In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region (American Encounters/Global Interactions) - Softcover

Garfield PhD, Seth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082235585X ISBN 13: 9780822355854

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Chronicling the dramatic history of the Brazilian Amazon during the Second World War, Seth Garfield provides fresh perspectives on contemporary environmental debates. His multifaceted analysis explains how the Amazon became the object of geopolitical rivalries, state planning, media coverage, popular fascination, and social conflict. In need of rubber, a vital war material, the United States spent millions of dollars to revive the Amazon's rubber trade. In the name of development and national security, Brazilian officials implemented public programs to engineer the hinterland's transformation. Migrants from Brazil's drought-stricken Northeast flocked to the Amazon in search of work. In defense of traditional ways of life, longtime Amazon residents sought to temper outside intervention. Garfield's environmental history offers an integrated analysis of the struggles among distinct social groups over resources and power in the Amazon, as well as the repercussions of those wartime conflicts in the decades to come.

About this title

About the Author

Seth Garfield is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988, also published by Duke University Press.

From the Back Cover

American Encounters/Global Interactions aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and deconstruction of cultural and political borders, the fluid meaning of intercultural encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local. American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historian of U. S. international relations and area studies specialists. The series encourages scholarship based on multi-archive historical research. At the same time, it supports a recognition of the representational character of all stories about the past and promotes critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the process, American Encounters strives to understand the context in which meanings related to nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, challenged, and reshaped.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

IN SEARCH OF THE AMAZON

BRAZIL, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE NATURE OF A REGION

By SETH GARFIELD

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5585-4

Contents

Acronyms...................................................................
ix
Acknowledgments............................................................
xi
Introduction The Reappearing Amazon........................................
1
Chapter 1 Border and Progress: The Amazon and the Estado Novo..............
9
Chapter 2 "The Quicksands of Untrustworthy Supply": U.S. Rubber Dependency 
and the Lure of the Amazon.................................................
49
Chapter 3 Rubber's "Soldiers": Reinventing the Amazonian Worker............
86
Chapter 4 The Environment of Northeastern Migration to the Amazon: 
Landscapes, Labor, and Love................................................
127
Chapter 5 War in the Amazon: Struggles over Resources and Images...........
170
Epilogue From Wartime Soldiers to Green Guerrillas.........................
213
Notes......................................................................
229
Bibliography...............................................................
303
Index......................................................................
333

CHAPTER 1

BORDER AND PROGRESS

The Amazon and the Estado Novo

In 1941, U.S. historian Hubert Herring noted the Amazon's capacityto stir nationalist sentiment in Brazil. While residents ofthe more industrial states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and RioGrande do Sul looked upon the rest of Brazil with condescension,he affirmed, they exhibited "indulgent imperial pride in theuncharted Amazon empire." Three years later, geographer EarlParker Hanson made a similar observation. Whereas elites onceshunned discussion of the Amazon because it conjured imagesof a nation consisting largely of "vast jungled wildernesses, filledwith poisonous insects and unpleasantly savage Indians," manyhad since decided that "there is the future South America."

Such "pride" in the Amazon's "future" had been nurtured. Indeed,the nationalization of the Amazon "question" represents oneof the dramatic transformations in twentieth-century Brazilianpolitics. Its origins can be traced to the first government of GetúlioVargas (1930–45), and particularly to the authoritarian period ofthe Estado Novo (1937–45), when the rehabilitation of Amazoniamorphed from a localized oligarchic longing into a state-backedcrusade. While the economic nationalism of the Vargas regimehas been extensively explored, this chapter examines the effortsof state officials and elites to promote the regional developmentof the Amazon.

As economists have noted, in a country with one area that isrich and prosperous and another poor and stagnant, the peripheralregion is only likely to attract public investment during periods of extraordinaryprosperity, inflationary excess, or when the promotion of suchgrowth assumes paramount national importance. In 1937, the southernstates of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul accounted formore than half of Brazilian agricultural and industrial production; coffeecomprised 70 percent of Brazil's exports, two-thirds of which camefrom São Paulo. Moreover, residents of southern Brazil tended to viewthe Amazon as a Green Hell, or merely harbored general indifference toextraregional concerns in a continental nation. This chapter analyzes theconfluence of factors that redirected public policies and state investmenttoward the Amazon during the Estado Novo. Rising national and globaldemand for rubber offered new bidders for Amazonian latex. Geopoliticaldoctrines legitimized the military's quest to colonize the Amazon and tapits natural resources. And the Vargas dictatorship, disbanding the legislature,banning political opposition, and blaring official propaganda, upheldthe development of the Amazon as a nationalist imperative. (Perhaps it isno coincidence that another full-blown, state-driven program to developthe Amazon would recur decades later in Brazil under military rule.)

