Brazil is the key country of South America. It contains half the land area of the continent and more than half the population. It is the fourth-largest country in the world. But half of the population is still illiterate, half goes barefoot, half suffers chronic malnutrition. In Recife, in the pro-Communist north-east, only half the working force has jobs. In this area 20 million Brazilians live in poverty as wretched as anywhere in the world. Life expectancy here is 30 years, average income $8 a month.
This area has produced the strongest Fidelista organization on the continent. Although the communist party is illegal, it dominates the Peasant League which thrives on the festering discontent of the landless and the jobless.
The problems of Brazil are clearly the crucial problems of all the long-suffering peoples of the South American republics. The privileged classes who have an iron grip on the wealth and political structures of their countries are only beginning to show concern for the millions of indigent, often-starving peasants and slum-dwellers who beg only the right to work and be paid for their labour. A great awakening of the social conscience of Latin America is beginning. But, is it too late?
The poor and hungry have discovered in the examples of Cuba and China that there is an alternative to the oppression they have endured for generations under what they call “capitalist exploitation”.
In Brazil the alternative is represented by the fast-spreading Peasant Leagues and their communist-oriented leader, Francisco Juliao. Forty Million Shoes follows Juliao on his mission of agitation and propaganda into the drought-stricken interior provinces of his country.
The programme also examines the lives of the daughter of a wealthy Brazilian family which traces its ancestry back 400 years, an indigent young girl whose father attempted to steal the money she needs to finish her education, and a peasant farmer who ekes out a marginal existence in northeast Brazil, without water and without hope.
Interviewed on the programme are Dr. Fernando Lee, one of Brazil’s major industrialists from Sao Paulo, and Louis Alberto Bahia, the influential editor of the Rio de Janeiro newspaper, Correa de Mania.