Brazil on the Move

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The Brazilians are great people for telling stories on themselves. One story that was going the rounds a few years ago was about God and an archangel on the third day of creation. When the Lord Jehovah has finished making Brazil he can’t help bragging a little to one of the archangels. He’s planted the greatest forests and laid out the world’s biggest river system and built a magnificent range of mountains with lovely bays and ocean beaches. He’s filled the hills with topaz and aquamarine and sowed the rivers with gold dust and diamonds. He’s arranged a climate free from hurricanes and earthquakes which will grow every conceivable kind of fruit.

“Is it fair, Lord,” asks the archangel, “to give so many benefits to just one country?”

“You wait,” says the Lord Jehovah, “till you see the people I’m going to put there.”

The real point of this story is, of course, that it’s topsyturvy. Ever since the Portuguese founded their first colonies there in the early fifteen hundreds the development of Brazil has been held back by its inconvenient geography. The rivers run the wrong way. The mountains are in the wrong places. The steep coastal range for centuries formed a barrier to penetration of the interior. Though the central and southern uplands are suitable for colonization the rain forests of the Amazon basin in the north offer the sort of climate and terrain that no civilization has yet been able to cope with. The eastern bulge is cursed with perennial droughts. Until the coming of air transportation, which a Brazilian named Santos-Dumont, by the way, did almost as much as the Wright brothers to promote, it literally took months to get from one part of the country to the other. Tropical diseases are still a threat to development. The chief asset of Brazil is the Brazilians.

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