Brazil's Wasted Generation

In spite of a boom, 16 million children are hopelessly deprived

Since 1969, Brazil has achieved one of the world's most spectacular rates of economic growth, impressive industrialization and a heady standard of living for its thriving middle class. In the great booming cities, flashy cars carry hordes of executives from comfortable apartment houses to offices in downtown skyscrapers. The white sands of Ipanema and Copacabana beaches teem with people enjoying the good life. What mars this idyllic picture is a social scandal more massive in Brazil than anywhere else on the South American continent. Amid all the delights of Brazil live more than 2 million children who have been abandoned by their destitute parents and another 14 million who live in such poverty that abandonment almost seems preferable. These 16 million people--one-third of Brazil's youth--are growing up in circumstances so deprived that they are unlikely ever to play a useful role in modern society.

The outcasts among them have been called "nobody's children," and they range from infants to teenagers. They have been turned out into the streets of every major city in the land. In Rio de Janeiro alone, more than 100 children under three years old are abandoned each month. As the kids themselves say, they "join the struggle"--a term aptly describing their attempts to survive. In Rio, Recife and Sao Paulo they can be found--or more precisely stumbled upon--in alleys and on avenues and beaches. They rove in gypsy bands, sleep in construction pipes, in rat-infested cellars of abandoned buildings or on street corners in miserable heaps. Their beds are torn newspapers, their clothing mere scraps of cloth. Their days are spent in hustling, prostitution and petty crime. They prey upon each other as well as passersby. Even the police have been accused of organizing waifs into thieving bands and then collecting the better part of the loot.

The children who remain with their parents are similarly corrupted. Mothers and even grandmothers have forced their pubescent offspring into prostitution. Not long ago, an eight-month-old girl was left at the door of a child care center. She had been beaten and was infected with venereal disease. In another notorious case, a gym teacher interrupted a 14-year-old's attempt to rape a woman in her own office. Fleeing, the youth turned, drew a pistol and fired upon the man and killed him. Questioned by police, the boy boasted that he was planning to murder his mother, who had tried to drown him in a river when he was an infant.

Children who fall into the hands of the authorities are not necessarily any better off than the wandering urchins. One 13-year-old boy who spent six months in an Espirito Santo detention center told reporters: "They beat me on the back and the throat with boards and pieces of rubber with nails in it. Sometimes at night, four or five guards would come and rape us. They raped the little girls too. We screamed but it did no good." Complaints to child welfare officials went unheeded. The director of the children's home was accused of beating his wards and supplying some of them to homosexuals. In a Manaus Sao detention home, eight hapless girls vainly attempted collective suicide by swallowing large doses of poisonous detergents and tranquilizers. In Rio, a 15-year-old boy, arrested for a series of thefts, told police: "I hate rich people, especially the children." Abandoned at seven, he had spent the following years shuttling between orphanages and detention homes. Yet another youngster recently was brought before a Rio magistrate

and explained his crimes in a curious but oddly touching fashion: "What do you expect from me? I never even had a single birthday cake!"

So serious is the hemorrhaging of Brazil's wasted generation that nothing but an all-out emergency program could possibly stanch it. As it is, the government spends only $38 million a year on children's services--and even that is poorly distributed. Only 11.8% of all Brazil's cities and towns receive any aid at all for needy children. There is only one government or private-care agency for every 10,000 needy or abandoned children. Only 10% of these institutions are located in the poverty-stricken northeast, where nearly one-half of the country's deprived young are to be found. Well-intentioned attempts by agencies and individuals to find adoptive parents are hampered by the fact that few eligible grownups want to take in dark-skinned children; they prefer the relatively few who are blond and blue-eyed.

Ironically, the scandal is one consequence of Brazil's economic advance. For more than a decade, millions of peasant families have fled the countryside in search of factory jobs in the cities. For most, the effort has been futile. Lacking skills and education, they have settled for poverty-level employment at best--and in all too many instances, no job at all. By working ten hours a day, six days a week, an ambitious woman might earn about $75 per month, scarcely enough to survive in a wooden and tin-can hovel, let alone support her children. At the same time, the peasants contribute endlessly to a stunningly high birth rate (37.1 per thousand). Thousands of parents are forced to cast their offspring out like rubbish.

What is to become of these outcasts? Already, about half the country's 110 million population is 19 years of age or younger. Some experts predict that within 20 years or so, Brazil will be burdened with millions of adults so undernourished, unskilled and uneducated that they will be impervious to any kind of civilizing process. Experts report that the signs of this prophecy are already unmistakable. With nothing to look forward to, the children indulge in delusions of a glorious future. Says a psychologist: "We have illiterate seven-year-olds who say they are going to be doctors." At a Sao Paulo orphanage, the IQ of the youngsters ranges between 50 and 70; in the U.S., people with such scores are classified as mentally retarded. Says Irna Marilia Kaden, director of Rio's child welfare agency: "A person with psychological disorders and mental impairment, a sick person--a sick, fragile population--cannot act as an agent of development. And what's worse, he is a dead weight to be sustained by those who are healthy." For a nation whose population is expected to increase to 1 billion in less than a century, that weight may be too heavy to bear.

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