Brazil: State of Awakening

Germany’s Ruhr, the great Pittsburgh and Ohio Valley complex, Russia’s Do nets Basin — the areas where vast resources and power combine—long ago made their fabulous mark. Another of the world’s great areas, in the eyes of geopoliticians, is just beginning to touch its potential. It sprawls, bigger than France, in Brazil’s temperate heartland (see map). It is called Minas Gerais (pronounced mee-nesh jer-aye-eesh). However exotic the words sound in Portuguese, they simply mean General Mines—a most pedestrian description of a land of beauty and wealth.

One of the largest of Brazil’s 22 states, Minas Gerais has black mountains of high-grade iron ore, some 35 billion tons at last count, and its rushing brown rivers could generate 15 million kw. of electricity, more than is now produced by the entire TVA system. Its miners already dig 90% of Brazil’s iron ore, 95% of its bauxite, beryllium and mica, all of its graphite and nickel, most of its diamonds and gold. Its furnaces and factories lead the country in pig iron, steel and ferrous alloys, rank second in aluminum, cement and lime. And on its rolling farm lands, 16.5 million cattle and 8,500,000 hogs fatten for market. All this, though it is just beginning to wake up to the 20th century.

Crystal Pebbles. Minas Gerais had an earlier awakening, nearly three centuries ago. In 1693 the cry “Gold!” roared through Brazil, and within ten years the country was the world’s leading gold producer, accounting for about 44% of the total. The miners also ran across odd crystalline stones—and kept a few to use as counters in idle-hour card games. The pebbles were diamonds. When the news got out, a second headlong rush was on. Between 1730 and 1800, more than 3,000,000 carats came from the mines.*

For a fast and furious century, the boom lasted, producing a frontier society of bad men, high-priced low ladies, and sausage that sold for 3 drams of gold a link. But in Minas Gerais’ old capital of Ouro Preto (Black Gold), the wealth also brought Brazil’s first real intellectual and artistic atmosphere, and its first effective stirrings of independence. It was there in 1789 that an army officer named Joaquim José da Silva Xavier (nicknamed Tiradentes, “the tooth puller,” because of the amateur dentistry he practiced) joined a conspiracy against Portuguese colonial authority. The Portuguese hanged, quartered, then beheaded Tiradentes in Rio.

His head was displayed on a pole in Ouro Preto, and Brazil had a hero.

Power to Burn. Then, in the early 19th century, the gold and diamond rush tailed off. Minas Gerais sank into backwoods somnolence. Not until the 20th century did the state come alive again. Even then the real surge had to wait until Juscelino Kubitschek, born in the old diamond center of Diamantina, moved into the governor’s palace in 1951 in the new capital of Belo Horizonte. “Power and transportation,” pledged Kubitschek, and that was only the beginning.

He built 1,900 miles of new roads, organized a new power company that has since played a major role in the immense (394 sq. mi.) Tres Marias reservoir and the giant Furnas dam. Today power is already so plentiful that the part-German, part-Brazilian Mannesmann Steel Co. uses electricity to fire its major blast furnace. The capital that Kubitschek lured made an island showcase of Belo Horizonte, its progress less dramatic than Sao Paulo, but impressive nonetheless. Skyscrapers shot up alongside its lOO-ft.-wide streets; a new factory city sprawled just beyond the highway ringing the city. Throughout the state, industry started busting out all over.

Only 15 years ago, Uberlandia and Uberaba, twin towns 30 miles apart, were depressed way stations on the road to nowhere. The only thing that seemed to flourish was Communism, and it grew so luxuriantly that a special battalion of state troops was dispatched to Uberlandia to keep the crowd under control. Now the two cities argue like Dallas and Fort Worth about who en joys the bigger boom. Uberlandia’s population has nearly doubled to 100,000 in 13 years, and eleven skyscrapers (including a first-class hotel, the Juscelino Kubitschek) are going up. There are four radio stations, three daily newspapers, 500 small and medium industries. A modern airport is served by 68 flights a week, and a new industrial district is under construction to accom modate all the meat packers, textile weavers, flour millers and food canners hurrying into town.

Under Construction. In 1956, Kubitschek became Brazil’s dynamic and free-spending President, building new roads, new power grids and a brand-new inland capital of Brasilia, just over the state line from Minas Gerais. In his place today sits José Magalhaes Pinto, 54, a progressive, self-made millionaire banker. Construction is proceeding apace.

Last week Magalhaes Pinto flew into a brand-new airfield in the middle of the jaguar-haunted Sweet River Valley to inaugurate the latest additions (two oxygen converters and a large slabbing mill) to the $250 million USIMINAS steel mill—a thoroughly mixed venture financed 40% by private Japanese businessmen, 35% by the Brazilian government and 25% by the state of Minas Gerais. Beyond the giant ventures, Magalhaes Pinto’s approach is to spread the wealth to Minas Gerais’ 10 million people by “developing small and medium industries all over the state.” Last year he established a development bank, and so far the bank has approved 221 development plans calling for 16 billion cruzeiros ($20.5 million) plus $34 million in U.S. currency. To help raise the capital, the governor has asked the Alliance for Progress for a $20 million loan. Says Magalhaes Pinto: “With $20 million, we might well make a little revolution here.”

-A more recent spectacular find: the immense, 726.6-carat Getulio Vargas diamond.