Technocrats, Politicians, and Industrialists, 1940s–1960s

By the mid-1940s, Belo Horizonte and Minas Gerais had begun to enter a new phase of industrialization. In the decade of the 1950s, the city and state experienced the first of three major industrial surges during the last half of the twentieth century (the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s). This first major wave of industrialization built on the foundations laid in the previous decades—especially in the transformation of mineiro raw materials, most notably iron ore and water. Entrepreneurs had put in place a basic infrastructure of banks, transportation, electric power, and commercial networks. Technocrats and politicians would transform this fragile foundation through planning and the mobilization of massive new capital investment—both public and private. Entrepreneurs found themselves in a very different business environment from the prewar decades.