Microloans have helped Maria Auxiliadora Sampaio, far left, and Maria Benedita Sousa start their own businesses

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

FORTALEZA, Brazil - Desperate to escape her impoverished existence in one of Brazil’s poorest regions, Maria Benedita Sousa used a small loan five years ago to buy two sewing machines and start her own business making women’s underwear.
Today Ms. Sousa, a mother of three who started out working in a jeans factory making minimum wage, employs 25 people in a modest two-room factory that produces 55,000 pairs of cotton underwear a month. She bought and renovated a house for her family and is now thinking of buying a second car. Her daughter could be the first family member to finish college.
“You can’t imagine the happiness I am feeling,” Ms. Sousa, 43, said from the floor of her business, Big Mateus, named after a son. “I am someone who came from the countryside to the city. I battled and battled, and today my children are studying, with one in college and two others in school. It’s a gift from God.”
Today her country is lifting itself up in much the same way. Brazil, South America’s largest economy, is finally poised to realize its long-anticipated potential as a global player, economists say, as the country rides its biggest economic expansion in three decades.
That growth is being felt in nearly all parts of the economy, creating a new class of super rich even as people like Ms. Sousa enter an expanding middle class.
It has also given Brazil new swagger, providing it with greater leverage to push for a tougher bargain with the United States and Europe in global trade talks.
Despite investor fears about the leftist bent of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva , he has demonstrated a light touch when it comes to economic stewardship, avoiding the populist impulses of leaders in Venezuela and Bolivia.
Instead, he has fueled Brazil’s growth through a deft combination of respect for financial markets and targeted social programs, which are lifting millions out of poverty, said David Fleischer, a political analyst and emeritus professor at the University of Brasilia.
Brazil has shrunk its income gap by six percentage points since 2001, more than any other country in South America this decade, said Francisco Ferreira, a lead economist at the World Bank.
While the top 10 percent of Brazil’s earners saw their cumulative income rise by 7 percent from 2001 to 2006, the bottom 10 percent shot up by 58 percent, according to Marcelo Cortes Neri, the director of the Center for Social Policies at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil has diversified its industrial base, has huge potential to expand a booming agricultural sector into virgin fields and holds a tremendous pool of untapped natural resources. New oil discoveries will thrust Brazil into the ranks of the global oil powers within the next decade.
Yet while exports of commodities like oil and agricultural goods have driven much of its recent growth, Brazil is less and less dependent on them, economists say, having the advantage of a huge domestic market - 185 million people - that has grown wealthier with the success of people like Ms. Sousa.
“What makes Brazil more resilient is that the rest of the world matters less,” said Don Hanna, the head of emerging market economics at Citibank.
President da Silva has deepened many of the social programs begun 10 years ago . In Ms. Sousa’s case, for instance, she owes much of the success of her underwear business to loans she has received from the Bank of the Northeast, a government- financed bank that has awarded microloans to 330,000 people to develop businesses .
Other programs, like Bolsa Familia, give small subsidies to millions of poor Brazilians to buy food and other essentials. Maria Auxiliadora Sampaio and her husband, who live in Fortaleza, a coastal city of 2.4 million people, were receiving Bolsa Familia payments of about $30 a month .
Then, two years ago, Ms. Sampaio used a microloan of about $190 to buy nail polish and start a manicure business .
Today she is making around $70 a day - about four minimum salaries per month, she said. This month her husband, who works at a Cachaca factory, bought a drum set that he plans to use in a band that plays forro, a traditional music in the northeast.
“I feel like we are part of this group of people that are coming up in the world,” said Ms. Sampaio, 28. “When you don’t have anything, when you don’t have a profession, don’t have the means to live, you are no one, you are a mosquito. I was nothing. Today, I am in heaven.”