Fast-growing Brazil tries to lift its poorest

“Here, it is full of poverty,” she said. “We need many things. Pernambuco is very ignored.”

Jorge Jatoba, an economist who studies poverty, said that a confluence of violence, malnutrition and lack of services, such as potable water, has made poverty especially difficult to uproot in the northeast, despite the region’s China-like growth, 9.3 percent last year. Illiteracy hovers around 20 percent, he said, and only about half of those between the ages of 15 and 17 attend school.

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(Juan Forero/TWP) - Netildes Delvina Soares, 47, lives with much suffering, as she put it, in a wood-plank hut without plumbing or electricity. Her sister (right), Mara Maria da Silva, 58, worries about the abject poverty for the children in the community.

Jatoba said it may be surprising that widespread misery still exists in a country that has undergone an important economic and social transformation since the 1990s. Many of Brazil’s accomplishments have been credited to Pernambuco’s most famous son, Lula, who grew up poor and was elected president in 2002.

“The city has lived for many years this kind of cruel coexistence between affluence in some areas and extreme poverty in some areas,” Jatoba said, sitting on his balcony in a high-rise apartment building in Recife, the lights of other buildings twinkling across the skyline.

Jatoba said the government must vastly improve education and other services and find ways to pull from the margins of society people who have never worked or do not read. That is not to say, he stressed, that job creation in the northeast is not chipping away at poverty.

Employment is increasing particularly quickly in Pernambuco as the state and private industry invest in highways and a $3.4 billion rail line. The linchpin of this region is the Suape port and industrial park, located on a former mangrove swamp south of Recife here in Ipojuca.

Although more than 30 years old, the complex has awakened only in recent years as investments increased dramatically. By 2014, $15 billion will be invested as Fiat completes a car plant, shipbuilding facilities are expanded and an oil refinery and petrochemical facility are opened, said Frederico da Costa Amancio, Suape’s chief executive.

Suape has 55,000 workers, 20,000 of them permanent, and Amancio expects 15,000 more in four years, many of whom will come from the ranks of rural agriculture. “It’s like an industrial revolution in our state,” he said.

Among those benefiting are workers such as Jorge Rocha, 40.

Until the end of last year, Rocha washed cars. With his meager wages, he had to bunk with relatives and, at times, struggled to pay for a good meal.

Now, Rocha is earning more than $600 a month, well above the minimum wage, driving heavy machinery at a construction site. Yet, he said, the memories of hardship are still fresh in his mind — and he reels off how many of those close to him are still struggling.

“Things are very precarious for them,” he said. “There are many people living with big necessities.”