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Maranhão is the poorest state in Brazil. Former President of Brazil Jose Sarney started off in charge of the state’s oligarchy in 1966. As he first rose to power, during the military dictatorship, he arranged a series of aerial maps of the state and with a pencil marked off huge tracts of land for ranchers from neighbouring states. He handed out land seemingly willy-nilly, and the people who lived off of the forests there were kicked out and forced onto the thin strips of ground between rancher fences and the pothole-ridden federal highway. Forty years later, the roadside throughout the state is filled with houses made out of taipa, a material made from mud that fills in a thin stick framework. It’s one of the favorite hiding places of the chagas beetle, which bites you and causes you to die ten years later of respiratory failure.Sarney became leader of the official Military party in the Senate during the 70s. When democracy finally returned to the country, he became the first democratically-elected vice president in 1985. On the eve of being sworn into office, the president-elect (who was from the opposing party) died of a mysterious illness, so Sarney was inaugurated as president. Five years later, with inflation at an unhealthy 1000% a year, Sarney was so unpopular that he couldn't appear in public without having rocks thrown at him. A shoe would have been a compliment. He is the last of Brazil’s “coloneis”–the Northeastern political strongmen who traditionally ran the media in their states and put one son in the communist party and one in the priesthood, just to make sure they covered their bases. Today, Sarney is also president of the Brazilian Acadamy of Letters (for his many novels) and is for the third time in his life Senate Majority Leader, currently representing the state of Amapa, where he has never lived.
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23,000 people living in shelters…
Crap mixing into the floodwater from the town's open sewage canals…
Kids are happily jumping out of trees into the floodwater, carelessly catching intestinal worms and scabies with the joy of an extended holiday caused by flooded schools.