Brazil on the Move Read Online Free Page A

themain impediment is bureaucracy,” one of the engineers interrupted as we climbed into the car to go into town to lunch, “Brazilian bureaucracy.”
    Brazilian bureaucracy, someone explained from the back seat, was a little special because of the horror of productive work of the literate Brazilian. One of the evils of the Portuguese heritage. No use fussing now about the historical causes but the fact remained that the sort of people who were brought up to become public servants had no practical knowledge of any of the processes of production. The old habit of wearing a long fingernail on the little finger had been the symbol of the educated class that had never done any physical work and never intended to do any. So the Brazilian bureaucrats’ notions of production were purely theoretical. This was true more or less of all Latin countries. In Brazil a certain social democracy did occasionally narrow the gulf between the illiterate barefoot producer and the man at the office desk, but it was wide all the same. In the States we suffered from bureaucracy too, but the man at the desk had maybe worked as a section hand on the railroad summers when he was in school, or at least he went home and stoked his own furnace and mowed his own lawn. In most of South America you came out of school belonging to a different race from the man who hoed your garden.
    By that time we had arrived at the already shabby modern-style building where the Special Public Health Services, known to everybody as Sespe, had central offices for the Rio Doce region.
    Going up in the elevator Dr. Penido explained sadly, in his low rather singsong tones, about the building. It had been built as a hospital. A modern hospital was very much needed in Vitória, but the money had run out and all that had come of it had been a small private clinic on the lowerfloor. The rest was rented out for offices. That was the sort of thing his service was determined to avoid. Sespe never entered into a project unless the funds were on hand not only to complete it but to maintain it.
    Did I know the history of Sespe? I nodded.
    I had spent some time in the main office in Rio where I had found the same low tones, the same frankness and modesty, talking to Dr. Candou, then its Brazilian chief, and Dr. Cambell, who represented the State Department’s Institute of Inter-American Affairs.
    Although Brazil had a public health service back in the fifties of the last century, before the United States in fact, that service fell into bureaucratic lethargy, along with many other useful organizations set up by Pedro II’s imperial administration, under the republican spoils system. There was a revival under Oswaldo Cruz, the Brazilian Walter Reed; but the new generation of Brazilian public health doctors got their training during the worldwide battle of the Rockefeller Foundation against yellow fever, and in the war of extermination against the
gambiae
mosquito in the eastern bulge during the period of the Second World War. Before DDT they used arsenic and pyrethrum. These campaigns resulted in the only cases known to medical history of the complete eradication of a species. The
Aedes
mosquito which carried yellow fever was eliminated in Brazil, and the
gambiae
which carried pernicious malaria.
    Then in 1942 in the early days of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, Major General George C. Dunham, the author of a famous textbook on public health, was sent down from Washington to help Latin America set up a health program. He had experience in the Philippines in inducing local governing bodies to come in on public health programs and was convinced that a health organization to be effective had to be based on the cooperation of the people themselves. That was the genesis of the Sespe idea. Mostof the Brazilian staff obtained their practical education in the field under the Rockefeller organization and their theoretical training at public health centers in the States.
    We were