Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL, by Elizabeth Bishop. One of the finest descriptive poets now at work presents a magnificent album of verbal snapshots, the best of them taken in Brazil...
...standards, Brazil's Highway BR-14 is certainly no Indiana turnpike or New York State Thruway. Meandering 1,350 miles from Belém to Brasilia through the jungles and scrub of Brazil's wild interior, it is barely two lanes wide; the surface is dust in the dry season, mud in the wet, and some of the ruts could swallow a Volkswagen alive. Yet in the eyes of former President Juscelino Kubitschek, who built the road between 1956 and 1960, BR-14 is "the highway of dreams" for underdeveloped Brazil, and the means to "a new civilization...
Since the road's opening in 1960, some 600,000 settlers have poured into the area to tap Brazil's immense riches. Every day long lines of trucks rumble north and south carrying out lumber, rubber and vegetable oil. New farmlands produce beans, rice, corn and fruit to feed Brazil's exploding population; what was once useless scrub in the central state of Goiás is now pasture land for 4,000,000 head of cattle. And prospectors fanning out from the road have found a vast mineral potential, with deposits of nickel, tin, lead, zinc...
...Kennedy, founded in April 1964 700 miles north of Brasilia, already has a population of 1,000. Araguaina, which got its start in 1958 as a road-construction camp 500 miles north of Brasilia, is now up to 8,000 people, has its own branch of the Bank of Brazil and will soon have a $1,600,000 factory that will refine oil from native babaçú nuts, peanuts, cotton and sunflower seeds, produce the cans in which to export the oil and cut up local mahogany to make cases for the cans...
Redeeming Feature. Kubitschek, currently in self-exile in Manhattan, is a man without honor in Brazil. President Humberto Castello Branco's revolutionary government has suspended the ex-President's political rights for ten years on charges of corruption in office. Nevertheless, Castello Branco has tripled the Belém-Brasilia budget to $9,000,000 yearly for maintenance and road improvement. Even so bitter a Kubitschek critic as Carlos Lacerda, the acid-tongued ex-governor of Guanabara (Rio), gives the ex-President his due. "I'm an old enemy of Juscelino's," Lacerda told some road...