Monday, Apr. 25, 1960

Where Lately the Jaguar Screamed, a Metropolis Now Unfolds

KUBITSCHEK'S BRASILIA

I saw a great civilization rising on a plateau on the shores of a lake between the 15th and 20th parallels, a promised land of rich milk and honey blest.

--Joao Bosco (1815-88),

Brasilia's patron saint

AT the rate of one each 30 minutes, 2,333 trucks churned out of Rio de Janeiro and took the road west, their springs creaking under all the paraphernalia of bureaucracy, from swivel chairs to paper clips. In the wilderness of Brazil's central plateau, planes touched down on a new, jet-length runway every two minutes with Tempelhof-like precision. This week, before a crowd of 200,000, President Juscelino Kubitschek will officially move the Brazilian government into Brasilia, his $500 million new capital. Boasts Kubitschek: "We have turned our back on the sea and penetrated to the heartland of the nation. Now the people realize their strength.''

Hang the Cost. Brasilia is a skyscraper city sprung metropolis-size from a broad plateau where, just 43 months ago, Kubitschek recalls, "there was only solitude and a jaguar screaming in the night." It was thrown up at a hang-the-cost speed that wrenched the whole country's economy. Forty-five million cubic meters of red earth were ripped out by a $50 million army of machines. The final price tag will top Brazil's annual budget.

On his visit in February. President Eisenhower was reminded of "our own decision many years ago to move the capital of our fledgling nation from Philadelphia." But in the move to Washington in 1800, only 126 bureaucrats made the trek by coach and horseback, while state papers went by ship. Brasilia will have 120,000 citizens next week and 500,000 within ten years. No new capital--Ankara, Canberra or New Delhi--compares with it for scope and speed.

Eyes West. Kubitschek's critics dub him "Pharaoh Juscelino" because historians reach back for a comparison to the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who between 1375 and 1358 B.C. built the Egyptian capital of Akhetaton after deciding that Thebes was out of favor with his god. In ambition, though not in tragic cost, Brasilia might also be compared to St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), erected on inhospitable marsh, at a cost of more than 30,000 lives, to gratify Peter the Great's passion to open ingrown Russia to the Baltic and to Western influence. Kubitschek also looks west, but inwardly: he proposes to populate Brazil's vast domain carved out by 17th century bandeirantes --half-savage frontiersmen--but never settled. In the world's fifth largest country, he says, "enormous fertile lands are as empty as the Sahara, while millions of Brazilians live in penury, clinging like crabs to the crowded shoreline."

The dream of an inland capital of Brazil is an old one; it was written into the constitution of 1891. But after decades of lip service, nobody took the project seriously, even after an Ithaca, N.Y. aerial mapping expert picked a site in 1955, much as Brazil's patron saint predicted, at 15DEG 30 min. latitude in the state of Goias. Kubitschek's first encounter with the project came from a heckler at a Goias rally during the 1955 campaign. "What about Brasilia?" yelled the heckler. Kubitschek yelled back: "I will implement the constitution." He recalls: "I had hardly considered Brasilia before then."

Sign of the Cross. Eight months after his inauguration, Congress passed a law setting up the Companhia Urbanizadora da Nova Capital do Brasil (Novacap) to build the city. Says Kubitschek: "Nobody thought I could or would do it." Kubitschek could. And Brazil's great architects caught his enthusiasm:

P: Lucio Costa, 58, son of a Brazilian admiral, a lifelong pacifist and the acknowledged father of Brazil's flashy modern architecture, won the contest for a master city plan. While others submitted blueprints and models, Costa sketched on five sheets of paper what one judge, Britain's Sir William Holford, called "a city with solutions, not problems, built in." Says Costa: "The shape of Brasilia was born out of the simple gesture of a man who indicates a place or marks it as his own: two lines crossing at right angles."

P: Oscar Niemeyer, 52, a dormant Communist ("I am too old to change," he once said), and an old pupil and admirer of Costa, casually agreed during an automobile ride with his friend Kubitschek in 1956 to design Brasilia's major buildings. He set to work at a government salary of $300 a month to make a city for "free and happy people who appreciate pure and simple things."

Novacap President Israel Pinheiro bounced into a small clearing in a DC-3 and surveyed his site: a cool, green plateau cut into a V by the tawny waters of two streams, the Fundo and Bananal. "I spent 18 months with my wife in a single room in a wooden bunkhouse," says Pinheiro. "I stayed there for propaganda. If it was good enough for me, it was good enough for everybody." A whip-tongued engineer, Pinheiro bounced over crude roads in his Jeep, barking endless orders over his radiotelephone: "This is Novacap No. 1 calling."

