Hunger and starvation: Brazil's 'miracle'

By Tom months in office, President S: Ilvador Allende's government in Chile has set up a new Committee for Leadership and Planning.

Headed by Allende himself, rapidly-mounting crisis which threatens to wreck the Popular Unity regime.

After suspending operations for three days after the imposition of exchange controls, the central bank is back in business working no less than five different values for the dollar.

Exchange

The old parity is maintained for food imports, that is 12.112 escudos, while tourists have to pay 28 for a dollar.

This system was brought into belated operation to meet the history as the year that the locust has eaten. What matters now is how well prepared the economy and the government are for the strains ahead.

Opposition from the right is becoming increasingly violent and well-organized CIA ties According to the Communist Party daily 'El Siglo' it is spearheaded by the 'Fatherland and Freedom' movement, which is financed by big landowners and has close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency.

If the recently-concluded Sixth National Congress of the Central Labour Federation (COT) is anything to go by, there is plenty of complacency around.

The Congress was attended by 2,374 delegates representing almost a million organized workers and peasants who support Allende. Main theme of the Congress was support for the Allende Popular Unity government; economic demands were relegated to the background. BRAZIL'S right-wing military regime is the linchpin of United States Latin American strategy. Dictator Emilio Garrastazu Medici recently visited the White House for talks with President Nixon, who spoke glowingly of 'Brazil's economic miracle'.

The Brazilian • course, Nixon nent's policies a remark which would decide the contihas annoyed some Latin America's other heads of state who fear they may be next on the list for a CIA-inspired coup d'état.

Brazil's "miracle' is worth examining in more detail, to see just what the US imperialists plan for the rest of Latin America.

The Brazilian government has just published its latest census figures, giving details of workers' earnings and living conditions.

Census

The census, taken in 1970, confirms that the workers have highly unfavourable living conditions. The figures include only the permanently-employed population. The high percentage of unemployed and part-time workers suffer even worse conditions.

According to the census returns, one-third of the Brazilian workers receive wages of under $20 a month, while another third are paid less than $40 a month.

Even in Rio de Janiero, where the highest average wages are paid, only 69,000 people (out of a population of 3.5 million get more than $400 a month.

Eighty per cent of workers spend more than three-quarters of their pay on two basic necessities, housing and food. SPECIAL LEON TROTSKY Even right-wing Senator Carvalho Pinto, a former governor of Sao Paulo, admits that the poorest wage-earners are hardest Imprensa newspaper "Tribuna da hit by taxes.

pointed out, 25 per cent of the workers' income can hardly pay for "transportation, schooling, medicine, clothing, the lottery and funerals'.

Stricken

The newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo' gives the daily average consumption of milk per head in the city at just over one-eighth of a pint. In the even more poverty-stricken NE provinces, milk consumption runs at only about a third of the Sao Paulo figure.

Not surprisingly, the workers' health reflects these appalling living standards. Tuberculosis, the classical disease of poverty and under-nourishment is rampant, despite medical advances.

Prescription

German Gerhardt Filmo, director of the National Tuberculosis Division, told a recent conference that two new cases are registered every minute.

Every 40 minutes a Brazilian dies from TB. The entire country is hit by the disease, including the Indian peoples who live in the jungles.

This 'economic miracle' is Nixon's prescription for the rest of Latin America. on Tactobe Thei