[Brazil]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

___Jooo ît
Big Neighbor & Good Friend
ItRAZIL is many things—most of them spectacular.
The land is vast—greater in area than continental United States—nearly half the South American land mass. It is drained by a giant river system whose flood plains are choked with the fiercest jungle on earth. It has a water fall 40 feet higher than Niagara. The Switzerland-sized island of Marajo, one of a cluster in the mouth of the Amazon, is inundated by rain most of the year—and 300 miles away is an area where a shower is a real event.
Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are big, modern cities which were in existence a half-century before the Pilgrims sighted Massachusetts Bay. Yet, an hour’s flight by plane to the west lie expanses of unknown, relatively unexplored territory.
To the people of the United States, Brazil is important. The nation is the largest buyer of United States goods in the hemisphere and the source of a large variety of materials essential to us in peace and indispensable in war.
Interest in Brazil is further heightened now by its geographic situation. While most Americans have been vaguely aware that the coast of Brazil was nearer to Europe than to the United States, the present war has highlighted that point.
For months, while Dakar was held by Vichy, this strategic fact was a source of potential worry. Today the Brazilian bulge has become one of the most important spots in this hemisphere from an aggressive war standpoint.
The worry about Dakar was not entirely academic. Vichy collaborated with Hitler and it was he who told his one-time lieutenant Hermann Rauschning: “We shall create a new Germany in Brazil. We shall find everything we need here.”
But finding resources in Brazil and seizing them are two different things. This great nation, with its enormous reservoir of power, in line with traditional friendship for the United States, was a fighting ally of the United States against the Axis aggressors long before Dakar opened its gates to the United Nations. And even before Brazil entered the conflict in August, 1942, her planes had sunk Nazi submarines that were preying on her shipping. When this piracy drove Brazil into the war, her Navy and Air Force joined the patrol of inter-American shipping lanes, and her army intensified its training, ready to repel an invader ordeal with any Nazi-fostered attempt at a coup. Brazilian airports, too, are vital links on the route to the North African front.
Colonial Architecture in Brazil
m ...
A STEPPING STONE
• BRAZIL’S strategic position makes her of vital importance in supplying United Nations’ offensives or in case of an Axis attempt on this hemisphere.
FOR IN VAS IO N... E AST OR WEST
Based on a map by Richard Edes Harrison

THE PAST
The PROCESS of getting acquainted with this great neighbor quite properly begins with an examination of its past.
Even a casual study establishes one factor which should be remembered. Above all else, Brazil is different! First, in the accepted sense of the term, Brazil was not discovered at all. Pope Alexander VI, in his famous “Line of Demarcation,” which divided all New World territories between Spain and Portugal, predicted its existence and gave it to Portugal. Second, the man credited with the discovery, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, was actually the third European to touch Brazilian shores. He reached Brazil because he was blown off his course seeking the Portuguese Indies.
In Brazil’s turbulent colonial years, the activities of the Jesuits, the piratical frontiersmen called the bandeirantes, and Napoleon were dominant. The hinterland penetrations of the selfless and courageous Jesuits and the marauding expeditions of adventurous bands of the incredibly tough bandeirantes in search of diamonds, gold
and slaves, established Brazil's claims to the inland regions.
In a backhanded fashion, Napoleon was responsible for Brazil’s independence, and for giving the nation a liberal and stable government. The sweep of the Napoleonic armies down the Iberian peninsula in 1808 convinced Regent Dorn Joao that the house of Braganca would weather the storm better in Brazil than in Portugal. In one of history’s most fantastic odysseys, the entire Court of Portugal, some 15,000 people, embarked on a flotilla of ships, and to the tune of mad Queen Maria's shrieks of “Ai Jesus,’’ set out for Rio. Still more surprising, they got there. The incident is significant in that through it Brazil acquired a central and sovereign government. The first and only dynasty to be established on American soil spared her the internal turmoil and confusion that fill so many bloody and bitter pages of her neighbors’ history.
Dorn Joao resumed the throne of Portugal after the treaty of Vienna and left his son, Pedro, in the New World as regent. A year later, Pedro informed his father of Brazil’s independence and was crowned Emperor of Brazil. Joao VI was by no means pleased but could do little about it and the nation won independence almost by mail!
