Smartt, if you believe what you wrote, you're very wrong.
(pasted footnote from Chomsky's "Understanding Power", too lazy to type his take or learn how to underline things)
54. On the new human species in northeast Brazil, see for example, Isabel Vincent, "Life a struggle for Pygmy family," Globe & Mail (Toronto), December 17, 1991, p. A15. An excerpt:
A diet consisting mainly of manioc flour, beans and rice has affected [northeastern Brazilian laborers'] mental development to the point that they have difficulty remembering or concentrating. Fully 30.7 per cent of children in the Northeast are born malnourished, according to Unicef and the Brazilian Ministry of Health. . . .Brazilian medical experts have known of undernourishment in the country's poorest region for more than two decades, but they confirmed only recently the existence of a much more startling problem -- a severe lack of protein in their diet that is producing a population of Brazilian Pygmies known by some medical researchers in Brazil as homens nanicos. Their height at adulthood is far less than the average height recording by the World Health Organization and their brain capacity is 40 per cent less than average. . . . In the poorest states of the Northeast, such as Alagoas and Piaui, homens nanicos comprise about 30 per cent of the population. . . . Much of the Northeast comprises fertile farm land that is being taken up by large plantations for the production of cash crops such as sugar cane.

On the desperate conditions of poverty and repression in Central America, see for example, César Chelala, "Central America's Health Plight," Christian Science Monitor, March 22, 1990, p. 18 (the Pan American Health Organization estimates that of 850,000 children born every year in Central America, 100,000 will die before the age of five and two-thirds of those who survive will suffer from malnutrition, with attendant physical or mental development problems). See also chapter 1 of U.P. and its footnote 13; footnotes 15 and 52 of this chapter; and chapter 4 of U.P. and its footnote 8.