Profile : Social Critic Crusades Against Brazil Hunger : Once an exile, fragile-looking Herbert de Souza has become a potent symbol in a war on poverty.

He doesn’t look much like a celebrity. Pencil thin, weighing 103 pounds, Herbert (Betinho) de Souza seems to be all angles and no curves, his frame lost under a billowing shirt and trousers. A receding crown of graying hair frames a high forehead, punctuated by overgrown eyebrows. His hands seem too large for his wrists, and a watchband slides like a curtain ring nearly up to his elbow.

His most startling features are his eyes, limpid and aqua-green. His gaze is at once kindly and piercing. Only the large smile and a clear, unfettered voice make a sturdy counterpoint to his brittle physique. Souza, or Betinho as he is widely known in Brazil, would seem at home in front of a blackboard or cloistered in a monastery--anywhere, really, but in the limelight.

Yet suddenly, this studious, fragile-looking 57-year-old sociologist, who is fighting his own personal battle with AIDS, has been pressed into national service. Moved by a damning report on malnutrition and poverty, Brazilian President Itamar Franco last April created a national council on nutrition and announced his ambitious Plan to Combat Hunger and Poverty.

But Franco, thrust into office when the disgraced Fernando Collor de Mello was impeached last year, has his hands full just trying to steady Brazil’s riotous course. To take on a task as big as hunger and abject poverty--a condition that afflicts one-fifth of the Brazilian population--Franco needed credibility, a scarce commodity in Brasilia these days. So he called Betinho.

Not that Betinho was a natural ally for Franco. A social critic by vocation, irreverent by instinct, Betinho is not one to break bread with the rich and famous, much less keep counsel with presidents and military men.

In 1970, during the darkest days of the military regime, he left Brazil on a long odyssey of exile. He first sought refuge in Chile, but when soldiers toppled Salvador Allende in 1973, he fled again to Mexico, then to Canada. He returned in 1979, when the military declared a general amnesty.

Back home, he set up a social research think tank, the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis, or Ibase, where he has churned out survey after survey exposing the ills of a society pocked by corruption, landlessness, violence and injustice. Now he is taking on the biggest problems of all: poverty and hunger.

From Dhaka in Bangladesh to Mogadishu in Somalia, the ravages of hunger are only too familiar. But hunger in Brazil? Wasn’t this, after all, the United States manque, author of a decade-long economic miracle in the 1970s, an exporter of software, airplanes and frozen orange juice?

But behind the robust trade balances, another Brazil has emerged. Hunger looms large in the backlands of the northeast, punished by epic droughts. It pervades the villages of the Amazon, where farmers must scratch a living out of weak soils. It gnaws at the favelas, or shantytowns, that ring cities like some raggedy tourniquet.

Though no one is starving in Guarabu, a favela of 17,000 residents near Rio’s Galeao airport, a distribution of food aid draws hundreds of people to the main square.

Like favelados all over Brazil, Guarabu’s residents are not only bitterly poor but also spectators in a daily parade of plenty. Overhead, Boeings glide into Galeao, bringing tourists and business people from London, Miami, Rome and Frankfurt. Down below, children taxi toy cars through the crumbling pavement and around the black fingers of open sewage ditches.

In the booming ‘70s, when these distortions first appeared, Brazil earned a telling nickname, Belindia: a robust and industrious Belgium surrounded by a teeming, impoverished India. But a decade of debt and no growth have made things far worse.

The richest 20% of Brazilian society earns 27 times more than the poorest fifth--one of the worst income gaps in the world. About 32 million people--equal to the entire population of Argentina--earn less than twice the monthly minimum wage, or about $150, which is enough to buy the most basic staples--but not clothing or medicine. Fully 15 million earn only half that starving wage, and 5 million earn nothing at all, bartering their labor for food.

Inflation has done its dire part. While the well-to-do part of the country negotiates high-ante market funds, which adjust assets against inflation every 24 hours, the rest deals in sorry cruzeiros (the local currency). Cruzeiro salaries melt away by 1% a day in workers’ pockets or are adjusted only tardily against the dizzy price spiral.