Although a colorful and intriguing personality, Pedro I fell well short of meeting Brazilian standards for an emperor. His loss of a war with Argentina and his role as the principal in a series of flamboyant amours that were the talk of two continents forced his abdication in favor of his 5-year-old son. After a 10-year regency, Pedro II, the republican emperor, assumed the throne in 1840.
Monarchs of the stamp of Pedro II of Brazil are rare in the record of history. He was moderate, progressive, intelligent, sympathetic to republican sentiments, and devoted to the welfare of Brazil. His involvement in sporadic wars provoked by Rosas, the Argentine dictator, and the belligerent Lopezes—father and son—of Paraguay, did not prevent him from initiating an era of internal development aimed at freeing Brazil from the shackles of inherited feudalism. The republican movement, however, was growing, and the revolution of 1889 which dethroned this last American emperor was precipitated when two influential groups joined with republicans to form a tri-partite alliance. High ranking army officials were disgruntled at Pedro’s refusal to dismiss a Minister who had offended an officer, and the large landowners were enraged by his decrees ending slavery (decrees largely inspired by his daughter, Princess Isabella, who was well liked by other Brazilians for her understanding of this very important social question).
The habit of orderly government contracted under Pedro remained. Science, education, and public health made progress. The Baron of Rio Branco, negotiator and compromiser par excellence, settled questions of boundaries—traditionally a source of conflict in the Americas—over the conference table.
On the highway between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo
THE LAND AND
THE PEOPLE
IN BRAZIL geography is important—because Brazil's advantages and disadvantages, her accomplishments and problems, her relationship with the rest of the world never get very far away from her physical conformation.
Generally, when dealing with the subject in connection with Brazil, it is best to round up all available synonyms for big. The maximum north-south and east-west axes of the country span 2,700 miles. Total area pushes 4,000,000 square miles.
Topographically, the land divides roughly into four regions. Largest, least known, and loneliest is the basin worn by the gargantuan 4,000-mile-long Amazon and its two-hundred-odd tributaries. Better known and still sparsely populated is the northeast “coatinga region," a half-forest, half-desert expanse of uplands. Wealthiest and best endowed are the mountains and plateaus of the central
and southern area which melt as they near the Atlantic into the narrow, fertile, coastal plain. They differ widely.
The flood plain of the Amazon is a melancholy shadow-world of jungle—savage and relentless. Voracious ants—tachys, tucan-
Excavating an irrigation ditch in the	j
northeastern highlands	J
deiras, and cariogadeiras—rule its banks unchallenged. Its waters are the domain of carnivorous, saw-toothed gangster fish—piranhas and candirus. Le Cointe, an authority of jungles, refers to the latter as “very small and uniquely preoccupied with evil doing.”
Life there for the human animal is amphibious,- an endless and hopeless war against predatory green walls of matted vegetation, floods, snakes, insects, and fish. Above the flood plain, on firm ground, nature is more hospitable. The hardwood forests, typical of higher tropical jungle, admit the sun. The climate divides itself between heavy tropical rains and a dry season that begets clear livable weather. The land can be cleared and worked. Such is the Amazon basin—2,225,000 square miles of Brazil.
In the northeastern highlands the altitudes of 1,000 to 3,000 feet make for a mild climate, but there is feast or famine, according to the weather. Although the rainfall averages as high as 58 inches annually, the area is subjected to periodic and devastating droughts.
In some sections irrigation has relieved dependence on the weather and allows successful cultivation of cacao, cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, and fiber grasses. The forests yield nut oils of considerable commercial value and carnauba wax. But the thinly spread habitants have their troubles making ends meet. There is a living here for hundreds of thousands of people—but man must first provide the water.
The third and fourth divisions, the rich and hospitable hill country of the southern third of Brazil, and the narrow, fertile coastal strip from Porto Alegre northward to Recife, on the bulge, are the heart and soul of Brazil. Here, on less than 30 percent of the land live nine-tenths of the nation’s 41,400,000 people. The climate is well mannered, the altitude stimulating, and nature prodigal. The
LAND USE IN BRAZIL
! Rio de Janeiro
rolling hill country of the States of Rio Grande do Sul, Sao Paulo, and land-locked Minas Gerais, and the plains washed by the Atlantic are the dream of an empire builder come true.
