KUBITSCHEK'S BRASILIA: Where Lately the Jaguar Screamed, a Metropolis Now Unfolds

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KUBITSCHEK'S BRASILIA

I saw a great civilization rising on a plateau on the shores of a lake between the 15th and 20th parallels, a promised land of rich milk and honey blest.

—João Bosco (1815-88),

Brasilia's patron saint

AT the rate of one each 30 minutes, 2,333 trucks churned out of Rio de Janeiro and took the road west, their springs creaking under all the paraphernalia of bureaucracy, from swivel chairs to paper clips. In the wilderness of Brazil's central plateau, planes touched down on a new, jet-length runway every two minutes with Tempelhof-like precision. This week, before a crowd of 200,000, President Juscelino Kubitschek will officially move the Brazilian government into Brasilia, his $500 million new capital. Boasts Kubitschek: "We have turned our back on the sea and penetrated to the heartland of the nation. Now the people realize their strength.''

Hang the Cost. Brasilia is a skyscraper city sprung metropolis-size from a broad plateau where, just 43 months ago, Kubitschek recalls, "there was only solitude and a jaguar screaming in the night." It was thrown up at a hang-the-cost speed that wrenched the whole country's economy. Forty-five million cubic meters of red earth were ripped out by a $50 million army of machines. The final price tag will top Brazil's annual budget.

On his visit in February. President Eisenhower was reminded of "our own decision many years ago to move the capital of our fledgling nation from Philadelphia." But in the move to Washington in 1800, only 126 bureaucrats made the trek by coach and horseback, while state papers went by ship. Brasilia will have 120,000 citizens next week and 500,000 within ten years. No new capital—Ankara, Canberra or New Delhi—compares with it for scope and speed.

Eyes West. Kubitschek's critics dub him "Pharaoh Juscelino" because historians reach back for a comparison to the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who between 1375 and 1358 B.C. built the Egyptian capital of Akhetaton after deciding that Thebes was out of favor with his god. In ambition, though not in tragic cost, Brasilia might also be compared to St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), erected on inhospitable marsh, at a cost of more than 30,000 lives, to gratify Peter the Great's passion to open ingrown Russia to the Baltic and to Western influence. Kubitschek also looks west, but inwardly: he proposes to populate Brazil's vast domain carved out by 17th century bandeirantes —half-savage frontiersmen—but never settled. In the world's fifth largest country, he says, "enormous fertile lands are as empty as the Sahara, while millions of Brazilians live in penury, clinging like crabs to the crowded shoreline."