Yet if nature, regions, and nations are produced from the power-ladenstruggles involving discrete human and nonhuman mediators, the taskhere too is to examine their protagonists during the Vargas era. The Amazon'ssocial meanings were delineated by forest biota, whose distribution,extraction, and circulation are discussed more fully in subsequent chapters.Among human mediators, the Amazon's new-found resonance duringthe Estado Novo reflected its embodiment of multiple aspirations in asociety undergoing tumultuous change. Industrialists in southern Brazilfavored access to cheap raw materials, tariffs, and subsidies, while Amazonianproducers and traders clamored for higher prices for forest commodities.Military officials strove to secure national borders and patrioticloyalties, while oligarchs defended local fiefdoms and prerogatives. Sanitariansgroomed robust workers to sustain national development, whileforest peasants resolved to use their bodies as they saw fit. Intellectualssearched for Brazil's organic roots, while technocrats heralded its future.And poor forest dwellers repudiated the lifestyle overhauls and socialstigmatization intrinsic to developmentalist projects. Amidst such cacophony,however, standard refrains sounded. Policymakers and professionalstrumpeted the potential of science, technology, and state planningto remake nature and society in the Amazon. And elite pronouncementscompartmentalized the Amazonian region and the purported cultural lagof its populations, even as the centralization of state power and the expansionof industrial capitalism deepened national integration.

"Taking a Chance" on the Amazon

"Amazonia will be quite a game, but it will be worth it," Vargas's ForeignMinister Oswaldo Aranha reportedly stated. "What is needed is the audacityand imagination of new people accustomed to taking a chance,that is, to win and lose." Indeed, the region's prospective developersconfronted numerous challenges. Socioeconomic, environmental, demographic,and epidemiological factors in the Amazon hindered the flow ofcapital, the rule of law, the control of labor, the extension of social services,and popular identification with the nation-state. An area of roughly1,845,500 square miles, the Brazilian Amazon comprised 54 percent ofnational territory in 1942. Yet its population of between one and a halfand two million, an average density of one inhabitant per square kilometer,represented less than 5 percent of the national total. Geopoliticalthinkers admonished that the Amazon's sparse and dispersed populationimperiled national security when colonial powers ogled tropical lands forraw materials and population resettlement, and neighboring countriesschemed. With scattered rural dwellers combing forests and rivers fortradable commodities and means of subsistence, Amazonian employershowled of a labor "shortage" that crimped exports and agricultural surpluses,stalled transport and public works, and inflated urban salaries.And Brazilian statesmen bemoaned their inability to harness the Amazon'svast natural resources.

The Amazon's economic stability and long-term growth, moreover,seemed forever hostage to cycles of commodity booms and busts, seasonalharvesting of forest products, mobility of labor, and dependencyon imports of food and consumer goods. As Agnello Bittencourt notedin his survey of the state of Amazonas (1925):

The economic life of Amazonas is based on the extraction of forestproducts, chiefly rubber and Brazil nuts. The commercial and financialactivity of the State is always dependent on the prices of thesecommodities, which are, for their part, at the mercy of speculativeschemes and other unforeseeable circumstances.

When rubber prices dropped, workers abandoned the properties, commercialfirms collapsed, and public finances contracted. But when theyrebounded, "everything comes to life again: ships that had been dockedload up with merchandise and passengers; businesses hire new employees;imports increase as do customs receipts; and new buildings andother urban improvements crop up in Manaus, where life pulsates in thestreets, the theaters, the schools, and the business firms."

