Behold the Brazilian whooping crane: Roberto Gaspar de Oliveira, wealthy landowner, an endangered species, and a man struggling to contain his fury. It was his land. His land, you must understand. An undeveloped part of his family property in the northeastern state of Ceara was to be taken away under a new agrarian-reform act and divided among landless peasants. The government would pay for it, but the terms were unacceptable to Gaspar. He had demanded that federal mediators examine the case.

I met Gaspar in Fortaleza, capital of Ceara. He was a tall, rather engaging businessman, boyish at 34, with dark-framed glasses, shiny black hair, and good manners. But his color rose quickly as he talked of his land, and his fingers tapped an indignant staccato on the tabletop. My tenants have been incited by the church, he said. They want to be the owners of the land now! The padre told them the land belongs to God, and the workers feel they have a right to pick my fruit!

Gaspar clearly felt the victim, betrayed by the institutions that had nurtured him. If this mediation fails, he said, we're going to arm ourselves and defend what we have. We're going to make war!

He stood up to his considerable height. I'm very macho, he said without a hint of self-mockery. And I'm not afraid of any government or any progressive church! The privilege and influence of the Brazilian landowner-politician, backbone of the nation since colonial times, has been withering for decades. Big-city corporations have become the landowners of power. And now agrarian reform has shaken rural Brazil by the scruff. Tenant farmers are demanding their due, and Brazil's new civilian government, installed in 1985 after 21 years of right-wing military rule, has begun to give them hope.

All across the nation there is a shedding of the authoritarian skin. Democracy is afoot. Brazilians are proud to be Brazilians again. Political exiles have returned. Community? action groups and labor unions have regained their voice. For Brazil, emerging into the First World of nations, now is a moment of promise. At the Rio de Janeiro offices of FUNABEM, Brazil's juvenile-welfare agency, director Ana Filgueiras was aglow with possibilities. There's tremendous excitement, she told me. Big, big optimism! Brazil was a country ruled by people (how can I say it in a soft way?) without morals, who stole money. The big change in Brazil is that the government will now listen to the needs of society. It would be a change indeed. There has never been a solid democratic tradition in Brazil, a nation that has tried to sustain technological growth and feudalism in the same century. The gap between rich and poor, educated and ignorant, has widened to tragic proportions. Eighty percent of the land is held by only 5 percent of the people. Twenty million Brazilians labor at a minimum wage of less than $60 a month. A fourth are jammed into urban slums where the social fabric has been torn into random threads, where thievery is no longer even confessed as a sin, and where heroes are often racketeers or dealers of cocaine.

For the poor, government has meant only repression. Out of 138 million inhabitants of Brazil, as novelist Antonio Callado told me, only a small group is living in this century and this time. And yet Brazil has no history of mass violence or revolution. Change has always come from above; popular movements have been quickly aborted. Slavery lasted until 1888. Even military coups are bloodless. Ours is a timid country, Callado said wryly, a bitofa bobo, a big fellow, but not really matured.

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world. It measures 4,300 kilometers (2,700 miles) from the northern Amazon basin to Uruguay-the distance from London to Tehran. Metropolitan Sao Paulo, an economic colossus, is practically a nation in itself. With 15 million inhabitants it rivals Mexico City as the most populous city in all the Americas.

Yet Brazil has no clear global role or duty. The Portuguese language isolates it from Spanish South America, and distance buffers it from the East-West tensions of the Northern Hemisphere. International affairs seem irrelevant. For the average Brazilian, as for the average American or Chinese, his own country is enough.

Brazil's worst enemy has been itself, but there is an underlying optimism here that recalls the United States of a hundred years ago, when the eastern cities were still wretched with immigrants and the Wild West beckoned to free men. Brazil, like the U.S., is a nation of newcomers, and there is still room to grow and to make mistakes. It often teeters on the edge of an abyss, it is said, but never falls in ... because Brazil is bigger than the abyss itself.

Brazil: the view from 1941
See how Stefan Zweig describes Brazil as paradise on earth.