The Foundations Move

Brazilians have a joke they like to tell on their popular Dictator-President Getulio Vargas. It concerns Sao Pedro Church, still standing in the middle of Rio de Janeiro's newly constructed, three-mile Getulio Vargas Avenue.

"We will freeze the church foundations," they say, "and move it on a track of ice. If that works, we will freeze old Pao de Ac,ucar and move it from the harbor entrance.* Then, if that succeeds, we will freeze Getulio and move him out of the way for a democracy."

President Vargas knows the joke and chuckles over it. Last week, on the sixth anniversary of his "New State," he chuckled again. Sao Pedro Church will be moved, stone by stone, to be rebuilt on a new site. President Vargas' regime is also moving--toward a postwar new deal

Said the President: "When the war is over, in a proper environment of peace and order, and with the proper guarantee of freedom of opinion, we will readjust the political structure of the nation by consulting the Brazilian people amply and definitively. We will choose by preference from working classes the necessary elements of national representation: employers, workers, shopkeepers, farmers--young people full of vigor and hope, capable of carrying out the task of progress."

Even as the President spoke, 21 members of Brazil's State Administrative Council were working quietly and without publicity around a large oval table in the Ministry of Labor. Their job: to draft a new and liberalized Constitution.

*Pao de Ac,ucar (Sugar Loaf Mountain) is an outstanding Rio de Janeiro landmark.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.