LATIN AMERICA: Brazil's Wasted Generation

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In spite of a boom, 16 million children are hopelessly deprived

Since 1969, Brazil has achieved one of the world's most spectacular rates of economic growth, impressive industrialization and a heady standard of living for its thriving middle class. In the great booming cities, flashy cars carry hordes of executives from comfortable apartment houses to offices in downtown skyscrapers. The white sands of Ipanema and Copacabana beaches teem with people enjoying the good life. What mars this idyllic picture is a social scandal more massive in Brazil than anywhere else on the South American continent. Amid all the delights of Brazil live more than 2 million children who have been abandoned by their destitute parents and another 14 million who live in such poverty that abandonment almost seems preferable. These 16 million people—one-third of Brazil's youth—are growing up in circumstances so deprived that they are unlikely ever to play a useful role in modern society.

The outcasts among them have been called "nobody's children," and they range from infants to teenagers. They have been turned out into the streets of every major city in the land. In Rio de Janeiro alone, more than 100 children under three years old are abandoned each month. As the kids themselves say, they "join the struggle"—a term aptly describing their attempts to survive. In Rio, Recife and São Paulo they can be found—or more precisely stumbled upon—in alleys and on avenues and beaches. They rove in gypsy bands, sleep in construction pipes, in rat-infested cellars of abandoned buildings or on street corners in miserable heaps. Their beds are torn newspapers, their clothing mere scraps of cloth. Their days are spent in hustling, prostitution and petty crime. They prey upon each other as well as passersby. Even the police have been accused of organizing waifs into thieving bands and then collecting the better part of the loot.

The children who remain with their parents are similarly corrupted. Mothers and even grandmothers have forced their pubescent offspring into prostitution. Not long ago, an eight-month-old girl was left at the door of a child care center. She had been beaten and was infected with venereal disease. In another notorious case, a gym teacher interrupted a 14-year-old's attempt to rape a woman in her own office. Fleeing, the youth turned, drew a pistol and fired upon the man and killed him. Questioned by police, the boy boasted that he was planning to murder his mother, who had tried to drown him in a river when he was an infant.