Brazil’s proud powerhouse celebrates 450 years

SAO PAULO, Brazil — Just south of the Tropic of Capricorn, on a breezy plateau whose rivers were harnessed for electricity by an engineer from Omaha, Neb., one of the world’s greatest cities celebrated its 450th birthday yesterday.

As the dancers and samba bands hit the streets and fireworks lighted the summer night, Sao Paulo had much to celebrate — not least of which was its sheer size: With 18.3 million people in 2001, it has edged out Mexico City as the world’s second-largest metropolitan area, behind Tokyo, the United Nations reports.

That is up from a bare 65,000 in 1890 — the greatest population explosion in human history, according to the Fernand Braudel Institute, a think tank here.

South America’s biggest industrial powerhouse has 5 million cars, 10,000 clanky cross-town buses and 450 helicopters — the world’s largest municipal helicopter fleet after New York’s — tilting through the skies in aerial “avenues.” Its 400,000 motorcycle messengers, called “motoboys,” average three deaths a day in accidents on the city’s 100,000 streets.

Sao Paulo is rich. With 10 percent of Brazil’s 180 million people, Greater Sao Paulo accounts for a third of the country’s manufacturing output. Per capita income of $9,000 a year is double the national average.

“Sao Paulo means work,” said Soraya Karrer, a manager at the Hotel Unique, an architectural landmark. “This is a city where people work all day and go to school at night.”

But Sao Paulo is also poor. About 1.1 million people live in the 2,018 officially designated “favelas,” urban slums of cardboard and baling wire. An additional 400,000 live in 1,648 tenements — concrete blocks of tiny apartments and exposed wiring. Invasions of empty buildings by hundreds of squatters shook the city in July — winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

Maria das Dores, a seamstress, migrated here from western Sao Paulo state and lives in one room at Cidade Tiradentes, in the grim tenement belt around Sao Paulo’s prosperous core.

Her worst fear is crime — 4,141 murders last year, compared with 596 in New York City.

“I’ve seen people killed in the street,” she said.

Her biggest complaint is her bus trips to make deliveries to customers. The 60-cent fare might not seem like much, “but it’s a lot to bang around inside a tin can for two hours without a bathroom.”

But Miss das Dores adds: “I’d never go back to my hometown. This is the most exciting city in the world.”

And one of the sexiest. Dozens of “love motels” line each of the main roads into the city. They charge by the hour and often feature gourmet room service, bordello-style decor and private pools for each suite.

Yet a state campaign that distributes free AIDS drugs and promotes condom use has helped keep HIV-infection levels below 1 percent.

Story Continues →