Year 501 Read Online Free Page B

its government’s decisions affecting the allocation of resources, and nudged Brazil into the U.S.-dominated trading system,” Haines writes.
    Within Brazil, the “modern scientific methods of development based solidly on capitalism” also brought great benefits, though to understand them, a bit more precision is necessary. There are two very different Brazils, Peter Evans wrote as the miracle peaked in the 1970s: “the fundamental conflict in Brazil is between the 1, or perhaps 5, percent of the population that comprises the elite and the 80 percent that has been left out of the ‘Brazilian model’ of development.” The first Brazil, modern and westernized, has benefited greatly from the success story of capitalism. The second is sunk in the deepest misery. For three-quarters of the population of this “mighty realm of limitless potentialities,” the conditions of Eastern Europe are dreams beyond reach, another triumph of the Free World.
    The “real American success story” was spelled out in a 1986 study commissioned by the new civilian government. It presented “a by-now familiar picture of Brazil,” Skidmore observes: “although boasting the eighth largest economy in the Western world, Brazil fell into the same category as the less developed African or Asian countries when it came to social welfare indices”; this was the result of “two decades of a free hand for the technocrats” and the approved neoliberal doctrines, which “increased the cake” while leaving “one of the most unequal income distributions in the world” and “appalling deficiencies” in health and welfare generally. A UN Report on Human Development (measuring education, health, etc.) ranked Brazil in 80th place, near Albania, Paraguay, and Thailand. Shortly after, in October 1990, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that more than 40 percent of the population (almost 53 million people) are hungry. The Brazilian Health Ministry estimates that hundreds of thousands of children die of hunger every year. Brazil’s educational system ranks above only Guinea-Bissau and Bangladesh, according to 1990 UNESCO data. 12
    The “success story” is summarized in a May 1992 Americas Watch report: “Rich in natural resources and with a large industrial base, the country has the largest debt in the developing world and an economy that is entering its second decade of acute crisis. Tragically, Brazil is not able to provide an adequate standard of living for its 148 million people, two-thirds of whom were malnourished in 1985, their misery caused and compounded by lack of access to the land” in a country with “one of the highest degrees of concentration of land ownership in the world,” and one of the most lopsided distributions of income as well.
    Starvation and disease are rampant, along with slave labor by contract workers who are brutally treated or simply murdered if they seek to escape before working off their debts. In one of the nine cases of rural slavery unearthed by the Catholic Church Land Ministry Commission in the first few months of 1992, 4000 slave workers were found extracting charcoal in an agribusiness project established and subsidized by the military government as a “reforestation project” (of which nothing operates but the charcoal pits). In haciendas, slave laborers work 16 hours a day without pay and are frequently beaten and tortured, sometimes murdered, with almost complete impunity. Almost half the farmland is owned by 1 percent of farmers; government emphasis on export crops, following the precepts of the foreign masters, favors farmers with capital to invest, marginalizing the huge majority even further. In the north and northeast, rich landowners call in gunmen or the military police to burn houses and crops, shoot livestock, murder unionists, priests, nuns or lawyers trying to defend