A Decade of Ditadura

Just ten years ago it was called the United States of Brazil--a functioning democracy with a representative government patterned on the American model. There, however, comparison with the U.S. ended. Although Brazil was the giant of South America, with about half its 6,888,000-sq.-mi. land mass, it was perennially hamstrung by internal problems. Now much of that has changed. Today Brazil, with a population of 103 million, is the major political and economic influence in South America; moreover its exports are spreading so far beyond the continent's shores that it is being billed as "the new Japan." But no longer is it the United States of Brazil. Ten years after a military coup ousted the leftist government of President Joao Goulart, it remains in the iron grip of a junta; in 1967 the generals renamed the country the Federated Republic of Brazil.

When they took over, the generals declared their intention to rule only "temporarily"; they gave themselves three years. Last week Pat Nixon flew into the gleaming, Oscar Niemeyer-inspired capital Brasilia to witness the inauguration of a new President, but the ceremony signaled no easing of the reins. In a brief swearing in, low-keyed President-select (meaning selected by the generals) Ernesto Geisel promised to uphold a constitution that his three immediate predecessors (all generals) had carefully tailored to meet their authoritarian requirements.

Carbon Copies. Geisel, 65, will be the first Protestant ever to rule what is the world's largest Roman Catholic nation. One of the original plotters of the coup, he served four years as head of Petrobras, the state-owned oil monopoly. The new chief of state is almost a carbon copy of the taciturn outgoing President, Emilio Garrastaz Medici, and few changes seem in prospect. In fact, given the self-effacing, collective character of the Brazilian oligarchy, who wears the presidential mantle at any particular time is of little importance.

What is important is the remarkable stability and success of Brazil's decade-old right-wing dictatorship. Its achievement has far-reaching implications, a fact that President Nixon accurately noted in an ebullient 1971 salute to the visiting Medici: "As Brazil goes, so will the rest of the Latin American continent." That encomium caused brass buttons to pop on Brazilian uniforms. It also chilled the political leaders of Brazil's neighbors--notably Argentina--who fear the imperial ambitions of a new "colossus on the make."

The junta has run Brazil with efficiency and cold skill. It has imposed strict censorship on the press and the arts and has imprisoned and tortured priests and Catholic lay workers who have been organizing among the poor. With the notable exception of Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Archbishop Helder Pessoa Camara of Recife and Olinda,* opponents of the regime have been cowed or brutalized into silence. The generals have relentlessly tracked down leftists. In late 1969 they killed Guerrilla Leader Carlos Marighella, the one man who had the personal magnetism to lead an underground movement. According to apologists for the junta, torture is something that "used to happen." Unfortunately, there are plenty of victims who insist that it is still happening.

Love Brazil. The most significant achievement of the regime, however, has been economic, not political. While it has been ten years of ditadura (hard dictatorship) for the bulk of the population, it has been ditabranda (a mild variety) for business and the middle class. Although the military run the government, it and the economy are managed by an accomplished cadre of technocrats. When Goulart was deposed, intemperate development schemes had fired a wild inflation rate--more than 100% in 1964. Last year inflation was between 14% and 20%--high enough but still tolerable for Brazil, which has just seen six consecutive years of better than 10% real growth in the gross national product. Exports last year were $6.6 billion v. $1.4 billion in 1964.

That year Brazil produced only 100,000 autos v. 740,000 in 1973. With the prospering if still small middle class driving ever greater numbers of Brazilian-built Volkswagens and Fiats (many with BRAZIL, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT bumper stickers), the nation's oil needs are becoming costly. The government is so confident of its healthy balance of payments position that it has made no move to ration gas, even though Brazil must import more than 70% of its petroleum requirements.

The regime has been enormously successful in attracting foreign capital. Americans, Japanese and Germans are investing most heavily, but even the Italians are involved in projects, ranging from steel production to manufacture of the G91 fighter-bomber aircraft (extremely effective, among other things, in helping suppress guerrilla insurgencies). Two Japanese firms, Nippon Steel and Kawasaki Corp., plan to treble the size of the Brazilian steel industry. Other Japanese firms have invested heavily in everything from electronics to paper production.

In statistical terms, the dimensions of the Brazilian "miracle" are undeniably imposing. Foreign exchange reserves currently total $6.3 billion, almost $1 billion more than a year ago. The country is the world's fifth largest producer of iron ore, the third largest producer of manganese; it has huge (and largely untapped) reserves of tin, nickel and tungsten. Brazil has a beef population of nearly 93 million head--almost twice that of Argentina. Once a rich land waiting to be exploited, Brazil can now help develop other countries. Brazilian oil and gas pipelines are being laid in Colombia and Bolivia, and Brazilians are building a dam in Paraguay and a highway in Ecuador. Three months ago, a 25-year-old Brazilian rail project finally connected the Pacific and Atlantic coasts for the first time, bringing Chilean copper to the burgeoning industries of S`ao Paulo.

Yet even some technocrats who have guided Brazil's development reluctantly concede that progress has largely benefited an elite few. Despite the forest of new skyscrapers rising in booming S`ao Paulo and the highways cutting through the "green hell" of the Amazonian jungle, perhaps 70% of the nation's people still live outside the money economy in appalling poverty. Brazil stands only 13th among Latin American nations in per capita income ($520 a year), below even backwaters like Surinam. The average life expectancy is only about 50 years (against 67 in Castro's Cuba), and infant mortality is increasing. In rural areas of the arid Northeast, the average calorie intake of peasants has declined in recent years from 1,800 a day to 1,323--more than 1,200 below what United Nations' food experts consider the minimum for subsistence.

Part of the problem is that the technocrats have not yet brought the full force of their planning to bear on impoverished regions such as the Northeast. But even in expanding areas, poverty seems built into the master plan. Each flat in the new blocks of expensive marble-hailed apartments mushrooming in Rio and S`ao Paulo has its minuscule cubicle for a maid who is likely to earn far less than the posted minimum wage of $65 a month. Nor is the incompetence of the old Brazil a thing of the past: a significant aspect of the Transamazonian Highway was a vast program to colonize a 60-kilometer band on either side of the right-of-way. Only after the road was cut and colonists were dispatched did anyone discover that the soil along the first stretch was unsuitable for intensive farming.

* Although Dom Holder is perhaps Brazil's best-known figure abroad, his name cannot be mentioned in the national press.

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