Brazil on the Move

  As director of Novacap, Sayão for the first time had sufficient funds and proper assistants. Hardsurface roads had to be completed to Belo Horizonte to the east and to Anápolis and Goiânia to the south; but the project into which he put his heart and soul was the nine hundred and fifty mile road, stretching due north through barely explored territory, that was to open up passage from central Brazil to the seaports and mining regions in the mouths of the Amazon.

  When I was being shown around the construction work in Brasília in the summer of 1958 I tried in every way to catch up with Sayão. He was off in the bush, we were told. One of his chauffeurs drove us around, in a car, he explained with awe in his voice, that Dr. Sayão often rode in. He pointed out the plain frame house where Sayão lived, a place where he had once eaten a meal, a chair he had sat in. When he learned that I had spent several days in Dr. Sayão’s company several years before he treated my wife and me with almost embarrassing respect. Some of the mana of the great roadbuilder had rubbed off on us.

  In January 1959, a few days before the bulldozers working up from the south were to meet the bulldozers coming down from Belém to open the final link in the preliminary trail of the Belém road, Sayão was killed by a falling tree. He was directing the clearing of the dense rainforest near Imperatriz on the Rio Tocatins in the State of Maranhão. He had sat down for a moment at a rough table to check something on his map when the tree fell on him and crushed his skull. He died very soon.

  The candongos, as they call the roadworkers and construction workers, revered him as a father. He was a saint who worked miracles. His death was the end of the world. One of his jeep drivers, Benedito Segundo, fell dead when he heard the news.

  Bernardo Sayão and Benedito Segundo were the first men buried in the new cemetery at Brasília. The whole city was in mourning. People walked along the streets crying. Particularly the huts of the candongos were hung with crepe. The candongos begged that Dr. Sayão be buried standing up, with his face to the north, so that he could look forever up the great highway he had planned.

  III

  A NATION IN SEARCH OF A CAPITAL

  The Madmen of the Planalto

  “Mad,” growled Israél Pinheiro affectionately, when I first asked him about his friend the roadbuilder. We were at the Santos Dumont Airport in Rio in the pearly dawn of an August Sunday in 1958, waiting to take off for Brasília. “Of course he’s a little mad.”

  Dr. Israél, as everybody calls him, is a rangy grayhaired quizzical man with a long rough-hewn countenance and a determined jaw under a clipped gray mustache. His tart manner tends to be mellowed by the play of expression on his face and by his sudden way of showing his long teeth in a dour smile to emphasize a joke. “… And so am I,” he added, “and so’s Kubitschek.” He grinned. “That’s why we get along so well. It takes madmen to put through a project like Brasília.”

  We climb aboard and the Beechcraft roars into the air and circles over the city’s closepacked apartment buildings, which overtop dense parks and gardens tufted with royal palms and the bay, duncolored this morning and full of shipping; all enclosed in Rio’s fantastic frame of conical mountains and foaming white beaches. Above the abrupt crenelated mountain range which seems to be forever pressing the teeming city back into the ocean, the pilot sets his course into the northwest.

  After the throngs and the jangling traffic and the brawling voices of loudspeakers and the dense humidity of the seaport it’s a delight to breathe the cool sharp air at six thousand feet. The checkerboard below is the resort city of Petrópolis, where the betteroff people of Rio spend their weekends among upland breezes. Beyond appears the deep gorge of the Paraíba, a river laced with rapids. There are textile factories set in crisscross patches of industrial towns on the plains beyond the mountains. Volta Redonda, where the steel mills are, is lost under the clouds to the left. To the right I catch a glimpse of Juíz de Fora, a textile town I spent a night in years ago. More mills, railroad yards … The plane bores into a high overcast.

  At the end of an hour the Beechcraft is out in the sunshine again, flying over an enormous empty landscape. Small muddy watercourses wind between eroded hills. No, the green patches are not pasture, Dr. Israél explains, it’s a wild grass with little nutriment. He’s a stockman as well as a builder of cities. “Further west the grass is better.” The brightgreen oblongs now are sugarcane. “See: not a house, plenty of room for development,” he shouts with a creaky laugh.