In these third and fourth divisions are concentrated a preponderance of the chief cities, the roads and railways, the productive capacity and the wealth.
The people are a well-stirred mixture of many stocks. The base is Portuguese. To this base has been blended strains of Dutch, French, Italian, German, Indian, Swiss, Belgian, Polish, Swedish, Russian, and African blood. The great tolerance native to the Brazilian has aided in the thorough assimilation of this variety of nationalities. With the exception of 200,000 lately arrived Japanese, who in their usual fashion have remained apart from the nation, and a few Germans, foreign origins have been put aside and the immigrants have identified themselves with Brazil.
In a nation as big as Brazil the problem of communications is inevitably of front rank importance. In that regard Brazil is both blessed and cursed. She is not, as is the case with so many of her neighbors, imprisoned by mountains. There is a tremendous natural system of inland waterways, 40,000 navigable miles
Ocean steamers can travel 2,000 miles up the Amazon to Manaus at any time of year, and at high water, steam to Iquitos clear across the breadth of Brazil to the Peruvian border. It is possible to go from Trinidad—at the mouth of the Orinoco—by boat to Montevideo, 3,000 miles to the south, without ever touching the ocean.
There the advantages end and the disadvantages begin. Only Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, and Minas Gerais, the power trio, have a road system adequate to local needs. An overwhelming percentage of Brazil’s 21,240 miles of railroads is also concentrated in this region. Land transport between these three and the 18 other states, with few exceptions, does not exist.
The causes for the gaps in overland communications can be briefly stated. The distances to be spanned are tremendous and the terrain in the interior difficult. Scant population to be served makes justification of the high-cost-per-mile difficult.
Fortunately, the airways are confronted with no such difficulties and Brazil has virtually stepped from the oxcart into the plane. Recent nationalization of an extensive German system of airlines which had flourished under the wing of Deutsche Lufthansa for several decades, plus the Pan American network, Panair do Brasil,
and a southern loop service, give the country a modern and fast air service for both passengers and freight. The Brazilian army also operates a national service 9,000 route-miles in length which opens up otherwise isolated sections. The rest of the Brazilians, whose lands border no rivers, adjoin neither highway nor airline, travel by mulepack and oxcart. There is no alternative.
MIXED IXHEKITAXCE
The story of Brazil’s economy is one of the struggle of a nation to free itself from the inherited bonds of a semifeudal system and to build a modern framework of production and distribution which will permit the development of an enormous endowment of natural resources.
The soil is rich. From south to north it can produce, in quantity, every crop known to man. Over a large part of the area rainfall is abundant and the climate equable. In the north are the forests of the Amazon basin and the adjoining uplands: 20,000 species of trees—hardwoods and soft. There are fine furniture woods, the quebracho which yields valuable tanning extract, the timbo from which the insecticide rotenone is obtained, and the cinchona for quinine. In these forests are millions of the hevea brasiliensis, the original and still the best source of that now priceless commodity rubber. There is a legion of other bizarrely named trees and shurbs that produce highly usable and prosaic materials—nut oils, wax, manioc, cassava root, tapioca, and many more. The list of valuable drugs and medicants is long. Some of them, like curare in the treatment of spastic paralysis, have just become known for their curative properties. Indications are that the tribal
witch doctors of the Amazon aborigines use medicants that would be important additions to twentieth century pharmacopoeia.
Moving toward the south out oi the tropical belt, from the semitropics to the beginning of the temperate zone, the ground grows tobacco, sugar, vanilla, cacao, oranges, and other citrus fruits. Farther south, the cereal crops appear—corn, wheat, barley, and the rest. In Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo are the great coffee fazendas and cotton plantations. Rio Grande do Sul and surrounding regions are dotted with expanses of pasture, which support a large percentage of Brazil’s 100,000,000 cattle, sheep and hogs.
Here, too, are the raw materials for that industry of the future—plastics. Already coffee is being used for these new materials.
