Recession? Unemployment? While economic hard times grip much of Brazil, there's little sign of them here -- even in the slums.
New asphalt is paving over dirt roads. Sewer pipes are being laid. Schools are popping up. A big new hospital is nearly ready to open in this southeastern coastal city 220km northeast of Rio de Janeiro. In Campos' shantytowns, a new program to stamp out child labor is paying families to keep their kids in school.
Conversations don't focus on the factory layoffs elsewhere in Brazil or a stock market that is down about a third from a year ago. People are talking about education, health and the extension of the 6km bicycle path through downtown.
"They say the economy is in trouble, but here we are selling as much as we sold last year," says Paulo Roberto Ramos Cardoso, manager at a bicycle shop. A few blocks away, car dealer Ezequias Lima is even more upbeat: "We're selling more than last year."
The source of the city's bonanza is oil. Since 1998, Campos and its neighbors along the rich offshore oilfields of the Campos basin have been prospering from a downpour of petroleum royalties.
Campos and other coastal cities, with jurisdiction over some 90 percent of the country's oil production, have been dubbed "the Brazilian emirates." Authorities quip that if Rio de Janeiro state were an independent country, its daily output of more than 1.3 million barrels would qualify it to join OPEC.
It's a dramatic change in fortunes for Campos, which for most of the last century survived on agriculture -- first coffee, then sugar. But as sugar prices fell and the government cut subsidies, the mills shut down one after another. Of the 31 sugar mills in the 1970s, only eight remain.
The turnaround came when the national government ended the monopoly of the federal oil giant Petrobras as part of Brazil's stepped-up drive to cut its reliance on imports for 25 percent of its daily consumption of 1.7 million barrels of oil.
Royalties are calculated in dollars, and the oil region's income began rising as Brazil's currency, the real, began to lose value in 1999. Three years ago, Campos got 9 million reals (currently US$3.5 million) in annual royalties. Over the last 12 months it took in 114.7 millions reals, about US$44 million.
The law requires the city to spend the windfall on infrastructure, so Campos launched a development program that most of Brazil's 5,000-plus municipalities can only dream about.
Pavement replaced dirt on most streets and avenues. Neighboring towns are linked with modern roads. Schools and colleges went up.
The network of hospitals and clinics was expanded and new equipment purchased. A huge new hospital to care for as many as 1,200 people daily is to open in December.
"Except for bone marrow transplants, our doctors perform even the most complex surgeries," says the municipal planning development manager, Romilton Barbara.
In the Rui Barbosa slum, not far from Barbara's office, the oil money let teenager Luis Fernando de Oliveira give up a dead-end job as a "car watcher" and enroll in a new school program to improve his grade-school education.
Oliveira, who is 13 but looks barely 7, proudly shows off his T-shirt with the logo of the Child Labor Eradication Program.
"After school you spend the rest of the day doing homework while learning new things. It's great," he says.
The main goal of the program, which started this year, is to remove children from the streets or sugar cane fields and have them complete grade school.
For sending him back to school, Oliveira's parents get 40 reals (US$16) a month. That's a fifth of what his father makes as construction worker and twice what the boy earned in tips watching cars at night.
The program has signed up more than 3,000 children in Campos, for which officials estimate the annual cost will be about 1 million reals.
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