BRAZIL: Razor Edge

Brazilians, feeling the razor edge of hunger, belied their easygoing natures. Last week swirling inflation, caused by war’s dislocations and Government ineptitude, spawned violence. Riot ruled Rio de Janeiro as angry mobs wrecked shops of profiteering merchants, smashed fancy movie theaters and battled police. Congress roared; at least one newspaper shouted for a strong man. This week martial law was declared and soldiers, guns in hand, patrolled the streets.

What lay behind all this TIME Correspondent Donald Newton told in a report from Rio on Brazil’s life and hard times:

After a nasty winter (the daytime temperature dropped as low as 70°), Rio had had a hot spell. Most of the city has had only a trickle of drinking water for the last two months. The ocean is bluer and greener; the sky is red at sundown; the crowds are more amorous along Copacabana beach; the open-air streetcars are slower than ever. Smells, bugs and skin diseases have multiplied. So has griping.

Brazilians work brilliant designs with figures. It was the Brazilian plan to stabilize the international coffee market that introduced the word “valorization” to the world in 1906. Today, after 40 years of valorizing, bargaining, spoiling land and burning crops, a few coffee merchants and Government officials are comfortably rich —and 90% of the population is as poor as ever. Millions of tons of coffee lie in warehouses. Thousands of acres of coffee land have been abandoned to armies of ants, to small-scale farms, to be worked by the children of slaves, who have so lost their talent for farming that they use pointed sticks and wooden hoes in place of plows.

Phony Facade. The new Brazilian enthusiasm is industrialization. But the $110 million Volta Redonda steel plant, five years abuilding, designed to make Brazil self-sufficient in steel, has yet to be inaugurated. The $13 million Quitandinha Hotel, which was to attract all the world’s wealthy tourists, is virtually empty. The National Motor Factory—one of the world’s most modern—has produced by itself one airplane engine in three years of operation. There is a huge movie studio outside São Paulo, brand-new and abandoned.

But the prisons are humming. Labor leaders and strikers fill them. And hospitals do not lack for applicants. In one charity ward, where 200 children are regularly confined, 80% are starvation cases. The food in the hospital is not good, but it is better than the children could get outside. So doctors keep them three weeks, until they look better, then discharge them to starve some more.

Slum dwellers, who live in the tin-shack favelas, rifle garbage as a matter of course. They also follow the gay-looking public markets for scraps to live on. Meanwhile, grocers put prices higher.

Cream Bomb. Last week a 17-year-old high-school student died an agonizing death after eating a tainted cream puff, the kind known here as a creme bomba. That bomb exploded into a riot. Hundreds of fellow students attacked the shop that sold the poisoned cake. Two days later, the outbreak had turned into a citywide protest against profiteering and high prices, a demand for a 50% slash in prices or else. Thousands of cariocas, armed with bricks and clubs, took vengeance on the places they could not afford to patronize. The swank Roxy Theater, showing Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, had its glass front smashed, its lobby wrecked.

Regular police tried to be easy on the rioters. Said one, “I sympathize with the people.” But red-capped special police were different. Red caps sent scores to the hospitals after working them over with sabers, billies and gun butts.

At week’s end, the powerful Catholic Church called for a “social crusade” against the black market. President Eurico Caspar Dutra had already banned food exports and eased duties on imports. Housewives organized vigilante groups. But merchants threatened still higher prices.