Plan for the Serra

President Janio Quadros has warned his Cabinet that unless Brazil embarks on revolutionary reforms, some day, on some unknown hilltop, some unknown Fidel Castro will rise up to plague his nation.

It is not necessarily a distant vision. A Brazilian would-be Castro has already appeared. Francisco Juliao is a Socialist state deputy from Pernambuco and founder of Brazil's mushrooming Peasant Leagues, which are already driving the landowners from their ranches and plantations. The "unknown serra" that Quadros envisions is also a real place. It is the overcrowded, underwatered, sugar and cattle land of the eight northeastern states of Brazil's Atlantic bulge.

To fight Juliao and his Peasant Leagues, President Quadros is backing a man and a plan. Last week Quadros sent the man to Washington to seek help. Celso Furtado, 40, felt immediately at home with President Kennedy's frontiersmen. Slim and intense, Furtado is himself a northeasterner who got through economics courses at Cambridge and the Sorbonne on saved-up soldier's pay and a literary prize. He worked nine years for the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America laying out development plans for Mexico and Venezuela, made a study of the Brazilian economy, finally took a job as director of the Brazilian Economic Development Bank.

Hang the Gardens. Before moving into his new office, Furtado took a sentimental journey home, was stunned to find that the mayor of his backward home-town had spent most of the available public funds to build a hanging garden in a park. Says Furtado: "During that visit home, I decided to fight backwardness for Brazil's northeast, so that no more hanging gardens were built before the problems were solved." Ex-President Juscelino Kubitschek put him to work. After an hour's talk, Successor Quadros confirmed the appointment, raised Furtado to cabinet rank.

Furtado's troubled realm spreads over 680,000 sq. mi. of stony, eroded land alternately scourged by drought and swamped by flood. The rains are intermittent to the point where the Jaguaribe River, one of the region's most important, is known as the "world's longest dry river." Along the coast, the old landowning families employ sharecroppers to raise cane, corn and cotton on relatively productive land, keep their workers bound by insuring that they are forever in debt to the plantation store. In the dry inland area, more than half of the 26 million people are regularly reduced to living on cactus flour; large numbers line the roads to beg.

Use the Dams. Furtado's plan begins at the arid roots. For years water-craving northeasterners built dams willy-nilly, saw them fill up in the rainy season, then slowly and uselessly dry out when the rains stopped. Furtado plans to send the stored water through irrigation canals, increase irrigated acreage from 37,000 acres to 247,000. He hopes to wean farmers away from one or two soil-killing crops, put wasteland to work, build silos and warehouses to store food for lean years. Electricity lines are already snaking into the northeastern backlands, industry is getting tax reductions and other incentives to move in to make use of plentiful labor. Last year Furtado's planners handled 23 industrial expansion and improvement plans, this year already have 23 more worth $83 million in private investment.

In public funds, Quadros and Furtado have already earmarked $140 million this year for such items as water and sewage systems, workers' housing, clinics, schools. By the time his five-year term is finished, Quadros plans to lay out a staggering $900 million in the northeast, 60% of it Brazilian. The other 40% he hopes to get from the U.S., and Furtado's Washington mission last week was to sell the idea.

Zealous and convincing, he perched at the hospital bedside of ailing (from hepatitis) Food for Peace Director George McGovern, made his case to Secretary of State Rusk, Under Secretary Chester Bowles, Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Robert Woodward, Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman.

At week's end he spent a half-hour with President Kennedy. Afterward, Kennedy made it plain in a lengthy statement that U.S. sympathies were with Furtado and that the U.S. would put its resources where its sympathies lie. "The overall objectives," said Kennedy, "appear to be substantially sound, realistic and in harmony with those of the Alliance for Progress." The practical proof: a Kennedy promise to send a team of U.S. technicians to the northeast, along with surplus food--estimated at an eventual $125 million worth over five years.

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