Word: espirito
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Children who fall into the hands of the authorities are not necessarily any better off than the wandering urchins. One 13-year-old boy who spent six months in an Espirito Santo detention center told reporters: "They beat me on the back and the throat with boards and pieces of rubber with nails in it. Sometimes at night, four or five guards would come and rape us. They raped the little girls too. We screamed but it did no good." Complaints to child welfare officials went unheeded. The director of the children's home was accused of beating...
...sand bars that a canoe can barely nose through. Bridges cross dry gulches overgrown with weeds and shrubs. Many once plentiful plants and birds are gone, and human beings who live there are disfigured by skin cancer. The scene is 300 sq. mi. in the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo, a once lush strip north of Rio de Janeiro that is now on its way to becoming a desert. The cause of this ecological disaster...
Plants and birds are not the only things to suffer. Says Dr. Douglas Puppin, chairman of the dermatology department at the Federal University of Espirito Santo: "Ninety percent of the people I examine from that area have skin cancer or precancerous lesions." The reason: the light-skinned Pomeranians have far less melanin, a protective pigment, than most other, darker-skinned Brazilians. With the trees gone, says Puppin, "children are constantly in the sun. We try to warn them, but you can't expect kids to walk around in hats and long sleeves in the midday heat...