The Dry Whip

"We had nothing to eat but cactus, and after five days my mother said she could not go on," recalled Ernesto da Silva, 17, sitting in a rocky field in the drought-burned eastern state of Pernambuco. "She was a widow but not old. She lay down by the road and told me to go. A man gave me 40-c- for a day's work. I bought food and hurried back to my mother, but when I got there she was dead."

Through rolling backlands in the five states that form Brazil's eastern bulge, crops of beans, corn and sugar cane were dead; 2,000,000 people gnawed cactus, dug holes in dry river beds for water or joined a dogged, starving march to the sea. The flagelo da seca, the dry whip that lashes the bulge country on the average of once a decade, was in its third month of fury. Some 370,000 flagelados (whipped ones) supported themselves and their families on relief wages of 30-c- a day -half the food allowance of a Brazilian army horse.

Busy Gravedigger. As the refugees fled to greener lands, they buried their dead along the way, piling stones to keep off animals and topping the graves with crude wooden crosses. "We are working hard," said a gravedigger in the parched town of Ju`azeiro do Norte, where funerals can be bought for 4-c-. "We have twelve children to bury every day. It used to be one or two." Health officials estimated that in the worst drought areas half of all children under a year old would die.

President Juscelino Kubitschek has shipped in 7,000 tons of food and 10,000 tons more is en route. But corruption is commonplace among the local relief agencies that give out the supplies. In one town political bosses pocketed a flat 25% from each man's 30-c-. In other areas the government farmed out relief projects to private contractors who paid off flage-lados in unwanted goods, e.g., hair oil, then bought it back at half price.

Scandal in Rio. The scandal reached all the way back to Rio. Politically ambitious Finance Minister Jose Maria Alkmim announced a special government advance of $6,000 to afflicted towns -and gave that amount to every municipality in his own green state of Minas Gerais. In Rio Grande do Norte, Carlos Cabras, who has been in charge of building a long-range irrigation project for the past two years, confessed that $1,000,000 had been looted and said part of it had gone for payoffs to a Senator and two Deputies in Kubitschek's own party.

Though he apparently cannot stop corruption, Kubitschek has made his relief effort an all-out try. The government has appropriated $15 million and plans to add another $30 million, or a total of 5% of the budget. This will keep most of the flagelados alive until December. If the drought follows its historic pattern, the first crops will then begin to bloom; the refugees will trek back and enjoy a few fat years until the hot, dry wind starts up again.

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