Under the ground are metals, diverse in kind and profuse in quantity—a formidable arsenal of the materials of war. In inland Minas Gerais is a mountain range of iron ore which is 70 percent high grade metal. Nearby is one of the world’s largest deposits of manganese. Scattered through the nation are metal deposits, which, written down, read like the table of contents of a metallurgist’s textbook. Bauxite, chromium, molybdenum, tin, tungsten, lead, zinc, and mercury are just a few. There is asbestos, rare quartz crystal, and mica. In the “quality line’’ there is gold, platinum, silver, diamonds of the gem and industrial variety, imperial topaz (the world’s only source) and other precious and semiprecious stones. And, as though that were not enough, recent drillings in Bahia have struck oil.
LATIN AMERICAN MINERALS CHECK
		USED FOR	URGENCY * OF U. S. NEEDS
ANTIMONY		Engines, Batteries, Dies, Bullets	VITAL
BAUXITE		Planes & Engines				 VITAL
BERYLLIUM		Alloys, Plane Engines	URGENT v 1
CHROMITE		Alloy Steels, High Speed Cutting Tools	VITAL
COPPER		Electrical Products Shell Casings	vital e i
MANGANESE		Steel, Batteries	VITAL
MERCURY	A	Explosives, Instruments, Batteries	VITAL
QUARTZ CRYSTALS		Ballistics, Radio Frequency Control	URGENT
TIN		Solder, Babbitt, Cans	VITAL «) !
TUNGSTEN		Cutting Tools,	VITAL
		Bullet Cores, Armor Plate	
VANADIUM		Alloys, High Speed Tools	VITAL 4
ZINC		Shell Casings, Cartridge Clips	URGENT
ZIRCONIUM		Flashlights, Blasting Caps	URGEN1* •
These resources already are being employed to slake the appetities of material hungry United States war factories. Beryl, a new factor in alloy steels which gives them a flexibility and hardness hitherto unknown, and manganese (also of great importance in steel making), have come north in important quantities. So have large shipments of castor oil, for delicate jobs of lubrication,- industrial diamonds, irreplaceable for machine tool cutters,- mica,- and quartz crystal for bomb sights, gun sights, and fine precision instruments. Brazilian wool is helping relieve a domestic shortage. Gutta percha and balata, babassu oil, chrome ore and zirconium, cotton linters, and many other products are marching in to help fight the war of production. There is another product Brazil is supplying to the United States—in quantities happily on the increase which should be mentioned. It is rubber! But for war or peace another
^ST: BRAZIL
RESOURCES IN BRAZIL	PRODUCTION IN BRAZIL	EXPORTS TO U. S.	BRAZIL'S SHARE OF U. S. IMPORTS	1938 PER CENT OF WORLD PRODUCTION	
				in Latin America	in U. S.
> YES	NO	NO	NONE	58.5	1.0
YES	YES	YES	SMALL	24.0	8.0
4 YES	YES	YES	LARGE	©	©
YES	YES	YES	SMALL	3.7	•
• YES	LITTLE	NO	NONE	22.5	25.3
YES	YES	YES	LARGE	6.5	•
9 YES	NO	NO	NONE	6.1	13.1
YES	YES	YES	100%	80.0®	•
> YES	LITTLE	NO	NONE	18.4	—
YES	YES	YES	SMALL	11.9	8.0
♦ SMALL	NO	NO	NONE	38.1	27.0
YES	NO	NO	NONE	10.6	28.0
• * YES	YES	YES	LARGE	©	©
© Not Available © Estimate
industrial requisite is the mighty Brazilian rivers that can furnish abundant and well-placed hydroelectric power.
Such is Brazil’s national equipment. What has been done with it?
The country produces almost three-fifths of the world’s coffee, is the second largest producer of cacao, exports large quantities of sugar, oranges, hides and skins, cotton, oils, diamonds, quartz, mica, and nut vegetable oils. Latest trade figures with the United States, both imports and exports, were substantially in excess of $300,000,000. Her domestic production and consumption is by no means small. Brazil has a large cement industry, ceramic works, refrigerating plants, mines, and metal fabricating plants. AJI are booming, yet cannot satisfy growing domestic demands.