  “President Kubitschek says there’s half an inhabitant to the square kilometer. I can’t even see half an inhabitant.” “Wait till we finish Brasília,” Dr. Israél leans back in his seat to talk into my ear. “Every half will turn into ten.”

  He pours a stack of glossy promotional literature into my lap: Brazil’s new capital in four languages.

  Since the beginning of its existence as a separate nation, Brazil has been in search of a capital. The forerunners of independence in the late seventeen hundreds dreamed already of a federal city in the interior. At the convention which confirmed the setting up of a constitutional monarchy in 1823 Brasília was suggested as a name for the future capital. In 1891 the convention which established the charter for a federal republic on the model of the United States of the North set aside an area of four hundred and forty square leagues on the high plateau far west of the sweltering coastal lowlands as the eventual governing center of the Brazilian union. The constitution of 1946 laid down the manner in which the transfer of the capital should be carried out. When Juscelino Kubitschek was elected President ten years later he determined to make that long projected capital a reality.

  Kubitschek was the son of a middle-European immigrant and a Brazilian mother. Like Dr. Israél he came from Minas Gerais. He was born in the secluded little city of Diamantina, which generations before had been the center of a great diamond industry. During Kubitschek’s boyhood years the place was a remote and forgotten settlement shrunken into a straggle of rambling old colonial buildings amid the scorched hills. Young Juscelino had no money behind him. A hardworking eager young man, he managed to get himself into the medical school in Belo Horizonte, the new capital of his state.

  Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizon)—the Brazilians are fond of rhetorical names—was the first important Brazilian city to be built right off the drafting board. The people of Minas Gerais, Mineiros they call themselves, decided in the early nineteen hundreds that they needed a new state capital. Their old capital, Ouro Prêto (Black Gold) was, like Diamantina, an ancient colonial burgh where old families vegetated amid the superannuated splendors of convents and palaces and churches built in the days when the exploitation of great deposits of gold and precious stones brought wealth into these torrid uplands. All that was in the past. Now the raising of zebu cattle and corn and sugar cane and upland rice; manufacturing and the iron mountain at Itabira offered prospects of a new prosperity. Instead of gold and diamonds the Mineiros were beginning to dream of virgin lands to the westward.

  The “beautiful horizon” the new state capital looked out on was the Brazilian west: the fertile river valleys running north into the Amazon and south into the Paraná and Paraguay rivers and the high plateau of Goiás and the wilderness of Mato Grosso.

  The founding of Belo Horizonte was greeted by howls of derision from the rest of the country. Can’t be done, the wiseacres said; you can’t take a city off a drafting board and bring it to life. The wiseacres were wrong; the venture was successful. It was during Kubitschek’s student days that the city really began to take hold. Industries sprang up, the population grew. Already in 1958 Belo Horizonte had more than half a million inhabitants, bristled with skyscrapers and shining white apartmentbuildings, and was considered the pleasantest city in Brazil to live in.

  So the idea that a city could be invented on the drafting board was nothing new to Dr. Kubitschek. After some studies in Paris and a successful career as one of Belo Horizonte’s leading urologists he was appointed mayor by Getúlio Vargas. From mayor o
f the state capital it was an easy step to governor of the state.

  The Mineiros man one of Brazil’s smoothest political machines. They are a stubborn and clannish people with a sharp eye for the main chance; a man has to fight hard for a living among those scraggly hills. In the period of confusion and recrimination that followed Getúlio Vargas’s melodramatic suicide the Socialist Democratic party of Minas brought forth Dr. Kubitschek as their candidate for the presidency of Brazil. He was a new man, a progressive technician with his face towards the west, a doctor of medicine who was free from political entanglements. He was elected by an honest majority: Brasília was one of the planks in his platform.

  “We have seen the success of our own new capital,” said Kubitschek and his friends. “Here’s our chance to build a federal capital that will unite the whole nation.”

