She admits with a smile that she often makes four dollars a day begging, outearning her laborer husband several times over...

...In July, workers went on strike in Sao Paulo...

...One federal deputy called the measures "the beginning of the end" of the rede-mocratization of Brazilian politics, and his opinion was widely shared...

...Occasionally, a bus drives by with no windshield, a relic of the violence accompanying last July's general strike against the government's economic policies...

...Taxi drivers who work for a company usually are on the job twelve to twenty hours a day, seven days a week...

...The infant death rate has soared, and the cities resemble India or Bangladesh, with famished refugees wandering the streets in search of work and food...

...They often cluster at restaurants, which are mostly open-air, waiting to scoop up handfuls of leftovers from the plates of the more fortunate...

...Two months later, the Chamber of Deputies agreed to a slightly less stringent wage decree to mollify foreign bankers...

...development has been based on the U.S...

...And the phones work...

...Drivers tell me that the first eight or ten hours a day are for the boss and the fuel, and then they start to make money—maybe $2 to $5 a day...

...Sao Paulo, the proud locomotive of Brazilian economic development, has stalled in its tracks...

...model, with the goal of export-led growth at whatever cost...

...At the shop's grand opening, the manager was quoted as saying that he hoped the anxieties of the economic crisis would whet the population's sweet tooth...

...The cost of a basic family ration for a week equaled sixty-five hours of work at the legal minimum wage in 1959...

...At lunch, while some of his co-workers eat their "wristwatch" (half a boiled egg) on rice, he stands around, hoping to garner some leftovers...

...Those without homes often camp in vacant lots or under viaducts, sharing what they've gathered and cooking together around a big pot...

...The Sao Paulo and Rio newspapers and television present images of people eating field rats and lizards, boiled and roasted on a spit with a bit of manioc flour...

...Almost a third of the state's 1.5 million workers are unemployed—a particularly harsh fate, since Brazil offers no unemployment compensation...

...During the 1970s, soybean production increased more than five times, reaching fourteen million tons per year...

...About six months ago, for the first time in two decades, democratically elected governors were inaugurated in all twenty-three of Brazil's states...

...At the weekly farmers' markets, even in the wealthier neighborhoods, the "new unemployed" and the "new hungry" wait for booths to close so they can scavenge for leftovers...

...The "emergency" followed the defeat of Decree-Law 2045, which would have substantially cut real wages...

...The situation is worse than in 1964,' said one of the leaders...

...Shabby men dragging automobile-tired donkey carts piled high with waste paper struggle between cars and buses...

...He was responding to widespread union criticism of Decree-Law 2045, which would have reduced wage readjustments to only 80 per cent of the official inflation level...

...Some of them doze off in their cabs rather than sleep at home—just one of the many attempts to save time and fuel...

...Clearly, progress has arrived with a vengeance in Brazil...

...This is the Brazilian economic miracle...

...The cranky customs agents in brown shirts have given way to courteous ladies and gentlemen in blue, helpful and reasonable as GM's Mr...

...Oops, We Goofed A snippet from the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo: "Former organizers of the 'Family March for God and Liberty,' who helped bring down the Joao Goulart government in 1964, are issuing a new manifesto against the present government's economic policies, denouncing widespread starvation and corruption...