Progress in the Green Hell

The Amazon, long a forgotten and forlorn land of jungle and despair, has always been part legend, part fact. It is not a region inhabited mostly by wild animals, naked Indians and white adventurers who swill straight gin under a slow-turning ceiling fan. Along the meandering, 3,300-mile Amazon River, in fact, disappointed visitors travel for miles or days without spotting so much as a monkey or parrot, let alone a jaguar, boa constrictor or alligator. What is easy to spot on every side, however, is the progress that is washing over the Amazon like a spring flood. Brazil's Green Hell is snapping out of its centuries-old snooze.

New roads are slashing into the interior, buildings are sprouting up, and new schools and hospitals are throwing open their doors to the impoverished caboclo (Amazon peasant). More vital than anything, a new generation of bright, energetic administrators has replaced the graft-ridden state governments of old, involving their Amazonian states in a rare partnership with the federal government. Last week, while Amazonas State Governor Arthur Reis flew to Rio de Janeiro to give President Humberto Castello Branco a report on progress in the Central Amazon, Castello Branco's Health Minister was in the Amazon to inaugurate a $3,000,000 public-health program for the area.

Year-Round Traffic. In the past, Brazilian politicians seldom bothered about the Amazon, since the area's population accounts for only 6% of the country's 80 million people. But Castello Branco saw that Brazil could not develop its full resources without transforming the four-state basin, which covers 1,500,000 square miles, or almost half of the country. No sooner had he come to power after Brazil's 1964 revolution than he replaced three of the Amazon's four state governors with reform-minded civilians and military men, and oversaw new elections in the fourth state. Federal money, technical help and encouragement followed.

The new governors have been hard at work ever since. In Amazonas, Governor Reis has built 700 new classrooms, opened three new high schools in Manaus alone and expanded the 2,000-student state university. In Maranhao, Governor Jose Sarney is building 1,000 simple, thatched-roof schools with only the help of mayors and townspeople. Belem now has regular Caravelle service from Rio, and last year for the first time its precious highway link to the south, which had previously closed during the rainy season, remained open. In just over two years, the Para government has rebuilt 870 miles of highway and asphalted another 370 miles.

Buzzards & Breweries. With new roads opening up new markets, industry is coming in; so far, 41 new projects worth $40 million have started up. In Para, workmen are building one of Brazil's biggest paint factories, a meat processing plant, a new cement plant and a $1,000,000 brewery--the state's first. In Manaus, jute factories are tripling their production, and outside the city, construction is under way on the Amazon's first steel mill.

Even in Sao Luiz, where buzzards still feast in the streets, a modern fish-freezing plant is starting up, and across the state a new hydroelectric dam will soon boost the state's power capacity from 10,000 kw. to 235,000 kw. A group of ambitious jute traders in hustling Santarem has set up a factory that makes sacks from raw jute; it now employs 800 people. Hotels are going up almost as fast. This month a new 16 story hotel opens in Belem, the first major hotel in decades. Manaus also recently opened one--eight stories high and completely air-conditioned.

All of this is, of course, only a start. Decades will be needed to make real headway against the Amazon's problems of poverty, illiteracy and disease. But a new outlook has come to the great river basin, and with it a new optimism. "You're going to see a lot of big changes around here," says American Bishop James Ryan, who is stationed in Santarem. "If they can do this much in two years, think what they can do in ten."

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