Word: pinheiro
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Caught in a Jam. At 3 a.m. the morning that Goulart was to present his request for a state of siege to Congress, a Goulart friend, Brigadier General Alfredo Pinheiro, accompanied by Lieut. Colonel Abelardo Mafra, appeared at the Vila Militar base in suburban...
...capital, in the wilds of Goiás state, was actually a glorious shambles. "I needed five more days to get it ready." wailed Israel Pinheiro, Brasilia's chief builder and first mayor. "But we just could not spare the time." In a last-minute cleanup, Pinheiro put 60,000 men to carting off debris, planting palm trees, scrubbing the red dust off Architect Oscar Niemeyer's graceful buildings. In a single day. 2,000 steel light poles were planted; overnight 722 homes were painted white...
Novacap had extraordinary powers, and Pinheiro used them. He floated bond issues, snagged a $10 million Export-Import Bank loan. He expropriated the 2,260 sq. mi. of the Brasilia federal district at $1 per acre, sold selected lots for $3 per square meter and up, a plan that will raise one-fifth of Brasilia's costs. He hired 1,500 contractors, flew in the first building materials at high cost. Through Kubitschek, Novacap raided departmental budgets. Checking the figures, newsmen have found at least $117 million of financing for Brasilia. It absorbed, for example, 95% of all hospital...
...Pinheiro made room for the rush by handing out free four-year land leases in mushroom shantytowns neighboring the capital site. In a nearby Wild West shack city called Cidade Livre (Free City), seven banks, 60 rooming houses, 750 stores sprang up. José Calaça, 52, arrived with a truckload of groceries, unloaded it "in waist-high grass," sold out all his cooking oil immediately, now does a $30,000-a-month business at his Casa Colorado. Says he: "The only way to lose money here is to throw it away." In Free City, construction crews line...
Dirt & Deadlines. But up the capital went. In June 1958, Kubitschek spent a weekend in his Palace of the Dawn (called "Niemeyer's cardiogram" by critics because of its leaping concrete pillars-see color). Pinheiro tacked signs marking the completion date on every building; ten-story ministries rose in 45, 36, even 28 days. More than 5,000 miles of road, most of it straight as a pencil, stretched out to São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, and even across the jungle to Belém at the mouth of the Amazon. Morbidly afraid of dark rooms, elevators...