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- WORLD, Page 61World NotesBRAZILAll in the Family
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- It was a project so simple even an undergraduate could do it.
- But what Maria Aparecida de Oliveira, a student at the University
- of Brasilia, learned in the course of her research was enough to
- send all Brazil into a furor. She found that nearly half the
- country's 570 Deputies and Senators have relatives squirreled away
- on the government payroll, many of them in cushy, high-paying jobs.
- Worst-case abusers included a former Senate president who provided
- jobs for at least nine family members, and a Deputy who hired his
- wife and three daughters.
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- News of such nepotism hardly came as a surprise to David
- Fleischer, chairman of political science and international
- relations at the same university, who says, "It's part of the
- Brazilian culture." In fact, Fleischer believes Oliveira's study
- was not thorough: "There's a lot more nepotism going on than she
- reported."