New Life in the Mountains

One of Brazil's coming men is Juscelino Kubitschek. 52, the trim, dynamic son of German-Polish immigrants who is governor of the Texas-sized inland state of Minas Gerais (pop. 8,000,000). When high-spirited Juscelino ran for office three years ago, he wooed the isolated backland voters with hillbilly songs (How can a fish live out of water? How can I live without you?) and dazzling promises of roads and electricity. Unlike many another Brazilian political charmer, Juscelino is making his campaign oratory come true. His slogan: "What I start I finish."

The governor's program called for expanding the state's road network by 50%. Halfway through his term, he has built 1,125 miles of new roads--just about half his goal. Even the federal program of building three trunk highways across the state is up to the mark. Last week Juscelino returned from Rio with word that he had saved another $7,500,000 Minas road-building project; it had been scheduled for slicing from the federal budget under Brazil's new austerity program. The governor's program of doubling the state's electricity supply, carried out under a new $50 million power authority, is well on its way to fulfillment.

Rejuvenating as Juscelino's shot-in-the-arm may be for the rundown economy of his whole state, its most startling results strike the eye in Minas' young capital city of Belo Horizonte. It was laid out just 60 years ago as a Washington-like model city on one of the mountainous state's few relatively level patches of land. Now Belo Horizonte is a booming metropolis of more than 400,000, the hub of Juscelino's net of roads and power lines. Its population has doubled in a decade. Beside its 100-ft.-wide streets, its 129 plazas and parks rise new skyscrapers such as the 24-story Banco da Lavoura, the severely elegant Hotel Normandy and a newly started, 35-story apartment house designed by famed Architect Oscar Niemeyer.

A new, unplanned-for industrial city has mushroomed just beyond the capital's fig-shaped circumferential boulevard, and some of the well-chaperoned girls who used to promenade under the lights in the palace square now work in bright new textile mills. A $20 million, German-financed steel-tube plant is under construction, and five cement companies are moving in. Though smiling at comparisons with lordly Sao Paulo, Mineiros agree that their state's natural wealth (manganese, thorium, bauxite, eleven billion tons of iron) points logically to the development of heavy industry. For his part, Juscelino just wants to get on with the power and the roads. "I have signed a promissory note to the voters and I've got to pay it," he says.

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