Blowup

Jobless workers on a rampage

The march had been planned as a peaceful demonstration to dramatize the plight of unemployed Brazilians. But as the procession of 1,000 made its way through the streets of Sao Paulo last week, the mood suddenly turned ugly. Shouting "End the unemployment or we will stop Brazil!" a rampaging mob shattered windows in supermarkets, butcher shops and bakeries, stripping shelves bare of food. Other looters helped themselves to clothing, television sets and even 518 Ibs. of coffee from a delivery van. The rioting continued sporadically, spreading through poor neighborhoods and threatening the busy downtown shopping district. At week's end Brazilian military police had not yet succeeded in fully restoring order.

The explosion of economic despair in Brazil's most populous state (25 million) posed the first major challenge to Governor Andre Franco Montoro, who has been in office for barely a month. A member of the center-left Brazilian Democratic Movement, Montoro was swept into power last November in the first open elections to be held since the military took charge in 1964. Though Montoro used to decry the heavyhanded police tactics of Brazil's authoritarian federal government before his election, he found last week that he also had to call out military police when a surging crowd of demonstrators ripped away the iron fence outside the capitol building.

The new Governor finally agreed to hear the demands of a delegation representing the region's unemployed. Later, in a televised address, Montoro said he would create 40,000 new jobs and appealed to industry leaders not to lay off any more workers. But he reminded listeners that Sao Paulo's pressing economic problems could not be solved quickly.

Montoro's supporters blamed a handful of left-wing agitators for the violence. They are afraid that the central government, which is still led by the military, will use the incident as a pretext to intervene in local affairs. President Joao Baptista Figueiredo, a former cavalry general who has promised a slow and gradual return of democratic freedom to Brazil by 1985, ordered units of the Brazilian army in Sao Paulo on alert last week. But he let it be known through an official spokesman that it was the state government's responsibility to maintain public order. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.