  People had made a lot of money out of the rise in real estate values in Belo Horizonte. The knowledge that their whole state lay athwart the lines of communication between Brasília and the sea heightened the enthusiasm of the leading Mineiros for the project. Kubitschek became their man with a mission. He would go down in history as the President who finally achieved the century old ambition for a new capital.

  Two years before Kubitschek’s inauguration as President the Brazilian Congress had appointed a commission to choose the best site in the federal rectangle. This commission contracted with the firm of Donald J. Belcher & Associates of Ithaca, N.Y., for a survey. A group of American engineers and geologists, most of them from Cornell, recommended five possible locations that offered the climate, the water supply, the drainage, the subsoil necessary for the foundation of a large city. The Brazilian commission chose the present site of Brasília as the best.

  When the problem of city planning and architecture arose President Kubitschek could think only of Niemeyer. His name has been associated with Kubitschek’s for years. It was Oscar Niemeyer’s design for the resort suburb of Pampulha, which Kubitschek promoted while he was mayor of Belo Horizonte, that made him the best known of the young Brazilian architects.

  The novel style of these buildings raised a storm. Kubitschek stood by his architect and stubbornly invited him to design a municipal theater. Even the fact that Niemeyer calls himself a Communist while Kubitschek usually defends private enterprise did not interfere with their collaboration. When the President offered Niemeyer the post of Supervisor of Construction at Brasília at a salary which amounted to only a few hundred dollars a month, Niemeyer is said to have turned down wellpaying contracts with private interests to take the job. “Niemeyer,” Brazilians will tell you, “is the soul of Kubitschek.”

  Brazilian politicians are notoriously easy of access. In those days it wasn’t too hard for an American to get an interview with President Kubitschek, particularly if the American were a journalist and the subject was Brasília.

  I was taken to see him at eight o’clock in the morning at the Larangeiras Palace in Rio. It was raining hard out of a sagging gray sky; chilly; Rio was having one of its rare touches of winter. This palace which Kubitschek chose for his official residence was built early in the century by a family that owned docks in Santos during the great coffee boom. Parisian architects and decorators decked it out with all the pomp they could dream up as a background for the patriarchal Brazilian capitalism of that day. There were marble columns and salmoncolored hangings. Gilt cupids crawled around the edges of the mirrors. There were massive overmantles, plush sofas, and oriental rugs. A gilded grand piano stood out on the parquet floor under an enormous chandelier. The gray light streaky with rain poured through the tall windows, glittered in the crystals, and made the huge drawingroom seem unbelievably empty.

  When President Kubitschek came walking with a short springy stride, keeping step with his chief of protocol, he looked almost as out of place as his visitors amid these Frenchified splendors. There was a certain small town look about the way he wore his clothes which was not unattractive to an American. He held himself well. He was taller than I had expected, a sallow man with large prominent eyes. Even before we sat down on the sofa he came right to the point.

  “You are going to Brasília?” He pronounced the name with a special sort of fervor. He started right away to explain that Brasília was not a luxury; it was a necessity. If Brazil were to go on progressing at the rate it had been progressing during the past ten years the center of population must move westward and northward; the nation needed a crossroads.

  The President talked clearly and ardently. Occasionally he stopped to allow the friend who had accompanied me to translate a difficult phrase into English. As he talked he sketched out a map of Brazil so clearly I could almost see it on the wall behind the gilded piano. Sixtyfive million people. Twenty states and four territories. Roughly half the land area of South America and most of it empty. He described how the riversystems of the Amazon basin bound Brazil on the north, more fresh water pouring out through equatorial rainforests than in all the other rivers of the world put together, thousands of kilometers navigable by ocean steamers. Still the only practical communication between Belém, the old Portuguese city which was the port of entry of the Amazon region, and the rest of the country was by air.

