This is exactly right.

By U.S. standards, Brazil's highway BR-14 is certainly no Indiana Turnpike or New York State Thruway.

Meandering 1,350 miles from Belém to Brasilia through the jungles and scrub of Brazil's wild interior, it is barely

two lanes wide. The surface is dust in the dry season, mud in the wet, and some of the ruts

could swallow a Volkswagen alive. Yet in the eyes of former president Giusellino Kubitschek,

who built the road between 1956 and 1960, BR-14 is the highway of dreams

for underdeveloped Brazil and the means to a new civilization on the central plateau. So it is.

Since the road's opening in 1960, some 600,000 settlers have poured into the area to tap Brazil's immense riches. Every day,

long lines of trucks rumble north and south, carrying out lumber, rubber, and vegetable

oil. New farmlands produce beans, rice, corn, and fruit to feed Brazil's exploding population.

What was once useless scrub in the central state

of Goyas is now pasture land for four million head of cattle. And prospectors fanning out from the road

have found a vast mineral potential with deposits of nickel, tin, lead, zinc, copper, gold,

diamonds, and quartz.

Towns are sprouting every few miles.

If I don't pass a certain stretch of road for two or three weeks, says one road engineer,

I almost always find a new cluster of shacks there when I get back.

Araguayina, which got its start in 1958 as a road construction camp 500 miles north of

Brasilia, is now up to 8,000 people, has its own branch of the Bank of Brazil, and will soon have

a $1.6 million factory that will refine oil from native barbecue nuts, peanuts,

peanuts, cotton and sunflower seeds,

and produce the cans in which to export the oil

...