There is all this and yet, comparatively speaking, Brazil is poor.
This economic paradox, unparalleled wealth and comparative
poverty, derives from complex conditions of long standing.
At the outset, the Portuguese overlords sought deliberately to establish in colonial Brazil only the type of development which would line the pockets of the court and the merchants of Portugal. The feudal patterns of sixteenth-century Portugal were carefully duplicated there—including the system of latifundio, great landholdings worked by slaves, peons, or tenant farmers. Colonial activity was restricted to production of cheap raw materials, particularly the slave crops of sugar and cotton, and the purchase of expensive finished goods from the mother country. The exchange profited the mother country greatly—and strangled Brazil.
Trade between colonial settlements was forbidden unless routed through Portugal. Manufacturing and industry were frowned on.
The effect of these measures stifled, at the beginning, any normal development in Brazil and for 300 years stalled the construction of the unified network of communications and the efficient system of distribution so vital to a functioning twentieth-century economy.
Change came slowly. The land was rich and planters clung tenaciously to one- or two-crop agriculture. Refusal to diversify induced chronic instability and severe periodic crises. Regardless of the dominant crop—and during the nineteenth century there were a number: sugar, then cotton, then cacao, rubber, coffee, and cotton again—the planters found themselves competing in a buyer’s market, offering overproduced goods at harshly depressed prices. When the growers suffered, the nation suffered, for Brazil lived by agriculture. Change was impossible, for agriculture did not create the surplus capital to finance diversion and development.
These colonial economic ghosts still haunt the nation—sometimes in strange ways. The United Nations will be tons shorter of rubber—and Brazil millions of dollars poorer—because of the 300-year-old harshness of the bandeirantes and later cheating and oppression of the Indians by rubber dealers. The memory of three centuries of mistreatment is stronger in the minds of the Indian rubber collectors of the Amazon basin than the present bait of fat prices for rubber.
BRAZIL'S PRE-WAR TRADE
Figure* indicate percentage of Brazil's exports and imports, 1937
Under President Getulio Vargas, who has been in office since 1930, and the more enlightened of his predecessors, these difficulties have been subjected to a vigorous and partially successful attack. The economic phases of Vargas’s own “New Deal” have concentrated on diversification in agriculture, improvement of communications, the carrying through of an aggressive campaign of industrialization and a variety of measures to boost domestic buying power. These have been combined with some more or less drastic and stop-gap remedies for dangerous commodity situations. Relief for a badly overloaded coffee market has necessitated the destruction of an average of 7,000,000 bags of coffee annually, openly an emergency measure. Brazil’s ready participation in the 14-nation coffee agreement and encouragement of a promising coffee-plastic looks toward an absorption of the surplus.
Diversification efforts have increased production of oranges and
other citrus fruits, to the great benefit of local health. (The navel orange was first found in Brazil.) Cotton now rivals coffee in export totals. The number of hides and skins marketed has risen rapidly. Corn and cereal crops are increasing steadily. The output of jute has recently been tripled. Extensive experiments are being conducted with medicinal shrubs and trees to establish domestic cultivation on a commercial scale. The stockraising industry has become one of the largest in the world and much attention has been paid to the breeding of high-grade animals.
The progress made in stepping up mining output and in industrialization has been marked. Mineral production has multiplied eight times in the last decade.
The pick-up in ore production has further speeded an already accelerated program of industrialization. At the end of the empire, in 1889, there were in all Brazil 903 industrial establishments. In 1935 there were 60 times that number. Many more have since been built. Cotton textiles, cement, and refrigeration plants are the largest. But the output of paper, fabricated metal goods, drugs and chemicals, ceramics and glass, matches, and a variety of consumer items for home consumption amounts to millions of dollars.
OCCUPATIONS
A $60,000,000 steel mill is nearing completion 240 miles from Itabira. The United States and Brazilian Governments, and private Brazilian sources, did the financing. As was the case with the United States in the expansionist era, Brazil’s program of industrialization needs foreign capital for full realization. Although her present status is merely a good start, Brazil is now the most highly industrialized nation of South America.
