Paulo, Brazil has two of the world's great metropolises, and nine other cities have over a million inhabitants. Yet Brazil still thinks of itself as a frontier country, and certainly the deeper into the interior you go, the thinner the population becomes. In reality, though, the frontiers have been rapidly disappearing since the construction of the highway network in the Amazon in the 1960s. More importantly, though, Brazilians look different.
Brazil is a land of profound economic contradictions.
Rapid postwar industrialization made Brazil one of the world's ten largest economies and put it among the most developed of Third World countries. But this has not improved the lot of the vast majority of Brazilians. The cities are dotted with favelas , shanty towns which crowd around the skyscrapers, and the contrast between rich and poor is one of the most glaring anywhere. This throws up facts which are hard to swallow. Brazil is the industrial powerhouse of South America, but cannot feed and educate its people.