E/CN.4/1996/72/Add.1 page 22 73. In the favelas, instead of waiting passively for assistance, the inhabitants have organized themselves to ensure supplies of water, electricity and food. In Rio de Janeiro, the Special Rapporteur went to the favelas of Largatixa and Pedreira, each of which is home to about 25,000 people: there he saw the work of a direct sales and solidarity project which had been launched by the People’s Cooperation and Activities Centre which comprises a bakery, two shops selling essential goods and a sewing workshop. VI. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 74. At the end of his study, the Special Rapporteur notes that racism and racial discrimination in Brazil are not easy to pin down. These phenomena are subject to the vagaries of official statements. They are also concealed, to the point of being invisible, by biological and cultural intermingling. A degree of guile was necessary to draw from many of the official spokesmen a recognition of the existence of a cause-and-effect relationship between economic and social conditions, the marginalization and the poverty of Indians, people of mixed parentage and Blacks and the historical circumstances which underlie the origins of Brazil, in particular slavery and colonization. Only a political will stemming from a clear-sighted and courageous analysis of reality can break the vicious circle of racial discrimination through negation and make Brazil the great nation it aspires to be in the twenty-first century. Accordingly, the Special Rapporteur puts forward the following recommendations to the Brazilian authorities: 1. In the absence of special programmes for the benefit of disadvantaged ethnic and racial groups of the kind known in the United States as "affirmative action" (which several official spokesmen regarded as impracticable because the people of mixed parentage and the Blacks are not minorities and because economic and social problems affect all Brazilians without distinction of race), priority should be given to the education of the poorest who would be identified in terms of a minimum income level; 2. The situation of the street children should be studied as a matter of urgency in order to reintegrate them in normal social systems (schools, apprenticeship institutions) and enable them to escape crime and violence; in the same context, efforts should be made to disband the semi-official police organizations and the death squads which murder street children; 3. The Brazilian Government should undertake a major survey of the problem of the sterilization of Black women and on the effectiveness of the implementation of Act 229/91; 4. Campaigns should be conducted through the media and through the education system in order to improve the image of Blacks in Brazilian society and give Blacks, Amerindians and people of mixed parentage an awareness of their dignity as human individuals, to enable them to assert themselves and to participate fully in the life of the nation;