Brazil Government

World economic leaders are nearing a consensus that Latin America, especially Brazil, must be saved from an Asian-style economic collapse. That consensus crystallized Monday as the world community, led by President Clinton, made the survival of emerging markets a priority. The major industrialized nations seem ready to draw a line in the sand with Brazil out of fear that the collapse of Latin America's largest economy would be an enormous setback in the global shift toward free-market economies.

Drought and hunger have haunted the arid wasteland of northeast Brazil, the nation's poorest and most backward region, for centuries. The cyclical scourge has cultivated a "drought industry" run by political bosses and landowners, who keep peasants dependent on emergency food and resources in order to control their votes. So this year's drought was no surprise. But the reaction was.

Miriam Costa was in no mood to talk economics as she waited in an unemployment line here this month, hoping to find work, as she has every week since losing her job with a construction company in March. The Brazilian government's latest efforts to tame the economy have produced just one effect she cares about: She's lost her job. So have 700,000 other Brazilians since austerity measures were imposed last October. Unemployment is now at a 14-year high.

Embarking on a project intended to slow the steady destruction of economically and environmentally valuable tropical rain forests, the World Bank and Brazil unveiled a program Wednesday to nearly triple the amount of Amazon and Atlantic jungle acreage under protection.

With a wary eye on the still-smoldering wreckage of South Korea's currency, Brazil is struggling to avoid a similar fate, convinced that a strong real is the key to keeping its three-year economic boom intact. But does Brazil's currency, thought by many economists to be 15% to 30% too rich compared with the dollar, stand a chance of avoiding a devaluation similar to the one South Korea finally bowed to after months of maneuvering and speculation?

Rocked by the turmoil in Asian markets, Brazil on Monday took harsh steps to cut spending, raise taxes and reduce its vulnerability to the whims of currency speculators. The moves, decreed by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, will trim about $18 billion from the public sector deficit, which had threatened to grow by $1.8 billion a month after the central bank nearly doubled interest rates in an effort to staunch an outflow of dollars from the nation's economy.

Brazil is booming. But when a society as big, complex and inequitable as this one undergoes a revolutionary economic transformation, the process brings agony as well as ecstasy. Ask Romulo Fisher. Although the surging Brazilian computer market portends a dynamic future, the computer analyst still depends on an apocalyptically erratic telephone system that embodies the past.

Tens of thousands of marchers demanding agrarian reform completed a two-month trek through the brush with a historic rally Thursday in Brasilia, dramatizing the strongest political challenge to President Fernando Henrique Cardoso during his two years in office. The demonstration was organized by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers, a highly disciplined leftist group that is the most important social movement in Brazil today.

Visions of wild riches are bubbling again in this hardscrabble Amazon mining town. But so are the conflicts that usually accompany a gold strike. The fight here is between thousands of struggling prospectors who have held on since the last boom went bust six years ago and a government mining company that says it has found a new lode. For Jose Francisco Assis, a gaunt, toothless miner who heads the Serra Pelada prospectors co-operative, it's a struggle between David and Goliath.

Tiririca is one of Brazil's most popular singers, a former circus clown who sings childish ditties, a man of humble origins and mixed race. But Tiririca, according to some Afro-Brazilian leaders, has recorded a song that is insulting to blacks. A judge in Rio de Janeiro agreed: She ordered his record pulled from the shelves. The singer and his record company, Sony Music, have been hit with criminal and civil actions accusing them of racism.