Brazil’s Worsening Rich-Poor Gap Heightens Fears of Uprising : South America: Nation has the largest economy, but the majority of the people live in privation.

When Maria da Penha Ventura goes to the supermarket in this working-class suburb north of Rio de Janeiro, she often sees other shoppers caught at the check-out counter in a painful ritual of poverty. Short of money, they are forced to subtract needed food items one by one until they can pay the bill.

“What people suffer at the supermarket is sad and very embarrassing,” Ventura, 50 and widowed, said the other day, lamenting what she said was the plight of every poor Brazilian: “He has no way to live in dignity.”

While Brazil has the largest economy in Latin America and the ninth-largest in the world, the majority of Brazilians live in privation, denied the plenty enjoyed by the well-off minority. In a sense, the country is like a well-stocked supermarket where most customers are caught short at the cash register.

As a result, the frustration of the poor majority is turning to anger.

“More and more, the anger is growing,” Ventura said. “If it keeps on this way, I would say it will explode.”

Some Brazilian social scientists agree that the severe economic inequality is developing into a potentially explosive social conflict, a volatile class struggle pitting rich against poor.

In Brazil’s first presidential elections since 1960, the key issue is the unequal distribution of income. Significantly, both candidates in the runoff scheduled for Dec. 17 have taken sides with the poor.

Centrist candidate Fernando Collor de Mello has adopted a populist approach, accusing the government of neglecting the needs of the poor while tolerating official corruption and overpaying privileged public servants known as “maharajas.” He promises to hunt down the maharajas and root out poverty.

Socialist candidate Luis Inacio da Silva, known as Lula, accuses the wealthy elite of exploiting the poor through a backward capitalist system and a government that represents its interests. In a campaign of poor against rich, Lula is promising to change the economic structure.

Jose Cologrossi, president of a foundation in the state of Rio de Janeiro that provides services for homeless people, said Lula is trying to drive a wedge between rich and poor, between workers and employers.

“That is a very dangerous policy,” Cologrossi, a former congressman, warned. “If it worked, it would mean revolution; it would mean a class war.”

A powerful sector of the Brazilian Roman Catholic Church has no problem with Lula’s stance. Activist priests in poor rural villages, city slums and teeming suburbs like Sao Joao de Meriti are openly proselytizing for Lula and his Marxist-oriented Workers’ Party.

For years, these priests have been working with lay groups called Ecclasiastical Base Communities and other grass-roots organizations, promoting liberation theology, consciousness-raising and political action as the answer to the frustration of the poor.

Ventura lives on a dirt lane in Sao Joao de Meriti, in a simple brick house with a single bedroom she shares with four of her six grown children and an 8-year-old grandson. Sitting in a threadbare armchair in the house’s tiny living room, where a tattered gray blanket serves as a rug, she talked with a reporter about the plight of the poor.

She said she is a leader in her neighborhood Base Community, but she said most of the 500,000 people in the suburb, as angry as they are about their poverty, still do not believe as she does that political action can bring change.

“They put up with the oppressor because they feel weak,” she said. “They want change, but they want change to come by itself. They don’t believe in the power of struggle.”

But eventually, she predicted, the tables will be turned.

“That oppression is not going to continue the way it is,’ she said. “It can’t. Jesus will not let it. The people are going to become conscious of that.”

Father David Raimundo dos Santos, a Catholic priest who works with groups of poor people in Sao Joao de Meriti, openly declares his hope for an election victory by the left. He said the disparity between rich and poor has generated a social conflict that is erupting already in violent incidents.

On a recent Saturday, crowds in the southern city of Porto Alegre raided downtown stores in a frenzy of daytime looting that continued for hours. “The conflict is forcing the Brazilian people in that direction,” Dos Santos said.

The most urgent complaint of poor workers today is the erosion of their buying power by inflation, according to Irineu Guimaraes, president of a Rio de Janeiro federation of slum dwellers’ associations. Inflation is racing at a breakneck pace of 40% a month.

“There is a general revolt over the wage loss,” Guimaraes said. He said elections and the expectation of a new government have dampened the revolt, but perhaps only temporarily.

“The people are voting with the hope of improvement,” he said. “If there isn’t any, if things get worse instead of getting better, anything can happen. Looting will start to break out everywhere.”

Amaury de Souza, a Brazilian political scientist with a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that inflation is the “Latin American way of waging class warfare.”

Workers agitate and strike for salary increases, but when they get them, they themselves pay the increased labor costs in higher prices for consumer goods.

“The laborers lose what they have, so then they start again,” De Souza said. It is all blamed on inflation, but “it is important to understand that there is a serious distributive conflict at the base of inflation. . . . It is obviously a mass redistribution of income from the bottom to the top.”