The region's stark socioeconomic and racial stratification furtherclouded the Vargas regime's vision of development with social justice. Observersspoke of two classes in the Amazon. An urban elite of largely Portuguese,Middle Eastern, and Sephardic Jewish descent possessed tradegoods, ships, docks, warehouses, and processing mills; in the countryside,(absentee) landlords claimed the most accessible territories alongthe rivers in vast, uncultivated holdings that extended far beyond legalproperty lines. The other class consisted of peasants, whose fight withthe forest environment was "very direct and very severe." Tied by debt tolandlords and merchants, they relied on subsistence and the extractionof scattered natural resources to acquire commercial goods under highlyunfavorable terms of exchange. This class also included small farmersrelegated to far-off, meandering channels (igarapés) and burdened byusurious terms of credit, punitive taxes, and lack of formal land title.In the Amazon's urban centers, the underclass aggregated throngs ofdomestic servants, stevedores, washerwomen, prostitutes, vendors, beggars,and jacks-of-all-trades. The poor were largely nonwhite, made upof caboclos of indigenous and mestizo origin, and northeastern migrantsand their descendants; the 1940 census classified more than 50 percentof the Amazon's population as pardo, or "brown."

Insalubrious conditions, deriving principally from poverty and lackof infrastructure, perpetuated a vicious cycle in the region. Malaria,dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis, yaws, leprosy, leishmaniasis, filariasis,venereal disease, and nutritional deficiencies afflicted residents, felledmigrants, and repelled investors. Western medical care, best in Belémand Manaus—the capitals of Pará and Amazonas with respective populationsof 250,000 and 90,000—eluded most locales; populations scatteredover vast territories with slow forms of transportation relied onbotanical medicines and an irregular supply of overpriced, and oftenadulterated, drugs. In Amazon towns, the common practice of drinkingfrom polluted rivers, due to the lack of running water and the challengeof building wells where the water table was too high, served to transmitintestinal parasites; shallow wells often became contaminated by latrinesor provided breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

While rivers served as the conduits for trade, settlement, and communicationin the Amazon (see figure 1.1), seasonal variations in waterlevels and the presence of rapids on numerous waterways increased thehardships of transport and the cost of production and consumer goods.On the main artery of the Amazon, ocean-going ships drawing twentyfeet can reach the city of Manaus. But tributaries east of the Madeirariver are interrupted by rapids within 200 miles of the main trunk; thoseto its west, such as the rubber-rich Purus and Juruá rivers, accommodatelarger boats in upriver regions only during the rainy season fromNovember-December to April-May. Thus, a 2,395-mile trip from Manausto Cruzeiro do Sul, near the Peruvian border, of thirty days in highriver might take up to three months in the dry season, as upriver captains,consigned to flat-bottom boats, motor launches, and canoes, dodgedsandbars. Moreover, lack of scheduled transport, overcrowded vessels,fuel shortages, and frequent stops for firewood chronically delayed travel,while commercial shipping monopolies inflated costs and offered spottyprovisions. For the third-class passengers crammed in hammocks onthe bottom decks of the larger steamboats, transport entailed sharingspace with livestock, which in the absence of ice were carried alive andkilled on board as needed, producing a "choice collection of smells."figure 1.1 Aerial view of Amazon region, c. 1943. Source: National Archives.

For nationalists, the "conquest" of the Amazon stood yet as a taunt toBrazilian character. In the Northern Hemisphere, environmental deterministtheories condemned hot climates for ingraining indolence andinflaming passion over reason. Alternatively, detractors who attributedtropical "backwardness" to race, religion, or culture insisted that only"men from the Mississippi would make things hum along the Amazonand the Paraná"; or yearned that "when the great valleys of the Amazonand Congo are occupied by a white population more food will be producedthan in all the rest of the inhabited world." Small wonder, withnational character on trial, that anthropologist Gilberto Freyre extolledthe Brazilian military's initiatives to promote colonization of the hinterlandas confirmation of "the capacity of mestiço populations (as is ours,in its majority) to accomplish in tropical lands superior achievements."

The Vargas government's project for the Amazon entailed the rationalizationof the rubber trade and the expansion of commercial agriculture,subsidized migration, improvements in sanitation, public health, andtransportation, and militarization of the hinterland. Upholding Enlightenmentbeliefs in the perfectibility of peoples and places through science,Brazil's expanding professional sectors and bureaucratic apparatusvowed that out of vast jungle would emerge orderly landscapes, market-orientedproducers, and hearty patriots. Through public discourse andpolitical spectacle the regime stoked popular interest and national pridein the Amazon's potential.