Novacap had extraordinary powers, and Pinheiro used them. He floated bond issues, snagged a $10 million Export-Import Bank loan. He expropriated the 2,260 sq. mi. of the Brasilia federal district at $1 per acre, sold selected lots for $3 per square meter and up, a plan that will raise one-fifth of Brasilia's costs. He hired 1,500 contractors, flew in the first building materials at high cost. Through Kubitschek, Novacap raided departmental budgets. Checking the figures, newsmen have found at least $117 million of financing for Brasilia. It absorbed, for example, 95% of all hospital construction funds for 1959. As deficit spending sent the cruzeiro spiraling from 65 to 200 to the dollar, the opposition awoke. "The limit of insanity! A dictatorship in the desert!" cried Rio's Correio da Manha. "Madness," echoed O Globo. Kubitschek, sensing now a grand cause, replied: "The capital is moving, and anybody who tries to stop it will be lynched by the people."

Workers--ultimately 60,000 of them--flocked from all over Brazil, in particular from the drought-stricken northeastern bulge. "They mortgage everything to pay for a jouncing, weeklong ride in a truck to Brasilia," said a contractor. "After six months they visit home by plane."

Pinheiro made room for the rush by handing out free four-year land leases in mushroom shantytowns neighboring the capital site. In a nearby Wild West shack city called Cidade Livre (Free City), seven banks, 60 rooming houses, 750 stores sprang up. Jose Calac,a, 52, arrived with a truckload of groceries, unloaded it "in waist-high grass," sold out all his cooking oil immediately, now does a $30,000-a-month business at his Casa Colorado. Says he: "The only way to lose money here is to throw it away." In Free City, construction crews line up at the Romance Barbordello, and venereal disease causes more absenteeism than accidents on the job.

Dirt & Deadlines. But up the capital went. In June 1958, Kubitschek spent a weekend in his Palace of the Dawn (called "Niemeyer's cardiogram" by critics because of its leaping concrete pillars--see color). Pinheiro tacked signs marking the completion date on every building; ten-story ministries rose in 45, 36, even 28 days. More than 5,000 miles of road, most of it straight as a pencil, stretched out to Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, and even across the jungle to Belem at the mouth of the Amazon. Morbidly afraid of dark rooms, elevators and airplanes, Niemeyer endured agony on his frequent plane trips to the capital ("It's shameful, but I can't help it"). He finally moved to Brasilia, where he dropped 19 Ibs. off an already lean frame.

Costa's cross on the map became a skyline. Along the 820-ft.-wide "monumental axis" that runs for a mile and a half from the commercial center to the Plaza of the Three Powers, all the major government buildings are up. The residential axis, a six-lane, limited-access boulevard, has been paved, and 3,455 apartments are completed. Rising water in the 15-sq.-mi. artificial lake has already performed a slum-clearance job on hundreds of workers' shacks. Plans for the years ahead are drawn to the last detail: cemeteries will be built on either end of the residential zone "to avoid funeral processions through the center of town."

But Brasilia is still a raw clay construction site, with 600,000 newly transplanted trees and a few patches of turf. To handle what U.S. travel agents think will be a tourist boom, Brasilia has only one 180-room hotel, often jammed with 500 guests and feeding 1,000 at every meal. Pessimists still call Kubitschek's $4,000,000 Palace of the Dawn "the most beautiful summer home on earth," implying that Brazil will now have two capitals.

To the Frontier. For the next few years, government is certain to be split between the two cities. Embassy Row in Brasilia is mostly a row of cornerstones and stakes on the allotted sites, leading Kubitschek to threaten to "invite all the ambassadors to dinner in Brasilia once a week until they get tired of commuting from Rio" (a 2 1/2-hour plane trip). But the first 3,000 bureaucrats, moving with many a grumble to Brasilia last week, knew they were there to stay. Both Candidate Lott and his rival, ex-Sao Paulo Governor Janio Quadros, faced with an accomplished fact, pledge to carry on the Brasilia job.

For the new capital has caught the nation's imagination. Criticism has died away in pride. Full-blooded Indians from the Amazon, Negroes from Bahia, Japanese truck farmers from Sao Paulo are all streaming west in search of jobs and land. Throughout the vast plateau (altitude: 3,600 ft.) the climate is pleasant (average temperature: 69DEG F.), and the farm land, though not rich, will grow vegetables, rice, corn, coffee, tapioca, wheat and cattle.

Brasilia is also a personal monument to Kubitschek. "He hounded us all the time," says Pinheiro. "He created the spirit of Brasilia, and he got it built." This week, as Kubitschek flashes his broad grin across his El Dorado, not even the proud citizens of Rio, Brazil's seat of government since 1763, can begrudge him his day--though at the stroke of midnight they will be living in nothing more impressive than the capital of a newly created state called Guanabara.

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