Boom

To midmorning strollers on Rio's Copacabana Beach, the rending roar and the billowing cloud of dust seemed like a newsreel shot of a bomb explosion. An almost completed, twelve-story apartment building had crashed to the ground in a pile of bricks, iron and beach sand. Last week, 300 rescuers, working night & day in heat and stench, had recovered bodies of eight workmen. The search went on for eleven more.

For months, Rio had splurged in a colossal building boom whose economic base was no sounder than the sleazy apartment house which so dramatically collapsed. Construction companies, using Government-controlled, pension institute money ran up handsome buildings; Brazilians traded in, rather than rented them. An unoccupied apartment that could be freely bought and sold was a more attractive speculation than a rented one. When someone discovered last year that house-hungry Rio had 17,000 vacant houses and apartments, the Government ruled that dwellings must be occupied 60 days after completion. Builders got around that by postponing installation of such indispensables as bidets.

The Rio press, delving into the building scandal, generated more heat than light. O Globo printed a rumor that Benjamin ("Beijo"--The Kiss) Vargas, brother of Brazil's ex-dictator, was a proprietor of the collapsed apartment. Beijo countered by approaching O Globo's director on the terrace of Quitandinha, the country's fanciest resort hotel, and publicly pummeling him. The building boom went right on.

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