“The Brazilian miracle” of economic growth in the 1970s rapidly expanded total income and raised hopes of a better life for the poor as many of them rose into the middle class. While a modern industrial sector burgeoned in the southeast region of the country, however, the central, northern and northeastern regions remained largely backward and undeveloped.

Millions of poor rural families migrated to the cities, providing a large labor pool that helped keep wages down for unskilled workers. Because managers were relatively scarce, their pay increased rapidly.

And so the growth of the 1970s did not diminish the gaping difference between the extremes of rich Brazil and poor Brazil.

“Brazil grew, modernized, industrialized, and the same contrast continues,” said Charles Mueller, president of the official Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics.

The 1980s have been a decade of discouraging stagnation that has added to the desperation of those at the bottom of the income pyramid. In the first round of presidential elections Nov. 15, the great majority of the voters cast their ballots for candidates advocating action to correct the imbalance.

“It was a gigantic demand for change,” political scientist Helio Jaguaribe said in an interview. He emphasized that change is overdue.

“Brazil is the country with the greatest concentration of income in the world,” he said. Such a skewed distribution as Brazil’s is not found “even in India, in Mexico, in Honduras. It is the worst in the world.”

More than half of all Brazilian workers earn the equivalent of about $120 a month or less. This poor majority of the country’s 145 million people makes do on less than one-sixth of the national income, while the richest 10% of the population receives half of the total. (In the United States, the richest 10% receives less than one-fourth of the income.)

As might be expected, the Brazilian poor are often undernourished, unhealthy and ignorant. Less than one-fourth of the population has completed the eighth grade of school, compared with more than two-thirds in neighboring Argentina. The Brazilian’s average life expectancy is 65 years, six years less than the Argentine’s.

The extreme inequality in Brazilian society is reflected in the term “Belindia,” coined by economist Edmar Bacha to indicate that the comfort of Belgium and the misery of India exist side by side in Brazil.

The richest 14 million Brazilians have a per-capita income of about $10,000 a year, similar to that of a small European country. “The poorest 70 million live on about $500 a year each, which is as poor as the average for India,” Bacha said in his office at Rio’s Catholic University, where he teaches.

The ultimate inequality, that of masters and slaves, persisted legally in Brazil until 1888 under South America’s only monarchy. Some social scientists say remnants of Brazil’s system of bondage persist four generations after emancipation.

“The mentality of the Brazilian dominant class still bears deep marks from the slave period,” said Herbert de Souza, head of the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis. “They still feel that they are the masters.”

A member of the Brazilian elite often pays employees the same amount for a month of work as he does for a restaurant lunch, de Souza observed, and added: “He pays that to his employees without a thought. He even says, ‘They should be thankful that I am giving them work.’ ”

De Souza blames the military government of 1964-1985 for ruthlessly suppressing popular labor, church community groups that had begun a movement for change in the early 1960s. With the gradual return of democracy, the movement has regrouped and become politically active.

“The news is that there are workers trying to break with that traditional structure, break with that master-slave relationship,” De Souza said.

Meanwhile, many poor Brazilians have entered an informal or underground economy that includes street vendors, curbside parking attendants, handicraft makers, repairmen, seamstresses, and others whose money-making activities are not reflected in the official gross national product. De Souza said the underground economy may account for one-third or more of the total economy, giving millions of poor Brazilians a better chance to survive and sometimes thrive.

“That underground world is perhaps what explains why social explosions have not occurred in Brazil,” he said. “It is a huge cushion from the crisis.”

But a “serious, profound social crisis” remains, said Prof. Gilberto Velho, an anthropologist with the National Museum. Velho said traditional paternalistic relationships between rich and poor have broken down, opening the way for class confrontation.

Presidential candidate Lula, a former factory worker, has risen on a growing movement designed to confront the upper class through popular political and labor organization. Collor, on the other hand, is seen by his poor followers as a member of the upper class who will champion their cause at the level of power where he was born, according to Velho.

“They believe he is a kind of avenger of the oppressed classes who will improve their situation,” the anthropologist said. The “Collor phenomenon,” he said, reflects a centuries-old folk belief in the possibility of a “savior, a prince, a superior being,” who will deliver the people from their hardship and misery.

Muniz Sodre, a political scientist who heads the communications department at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said there is little likelihood that the gap between rich and poor will close significantly even with Lula as president. According to Sodre, the Brazilian government is and has always been administered by a powerful bureaucratic Establishment allied with the wealthy elite of society.

Through successive changes in government, the Establishment has renewed itself from generation to generation, perpetuating its grip on power with the help of the military and the rich, he said.

“The masses of Brazil are irrevocably condemned to another world,” Sodre said.