When Brazilians speak of their country’s future there are two magic phrases that occur with great frequency as key terms. The first is “fomento’’ (development). The second is “comunicacdoes” (communication). Hardly less effort has been spent on the latter than the former by the Vargas Government. Roads and railways have been pushed to the extent of the nation’s capacity to finance them. Air and river transport have been increased.
The administration’s interest in communications is dual. They form a practical means of breaking down the remaining vestiges of regionalism and uniting the nation. Without them, realization of Brazil’s bright economic future will be indefinitely delayed.
POPULATION GROWTH IN BRAZIL
GOVERNMENT
FOR THE PEOPLE
Dom PEDRO II began in Brazil a tradition of social intelligence in government. Successors to the empire have observed and extended the tradition. Much oi the social legislation now in force is more advanced than corresponding regulations in the United States. The provisions of the social insurance laws, besides predating those of this country, include sickness and disability insurance and through a trio of complementary programs, cover medical care and hospitalization—which we ignore. Minimum wage laws are
MAJOR SOURCES OF IMMIGRATION SINCE 1884
INDUSTRIAL
GROWTH
on the books, os ore measures providing for old-age pensions, accident insurance, worker s savings banks, low-cost housing, paid vacations for workers, and an act forbidding child labor.
Vargas has combined his interest in the welfare of the little man with a campaign aimed qt ending the latifundio system. Government credits have been made available to aid in the purchase of small land units. With this encouragement, the number of small holdings has so increased that great estates remain only in the heart of the coffee-growing district, in the cane lands that adjoin the sugar mills of Pernambuco and the great island of Marojo in the Amazon delta,and in the cattle country of Rio Grande do Sul, Goyaz, and the southern portions of the giant state of Matto Grosso.
The Government concerns itself seriously with public health. Here are problems greatly complicated by temperature and expanses of territory lacking adequate natural drainage.
Slightly more than nine-tenths of Brazil’s area lies between the tropic of Capricorn and 2 degrees north latitude. This tropic and semitropic zone is climatically productive of intestinal parasites, trachoma, malaria, yellow fever, and other tropical diseases. In such regions, anopheles and aedes aegypti mosquitos, dread fever carriers, breed in profusion.
Yet, in Rio de Janeiro there are neither window screens nor the need for them. The fact is a monument to Brazil’s efficient and excellent Saude Publica—the Bureau of Public Health. With the aid of the United States Public Health
Service and the Rockefeller Foundation, Saude Publica brought to an end the terrible toll malaria and yellow fever were exacting from the people of Rio de Janeiro, and then repeated the accomplishment in Santos.
In general, Brazil’s cities are as healthy as their North American counterparts, and health work continues to be pressed. Municipal water supplies and sewage disposal systems have come in for recent scrutiny and a number of cities have built new plants. The administration and private agencies have promoted general and specialized training for physicians and nurses and the centers of population are
Transportation between Santos and Sao Paulo is difficult
dotted with private clinics, sanitaria, church and mission-supported hospitals. The Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro is world Famous as are the Gafree-Guinle Foundation and the Butantan Institute in Sao Paulo—the latter for its antitoxins for snake bite.
In the rural areas and the interior the Prophylaxis Rural, estab-ished to work exclusively here, has made slower progress under extreme difficulties. The Rio de Janeiro conference in January 1942, however, stimulated hemispheric cooperation in health, nutrition, and sanitation, and within the last few months projects have been started in the Amazon Valley, in the Brazilian “bulge” and other sections to improve the health of jungle workers and stimulate local subsistence food production.
These projects, underwritten jointly by the Brazilian Government and that of the United States, strike at tropical and communicable disease and at the problem of supplying protective foods to regions which have had centuries of “cash-crop only” tradition.
Malaria, prime scourge of the Amazon Valley, has always made the utilization of the resources of this area dangerous and difficult. Today, with rubber gathering centers reopened, malaria control is all the more important.
