So long as he was governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Brizola could use other weapons than oratory. A severe drought had resulted in a scarcity of rice and beans throughout the northern and central part of Brazil. Rio Grande do Sul had a surplus. Brizola could use his control of his home state’s export of vital foods to cut off supplies from Guanabara. Beans and rice are basic articles in the diet of all classes in Brazil. The rich can eat other things. If the poor can’t get beans they go hungry. The sight of long queues waiting for beans and rice in markets and foodstores was a more cogent argument against Lacerda’s administration than all the oratory in the world.
While Brizola, supported by an active political organization which controlled the flow of cash to labor unions and students’ organizations, fought Lacerda over the air, his brotherinlaw’s administration in Brasília made life as hard as possible for the state of Guanabara. Everything the federal government could do was done to sabotage Lacerda’s program.
It was a mighty struggle. Lacerda’s capacity for work has always been prodigious. While he carried on the debate with Brizola in almost nightly television appearances, he worked all day superintending every detail of his rebuilding of Rio. He wore out secretaries and assistants. He had to prove to himself and to the world that his plans for the “marvelous city” were not just politicians’ talk. He had to show results that the voters could see.
As governor he lives on the top floor of an old apartment house facing the bay in a somewhat rundown residential section known as Flamengo Beach. First thing in the morning he’s out on the balcony looking down to see how the work is going on one of his favorite projects.
Early in his governorship he took steps to insure the public use of a large area of made land through which the new four-lane highway runs from the downtown district out along the bay shore to Copacabana and the new seabeach suburbs. He wants to develop this region into a park which will surpass in beauty the old parks that are part of the imperial heritage, and, at the same time furnish playgrounds, small boat harbors, soccerfields and beach facilities for the city’s growing population.
To superintend the project he appointed a committee under the active management of his old friend Lota de Macedo Soares. As a great hostess Dona Lota numbered among her personal cronies many of the world’s best architects and sculptors and townplanners. A small woman in black striped pants, she drives them with fair words, but she drives them hard. She has Burle Marx, Brazil’s most internationally admired landscape architect, doing the overall design and has dragged in the best talent in the country to help. Many of them work without pay. They’ll tell you that not a tree is planted, nor a stretch of shrubbery set in position which escapes the governor’s early morning gaze. Usually he’s after Dona Lota on the phone before eight o’clock to find out why some part of the work isn’t going along faster.
Next, after a couple of early morning hours at his administrative office, Governor Lacerda will be out on his rounds to see for himself. He has to see and be seen. The people must be made to know he’s working for them.
First he’ll turn up at a hilltop favela, climbing the goat-paths with a springy step while a subordinate pants after him with a bundle of documents. The documents are to declare the hill expropriated by right of eminent domain from the original owners. The owners haven’t been getting any profits anyway as they are helpless to evict the squatters and in some cases they are compensated by special privileges as to zoning and building heights in the more accessible sections of their land.
Lacerda’s program for the squatters is twofold. Where the land must be used for other construction, they are offered cheap substitute housing in rows of small dwellings which, though not luxurious, are at least better than the hovels they will be leaving. In the majority of cases it is not practical to move the people out. Then the city services bring in light and water. Something is done about sewage. Receptacles are set up for garbage where trucks can reach them. The governor furnishes cement, lumber, and technical help for these projects, but the heavy work is done by the faveladwellers themselves.
Lacerda is delighted by the success in the favelas of the institution of mutirão, mutual help. Since most of the squatters are recent immigrants from the backlands they are used to the old peasant system. If a man is building a house the neighbors pitch in to help. They work the same way in the favelas. The governor’s plan is to give the squatters title to the little plots they have already built their houses on, and gradually to draw them into the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship. “We want them to feel,” he says, “that they are regular people … just like anybody else.”
Leaving the favela the governor will pick up his chief engineer and visit the excavations where they are laying a new sewer, or check on the work on the tunnels being drilled through the mountains for the new water supply, which is to be chlorinated and treated with fluorine at the source. Then he’ll dedicate a clinic that is part of his program for renovating the obsolete hospitals, or cut the tape on a new thoroughfare designed to alleviate some of Rio’s unending traffic jam. Almost daily he opens a school. There are so many new schools he’s run out of names for them and asks his visitors to make lists of suggestions. Next it’s a viaduct or the beginning of a great traffic tunnel to link an isolated part of the city into the highway system.
He seems to carry all the details in his head. He gives the impression of knowing more about each project than the men in charge. Though he’s death on incompetence, he keeps the enthusiasm of his staff at a high pitch. Good work is immediately recognized. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” said one of Lacerda’s oldest friends, a lawyer who had helped him set up his newspaper fifteen years before. “We thought of him as the editorial writer, the fearless orator. To have him turn into an administrator is the surprise of the century … Why, he’s actually happy in administration.”
Brazil is a land of thoroughgoing social democracy. A public man has to be open to anybody who wants to talk to him. On his rounds Lacerda has to be ready with a little speech for every occasion. Humorous hardhitting casual discourses come easy as breathing. Everywhere the crowd presses around him. He seems to have time for everyone, for old women whose sons are in trouble, for a lame man who can’t get into a hospital, for a young man who wants him to start a school for television technicians. Doctors, engineers, hospital nurses, all whisper their problems in his ear. By night the men on his staff are worn out. Governor Lacerda is still ready to talk with a foreign visitor, or to dine with a group of American students.
Tonight a couple of the students have managed to get lost. At going home time between five and seven in Rio taxis can’t be found. Buses and trolleys are packed tight as sardinetins. We sit waiting on a sofa in the livingroom. In spite of his punishing schedule the governor shows no sign of impatience.
He does admit to having a bad cold. Though his voice is hoarse his talk flows on. He has an extraordinary flow of words in Portuguese and in English. He starts to tell about the loneliness of his position. It is the custom in Brazil for a public man to find jobs for all his friends and relatives. Lacerda has kept them at arm’s length. He sees nothing else to do. This has done him more harm than anything. So many people who used to be fond of him now think he’s a terrible fellow.
There are other things he’d like to do, other things than fighting Communists and fellowtravelers, he’d like to take time off to write a novel. He’d like to be Minister of Education in a federal administration he had confidence in, or ambassador to Washington. He feels he knows Washington well enough to get past the pundits and the knowitall columnists and to explain Brazil to the American people in Brazilian terms.