Booming Brazil could be world power soon

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"Long-term, Brazil is going to be a major petroleum power," said David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Brasilia. "It will enhance its importance in South America and the world as an energy supplier — and that translates into political power."

Fleischer said a greater role on the political stage could help diminish the influence of Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez. It also could help Brazil join influential world bodies such as the Group of Eight industrialized nations, and maybe win it a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

But while the economy booms, Brazil still suffers under a health system unable to prevent a dengue outbreak in Rio, drug gangs that all but govern teeming slums, and settlers and illegal loggers who burn and cut down the world's largest rain forest.

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This week alone, police arrested dozens of mayors in a corruption scheme involving more than US$100 million (euro63 million) in pilfered public money. Farm workers agitating for land reform blocked a railway used to get iron ore to ports for export. And the Roman Catholic Church reported that debt slavery has increased substantially.

"Everything is great in the short term: oil production, biofuels, iron ore, airplanes," said Riordan Roett, director of Western Hemisphere studies at Johns Hopkins University. "But the education and health systems are lousy. You can get super engineers, but you can't get enough decent high school graduates."

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's center-left government is trying to fix that. It is expanding a welfare program that gives monthly checks to 45 million poor Brazilians who keep their kids in school, and is pledging billions in anti-poverty money across Brazil's poorest regions.

"We're going to transform this country into a great economy and a great nation," Silva told his citizens in February.

But experts are divided on whether Brazil is in the midst of a social revolution that will break down the vast gap between rich and poor and create a much larger middle class.

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"The potential is there. It looks better and better every year. We just need to get our game together in turning the potential into reality," Fleischer said.

Meanwhile, ordinary Brazilians are basking in the glow of their newfound hope. At the bridge construction site, Edivaldo Pereira dos Santos smiled as he painted a guardrail.

"The oil will give us the power," he said. "And this bridge will be a postcard for Sao Paulo, like the Golden Gate Bridge is for San Francisco."

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