John Passos - Brazil on the Move

The last thing the young Brazilians who graduate from the university want to do is to engage in manual labor. We have a similar state of mind developing in the United States, but with us the old Protestant tradition of the nobility of work still has a certain strength. The career they look forward to is officeholding, and Communism looms ahead as the officeholder’s paradise. Even in opposition and illegality the Party offers careers to its adherents. The magic of the Marxist ideology turns careerism into altruism. The student leaders think of themselves as dedicated idealists.

The Communists are struggling against imperialism and exploitation: how can an idealist oppose them? The Communist imperialism and Communist exploitation they read about in the newspapers doesn’t impress them. The Berlin wall; they shrug it off. The development of the demagoguery of revolution in Mexico should have proved a corrective, but the lesson has been lost.

Of course the nationalists have a story, in Brazil as they did in Mexico. Though great sectors of industry are now wholly or partly in Brazilian hands, some foreign utilities are still owned abroad. Fear of nationalization has inhibited improvements or even decent maintenance. Investment is at a standstill. In Rio there are people who have been waiting twenty years for a telephone. In trying to protect their stockholders the foreign boards of directors have thrown the Brazilian consumer to the wolves. As a result both consumers and stockholders have lost out. The financial managers can’t seem to think of anything except how to get their companies bailed out by the American taxpayer when expropriation finally comes.

It is a sorry end to the history of American and European investment in South America, which produced so many engineering marvels in its day. It is a situation made to order for Communist propaganda.

With Goulart’s administration in charge of the federal government, Brazilian Communism seems to be entering its heyday. The tragic thing to me is that the Marxist theory has nothing to offer that can solve the country’s problems. The most pressing need is to grow enough food to feed the population. The world over, Marxism has failed to produce food. Brazil’s spreading frontier demands individual initiative. All Communism has to offer is increased power to a bureaucracy which has already proved its incompetence. With a government that can’t keep the employees from stealing the stamps off the letters in the postoffice, the rational thing you would think would be to call for less rather than more power for the politicians.

When you come to think of it, maybe the Communists and near Communists are no more powerful in Brazil than they are in the United States. There’s nothing in the history of Brazilian relations with the spreading Soviet power as disturbingly illogical as the behavior of various administrations in Washington. The Brazilian press suffers from none of the inhibitions against clear thinking that muddy the mental processes of the American liberals. The Rio and São Paulo newspapers are as vigorous and varied and scurrilous and satirical and generally rambunctious as the American newspapers used to be in their salad days before schools of journalism and the Newspaper Guild and the breakdown of competition. The best pens are in the anti-Communist camp. “How the hell,” I said to myself, “can we ask the Brazilians to follow our leadership when there isn’t any?”

In spite of the soothing roar of the surf on Pleasant Journey beach, none of these reflections made for sound sleeping.

Doug Elleby drove me up from Recife in a jeep. At breakfast the Recife newspapers were full of Brochado da Rocha’s resignation as Prime Minister. The unions, which are under the direct control of President Goulart’s Ministry of Labor, are threatening a general strike if the congress doesn’t speed measures for a return to “presidentialism.” That’s a pitch of labor demagogy we haven’t yet quite reached in the United States.

Leaving Recife the first thing that struck me was the road. Four years ago nobody would have dreamed of trying to drive from Recife to Natal, even in a jeep. We skirt Olinda on a firstrate wellgraded highway. A glimpse of the faded tiled roofs and the belfries of the ancient Dutch capital makes me wish I had time for one more look at the beautiful Portuguese tilework and the fine arches of the old convents there. North of Olinda we drive through a beautiful rolling green country. The dark sculptured mango trees give the country a landscaped look. The houses are stucco on adobe with red and yellow tile roofs. They seem comfortable. This is oniongrowing country and fairly prosperous.

After an hour the trees grow smaller. The only cultivation is in the valleys. Fewer fruit trees and more sugar cane. After we cross the state line from Pernambuco into Paraíba we drive through a region of thorny underbrush interspersed with small gnarled trees. The road is graded but it hasn’t been black-topped yet. Parts are under construction. Eroding streams have taken deep bites out of the new raised causeways across bottomlands. Occasionally a washout almost cuts the road in two. No road for night driving.

A little more than two hours from Recife we reach João Pessoa which is the capital of the small state of Paraíba. It’s a pleasant little yellowstucco city. The new quarters radiate along streets laid out like spokes of a wheel from a circular pond bordered with palms. The beach, studded with vast banyantrees, each tree a thicket by itself, opens in a halfmoon on a Nilegreen lagoon protected by a distant black reef where the surf spumes. Beyond the ocean is deepest indigo to the horizon. Jangadas skim back and forth in the fresh trade wind. Skinny sunblackened men wade with shrimpnets in the shallows. The waiter who serves us a beer under the trees points out that the impressivelooking promontory to the south of the lagoon is the easternmost point of Brazil, less than 35° west of Greenwich.

Leaving town down a cobbled hill we have a lovely view of a little port on the river, rusty small steamboats, ancient sailingships and a great stretch of salt marshes behind. We speed along the straight cement road which leads to Campina Grande, the most important town in Paraíba. It is too far out of our way; so we turn north on a dirt road so as to drive through Sapé.

Sapé is reputed to be one of the centers of Julião’s Ligas Camponêsas . Julião is a landowner from Pernambuco who at one time had pretentions towards literature. Under the influence of Communist activists he has organized peasant leagues which are said to receive arms and guerrilla warfare training through agents of Fidel Castro. Their program is for the tenants to take over the land by force. It is quiet this morning. We did see one man with a rifle; and walls and buildings occasionally decorated with the hammer and sickle, and with VIVA CASTRO in brightblue paint.

His illwishers tell the story on Julião that when the peasants took him at his word and started to occupy his own estate he called in the Army to protect it. Could be; but it seems a little too pat.

What, you ask yourself, would you do in their place?

It’s a hilly country with small patches of decent land, a little like the Piedmont region of North Carolina. We pass extensive plantations of pineapple, packingsheds with stacks of crates ready for shipment. Doug tells me that there’s an active pineapplegrowers’ cooperative in Sapé. They are trying to enlarge their export market to include the United States. Now their pineapples go to Europe or the Argentine.

Overpopulated. We pass through too many dusty little stone villages. The crumbling adobe huts have a company town look. People are poor all right. If I had to live there I’d feel rebellious too. But even driving through, it becomes fairly obvious that redistribution of the land won’t solve the problem. There’s not enough good land to go around. In North Carolina the solution was textile mills. Here it might be small industry. It might be resettlement on virgin lands to the west. Cutting the throats of the landlords isn’t going to help.