Following the Rio de Janeiro conference, Brazil and the United States allotted $5,000,000 for disease control and prevention. At bases in Belem and Manaus, nurses are being trained for work in the interior. Floating dispensaries ply up and down the Amazon, bringing relief to malaria sufferers, and carrying inoculation against typhoid, smallpox, and yellow fever. Local dispensaries and laboratories are planned for each Amazon settlement of a thousand persons. Swamps are being drained, and mosquito-
SOCIAL LEGISLATION
control work is getting under way in sections where this tiny killer has ruled unchallenged for centuries.
Not only the mosquito, but other diminutive man-killers such as ticks, which carry a fever similar to our Rocky Mountain Fever,-fleas and lice, which spread typhus-intestinal parasites like the hookworm,- and germs which cause amoebic and other forms of
dysentery, are being Fought. Sanitary measures, health education, and preventive medicine join together in this attack.
Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, keenly aware that proper nutrition is a great protection against disease, is inaugurating a far-reaching program to encourage the raising of vegetables, fruits, meat, poultry, and dairy products. With $3,000,000 allotted for the encouragement of local subsistence farming, the Ministry of Agriculture is completing plans for agricultural development, especially in the Brazilian “bulge,” to step up the production of foodstuffs for home consumption. While the chief objective is the long-range raising of dietary standards, the program has immediate repercussions on the war effort.
In education, Brazil has scored a success that is little short of spectacular. The very considerable numerical increase in schools reported in latest official figures does not satisfy Vargas. He has publicly insisted that the 37,000 now in operation must be
CHILDREN IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS
A primary school at Rio de Janeiro
doubled. Most impressive statistic is the drop in illiteracy, in the last 10 years, from an estimated 65 percent to less than 50 percent.
The public school system is slowly being Federalized. The Ministry of Education supervises all public, university, secondary, com-merical, professional, and remedial education. The states control elementary and rural education. By adroit use of small subsidies, the Federal Government is influencing the 21 state systems to adopt uniform administration and curricula.
The public system is supplemented by a large number of privately operated secondary schools—liceos and collegios—and universities whose standards are of a high order. Best estimates place their numbers at four private secondary schools to one public. The proportion of privately supported universities is much higher.
The administration has thrown its full weight behind both types of schools and is making an important contribution to further expansion through an intensive program of teacher-training.
Brazil’s contributions to the arts and literature are numerous and
notable, which perhaps explains, in some measure, the lively interest of the average educated Brazilian in such pursuits. Machado Assis, a psychological novelist, and Castro Alves, an epic poet whose verse led the successful fight for abolition of slavery, were writers of great distinction. Candido Portinari, realist painter and muralist, and Modestino Canto, sculptor, though still young, have won international reputations.
Brazilian music is gaining richly deserved popularity in this country. Heitor Villa-Lobos, prolific impressionistic composer, and Carlos Gomes, the classicist and composer of the widely-known opera, “II Guarany,” have had enthusiastic receptions by United States critics. Guiomar Novaes, described by Paderewski as a super-pianist, has appeared frequently before United States audiences. Elsie Houston, lyric soprano, has a hemisphere following.
Perhaps nowhere butin Rio de Janeiro could such an organization as the Teatro Municipal thrive. Here is the best theater in the nation—although theater is too restricted a term. It employs its own actors, owns its props, costumes and such, maintains its own symphony orchestra—good enough to attract Toscanini as a director—has its own ballet and its own chorale and soloists. It is in
Tuberculosis sanitarium in Salvador
every phase of the show business—and on taxpayer's money! To cap the climaxz it is continuously and enormously successful.
Such is a quick view oF Brazil, neighbor and Friend.
In many ways the nation and its people differ substantially from our country and ourselves. Nevertheless, we share with them many basic interests and ambitions. With the United States, they are joined in an international partnership whose smooth functioning requires understanding and confidence. From a strictly practical point of view, a greater knowledge of this partner will increase the effec-iveness and the benefits of the association.
From a less practical, more human side, those who have been privileged to know Brazil and Brazilians regard it as a pleasure.
PUBLISHED BY THE OFFICE OF THE COORDINATOR OF INTER-AMERICAN AFFAIRS. COMMERCE DEPARTMENT BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D. C.
FOR SALE BY THE SUPERINTENDENT OF DOCUMENTS. U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. WASHINGTON 25, D. C.
U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1944-0-595941
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