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Yet even some technocrats who have guided Brazil's development reluctantly concede that progress has largely benefited an elite few. Despite the forest of new skyscrapers rising in booming Sào Paulo and the highways cutting through the "green hell" of the Amazonian jungle, perhaps 70% of the nation's people still live outside the money economy in appalling poverty. Brazil stands only 13th among Latin American nations in per capita income ($520 a year), below even backwaters like Surinam. The average life expectancy is only about 50 years (against 67 in Castro's Cuba), and infant mortality is increasing. In rural areas of the arid Northeast, the average calorie intake of peasants has declined in recent years from 1,800 a day to 1,323—more than 1,200 below what United Nations' food experts consider the minimum for subsistence.
Part of the problem is that the technocrats have not yet brought the full force of their planning to bear on impoverished regions such as the Northeast. But even in expanding areas, poverty seems built into the master plan. Each flat in the new blocks of expensive marble-hailed apartments mushrooming in Rio and Sào Paulo has its minuscule cubicle for a maid who is likely to earn far less than the posted minimum wage of $65 a month. Nor is the incompetence of the old Brazil a thing of the past: a significant aspect of the Transamazonian Highway was a vast program to colonize a 60-kilometer band on either side of the right-of-way. Only after the road was cut and colonists were dispatched did anyone discover that the soil along the first stretch was unsuitable for intensive farming.
* Although Dom Holder is perhaps Brazil's best-known figure abroad, his name cannot be mentioned in the national press.