Remaking Amazonia: A Centuries-Long State Ambition

Four centuries after Europeans first descended the Amazon river, Brazilianstate officials still struggled to exert control over the basin's humanand natural resources. In 1542, Francisco de Orellana, a conquistador ofPeru searching for the fabled lands of El Dorado, had led the first bandof Europeans down the great river, which they named "Amazonas" followinga purported attack by indigenous female warriors reminiscentof classical legend. Although Spain claimed the Amazon under theTreaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which divided New World dominions betweenthe Iberian monarchies, over the next centuries the Portuguesemoved to control the estuary of the river and to extend their dominionover the basin. Lisbon's success was facilitated by geographic advantage:the Portuguese gained access to the region through the Amazon River'smouth and Atlantic seaborne trade, whereas Spaniards had to confrontthe rugged Andean mountains and dense jungle before reaching navigablerivers. Based on claims of prior occupation, achieved principallythrough the establishment of forts and missions, the Portuguese acquiredformal rights to Amazonian territory from Spain under the Treatyof Madrid of 1750. The new colonial boundaries of the Iberian kingdomsin the Amazon—delineated according to patterns of European occupation,geographic features, and waterways—were established by the Treatyof San Ildefonso of 1777.

During the colonial period, Amazonian populations and resourceswere linked to global trade through the export of drogas do sertão, an assortmentof botanicals collected in the wild by indigenous peoples andprized by Europeans as condiments and curatives. The most lucrativeNew World plantation crops, however, such as sugar, cotton, tobacco,cacao, and coffee, grew better in drier and more temperate climates,while Amazonia's poor soils, seasonal flooding, lush vegetation, and aggressivepathogens generally confounded Europeans. Chronic shortageof capital precluded large-scale importation of African slaves, leavingsettlers overwhelmingly reliant on indigenous labor.

John Hemming has estimated the population of lowland Amazonia atbetween four and five million in 1500—of whom three million were inpresent-day Brazil. Comprising over four hundred different peoples, aboriginalsocieties in the Amazon were marked by extensive settlementsand fairly sedentary lifestyles. They cultivated manioc, a tuber high incarbohydrates, on the terra firme, where most of the land is of low fertilityand deficient in animal life. They also relied on animal capture, fishing,and agriculture on the várzea, the alluvial forest that is annually renewedby rich silt from the Andes (and which comprises only roughly 2 percentof the entire Amazon basin). Cultivation on the várzea—althoughtricky due to the unpredictable flooding of crops, and compromised bythe reduction in protein supplies during the high-water season whenfish swim inland, birds fly north, and egg-laying turtles disappear—waspracticable with large labor reserves. But in 1743, when French scientistCharles-Marie de La Condamine sailed (unauthorized) down theAmazon, he found hundreds of miles of uninhabited stretches along itsbanks. Epidemics, warfare, and enslavement had decimated the indigenouspopulations during the intervening years. Moreover, the introductionof European goods and the extraction of forest products for exportupended traditional native subsistence patterns. Reorienting the Amazonianeconomy toward systematic commercialization of natural resources,European colonialism and Atlantic trade engendered new harvestingstrategies, residential patterns, and forms of spatial distributionfor native populations.

Portuguese officials, like countless subsequent outsiders, dreamed ofmaking better use of people and places in the Amazon. The "Law of Liberties"of 1755, issued by Portuguese Secretary of State Sebastião José deCarvalho e Mello (better known as the Marquis of Pombal), abolished indigenousslavery and stripped missionaries of temporal power over nativecommunities, which were placed under the tutelage of a (white) director.Seeking to forge a racially integrated and European-style peasantry in theAmazon, Pombal's reforms barred legal discrimination against Indiansand peoples of mixed race and rewarded marital unions between Luso-Brazilianmen and indigenous women in an attempt to promote longtermsettlement. Yet Pombal's efforts to overhaul the Amazon foundered.Under the Directorate (1758–98), indigenous peoples continuedto be mobilized to collect drogas do sertão; to paddle canoes and transportcargoes; to work on the construction of forts, public works, and inshipyards; and to perform labor for settlers for derisory compensation orunder outright duress. Whereas an estimated thirty thousand Indianslived under direct colonial control in the Amazon at the start of the Directorate,forty years later the population had plummeted to nineteenthousand because of disease, overwork, and flight.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082235585X
• ISBN 13: 9780822355854
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368