Help from Brazil

In international broadcasts, the receiving country seldom helps to prepare the programs it receives, but five Brazilians last week reached Manhattan for just that purpose. Their chief object: to assist the Rockefeller Committee (Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs) in getting up a daily radio program for Brazil.

There are no commercial networks in Brazil. But eleven independent stations in Rio and eleven in Sao Paulo are linked by telephone wires, and all 89 Brazilian stations can pick up and rebroadcast programs transmitted over Brazil's powerful short-wave stations. For years all stations have been required either to go off the air or to take the Government program, Hora do Brasil (sometimes known among jesting Brasileiros as the Hora do Silencio).

Brazil's Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (D.I.P.), having allotted a part of the hour to a U.S. program beginning next Monday, accepted the Rockefeller Committee's invitation to send advisers and writers to make the program hum in good Portuguese. Head of the delegation is Dr. Assis de Figueiredo, D.I.P.'s assistant director, who will stay in the U.S. a few weeks. With him were the head of D.I.P.'s radio division, Dr. Julio Barata, and three writers, Raymundo Magalhaes, Origines Lessa and Pompeu de Souza, all of whom brought their families and will stay a good long time, maybe a year.

One of the things that genial, low-voiced Dr. Barata has lately done for President Vargas is to forbid all foreign-language broadcasts in Brazil and to put an end to the use by Brazilian stations of all Axis news services. One of his worries has been clandestine radio communication between Axis agents on the Brazilian coast and German submarines at sea. A lesser worry has been short-wave propaganda from Berlin-- telling Brazilians they are being taken into a war that is already lost.

This kind of thing, said Dr. Barata, does not go over big with Brazilians, who think that "a people who can produce a man like MacArthur cannot lose a war."

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