  “The construction of Brasília is already forcing us to build roads,” he said. Communication with São Paulo and the south was already open. The highway from Rio was just about finished. The Belém-Brasília road now under construction was being built through regions that weren’t even mapped. Already they were cutting through forests of trees forty meters high. His gesture gave an inkling of the slow fall of an enormous tree. I explained I had met Sayão ten years before. He nodded enthusiastically.

  Subsidiary roads, he went on, would link that highway with the Atlantic coast. With his hand he indicated the eastward bulge towards Africa. With his forefinger he drew a line along the string of isolated coastal cities running southeast from Natal and Fortaleza to Bahia and Rio and São Paulo and down into the temperate regions of Rio Grande do Sul that border on Uruguay and the Argentine.

  Along the coast, he explained, the country averaged twenty-five inhabitants to the square kilometer. Brazil, socially and economically, was still only a long narrow seaside strip like Chile. “Inland we only have half an inhabitant,” he said with a wry smile.

  He turned to look me full in the face. “During your pioneer days,” he said, “you North Americans always had the Pacific Ocean for a goal to lure you on across the mountains. That’s why you populated your part of the continent so quickly. Our way west has been barred by impenetrable forests and by the Andes. Brasília will constitute a goal, a place to head for on the high plateau. Building Brasília means roads. A movement of population into the fine farmlands of the interior is already going on. As soon as I was inaugurated President, I gave the word to start construction. The Brazilian people demand a new capital. Brasília is the great goal of my administration.”

  The President was dropping into a political oration. I could half imagine the crowded hall, the wardheelers leading the applause of the crowd, the flash of the cameras, the busy pencils of the notetaking journalists.

  He caught himself suddenly and asked for comprehension by a broad deprecatory sweep of his hands. There was a pause. The director of protocol cleared his throat. It was time to leave. We rose for the formalities of leavetaking.

  Dr. Israél filled in the rest of the story. Construction started in the spring of 1956, when the President appointed him head of Novacap, the government corporation more or less modeled on TVA which was set up by Congress to put through the work.

  Dr. Israél, so his secretary told me on the side, was chosen because he had made a conspicuous success of the management of the Rio Doce Railroad after its purchase from the British during the war. Dr. Israél came of a prominent and popular family in the northwest of Minas. His father had served as state governor. A graduate of the School of Mines at Ouro Prêto, Dr. Israél was associated with Kubitschek’s projects in Belo Horizonte. As
a public speaker he was famous for his amusing stories. Now in the summer of 1958 he was spending alternate weeks in his Rio office and at construction headquarters on the planalto.

  So, this cloudy August morning, it is the Novacap Beechcraft which is speeding my wife and me and Dr. Israél and his wife, Dona Cora, on an excursion to visit the construction work on the new capital.

  Political Fences

  Already we are beyond Belo Horizonte. Some time ago the copilot pointed out a light smudge of smoke blurring the city’s clustered buildings on the northern horizon. Now Dr. Israél turns towards me and jabs at the window between us with a long forefinger. “The road, the road,” he shouts above the rumble of the twin motors. Sure enough a red gash cuts across the landscape from horizon to horizon. What look like tiny white caterpillars are finished concrete bridges. “The highroad from Belo Horizonte to Brasília,” he shouts exultantly. “Brasília’s lifeline.”

  The plane drones on across higher drier hills where trails are faint and few. The rivers are clear green now, the sky clear blue above ranks of cottony clouds. The earth is very red, vaguely stained with verdigris where water flows.

  The plane starts to bank. On the spinning tippedup landscape a few vague squares appear, streets, tileroofed houses, fenced fields. Buzzards cruise above. This is the town of João Pinheiro, named after Dr. Israél’s father. The pilot circles over what looks like a plowed field. When he lands the strip turns out just as bumpy as it looked from the air.

  Groups of swarthy countrymen come forward to greet Dr. Israél, backcountry politicos, candongos, young engineers in white shirts and khaki pants. They have a scorched look from the dry upland sun. Their faces wear easy smiles. Their voices are lowpitched and cordial. They shake hands a little shyly. We all file out through a stile in a thorny redflowering hedge that keeps the cattle off the airstrip.