At least half of the hungry live in Brazilian cities, which are showing the strain. Indigence has fed anger and crime, which in turn have bloated the security industry. Bodyguard services and martial-arts instructors are prospering. Middle-class mothers push their strollers behind the bars that wall in what people insist on calling “public plazas.”

“I remember when children played on the streets and their parents never worried. That’s history,” Betinho said. “There is no real democracy where hunger and misery exist.”

Betinho has thrown himself into the hunger campaign with an intensity that frightens his staff, and they are trying to curb the public’s appetite for his company. “He works 12 hours a day,” said Andre Luis Camara, a press aide. “We are trying to get him to slow down.”

Betinho’s mission seems driven by a combustion of anger, compassion and personal tragedy. A hemophiliac, he contracted HIV in a blood transfusion years ago, and he lost two brothers to the disease. Betinho said he hates the label of victim, that this campaign is about life, not death. Nor is he cut out for the role of ascetic. He does not go to church or remember the last time he prayed, and his only sacred ritual is to open a pint bottle of beer at the end of each workday.

Yet Betinho works with the urgency of a man racing against the clock. His phone sings day and night; his agenda is choked with commitments.

“I don’t think I’ve been this photographed in all my life,” he smiled on a recent afternoon as he led a trail of reporters and their arsenal of long-stem microphones, video cameras and motor-driven Nikons on a search for a larger venue. The room he booked for that day’s press conference was too small for the small army that turned up.

His bouts with illness may have robbed him of bulk but not determination. It was this fragile man who took to the streets last year, rousing people to march for the restoration of ethics in politics, a movement that eventually brought down Fernando Collor de Mello, caught in a huge corruption scam.

When Betinho, together with Bishop Mauro Morelli of Duque de Caxias, took on hunger, the official paper plan quickly became a crusade. To field all the calls from volunteers, he had to rent an annex office, put in new phone lines and hire a separate team of assistants.

Nearly 5,000 citizens committees have sprung up all over Brazil. The giant government-run Banco do Brasil loaned floor space and assigned employees to the campaign. Thousands of cyclists “pedaled against hunger” and gathered 16 tons of food donations. Advertising agencies are generating free publicity. Media mogul Roberto Marinho, owner of Brazil’s giant TV Globo network, has pitched in. Even the military has called on Betinho.

“It’s incredible,” he told a reporter, referring to a recent appointment with the officers at the military command school. “A car comes to pick me up and I’m not going to jail!”

Betinho seems amused at his newfound admirers. “If we put the Brazilian elite on the Titanic and pushed them out to sea, maybe that would be a good solution.” Betinho paused a beat, relishing the thought. “But you can’t just get rid of the national elite. Getting them involved means they are exposed, and once exposed, they are accountable.”

The hunger campaign has not won over all Brazilians. Many criticize it as mere assistencialismo, where handouts stand in for lasting solutions. There is also the danger that the poor’s commitment to the campaign will go no deeper than the bottom of the emergency food packages.

However, Betinho believes that the hunger drive has struck a chord that resonates among common folk, in Guarabu and a thousand neighborhoods like it, throughout Brazil.

“It’s as though there’s this sudden potential for solidarity which is far more extensive than we sociologists had ever imagined,” he said.

In that way, Betinho and his followers are hoping that their campaign has whetted Brazil’s larger appetite--for real change.

Biography

* Name: Herbert (Betinho) Jose de Souza

* Title: Founder and director, the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis, or Ibase.

* Age: 57

* Personal: Bachelor’s degree in sociology. Agrarian reform consultant for then-President Joao Goulart before 1964 military coup. Consultant to Chilean President Salvador Allende until 1973 coup there. Founded the Latin American Research Unit in Canada. Lectured at National University of Mexico. Married. Two children.

* Quote: “There is no real democracy where hunger and misery exist.”