In Search of the Amazon

Front matter

In Search of the AMAZON

BRAZIL, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE NATURE OF A REGION ares ASDA Mai nee

SETH GARFIELD

Index

ACA

BASA

BCB

BEW

CAETA

CNG

CNS

DIP

DNI

FBC

IAN

IBGE

IFOCS

IPEN

ACRONYMS

Associação Comercial do Amazonas (Trade Association of Amazonas)

Banco da Amazônia (Bank of Amazonia) Banco de Crédito da Borracha (Rubber Credit Bank) Board of Economic Warfare

Comissão Administrativa do Encaminhamento de Trabalhadores para a Amazônia (Administrative Commission for the Forwarding of Workers to Amazonia)

Conselho Nacional de Geografia (National Geography Council)

Conselho Nacional de Seringueiros (National Council of Rubber Tappers)

Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (Department of Press and Propaganda)

Departamento Nacional de Imigração (National Department of Immigration)

Fundação Brasil Central (Central Brazil Foundation)

Instituto Agronômico do Norte (Northern Agronomic Institute)

Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics)

Inspetoria Federal de Obras Contra as Secas (Federal Inspectorate of Works to Combat Drought)

Instituto de Patologia Experimental do Norte (Northern Institute of Experimental Pathology)

IRRC

OIAA

RDC

REC

RRC

SAVA

SEMTA

SESP

SNAPP

SPVEA

SUDAM

International Rubber Regulation Committee Office of Inter-American Affairs

Rubber Development Corporation Reconstruction Finance Corporation Rubber Reserve Company

Superintendência de Abastecimento do Vale Amazônico (Superintendency of Supplies for the Amazon)

Serviço Especial de Mobilização de Trabalhadores para a Amazônia (Special Service for the Mobilization of Workers for the Amazon)

Serviço Especial de Saúde Pública (Special Public Health Service)

Serviço de Navegação na Amazônia e Administração do Porto do Pará (Amazon Navigation and Port Authority Service) Superintendência do Plano de Valorização Econômica da Amazônia (Superintendency for the Amazon Economic Valorization Plan) Superintendência do Desenvolvimento da Amazônia (Superintendency for the Development of Amazonia)

x Acronyms

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for and publication of this book would not have been possible without generous institutional funding. For assistance in conducting archival fieldwork and completing the manuscript, I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Faculty Fellowship in Latin American Studies, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the American Historical Association. At the University of Texas at Austin, I received fellowships from the Institute for Historical Studies, the Faculty Research Assignment, the Summer Research Assignment, and the Department of History’s Scholarly Activities Grant.

In undertaking a research project that spans multiple regions in two countries, I have accrued debts of gratitude to individuals in far-flung places. Their knowledge, generosity, and patience enabled me to gain access to archival material, exchange ideas, and find my way in new surroundings. For assistance in conducting research in Fortaleza, I wish to thank Frederico Castro de Neves, Glaubia Cristiane Arruda Silva, Pedro Eymar Barbosa Costa, and Martha Santos. In Manaus, Luis Balkar Sá Peixoto Pinheiro allowed me to consult the J. G. Araújo collection at the Museu Amazônico; Hilma Reis Kouyoumiji patiently tended to me at the library of the Associação Comerical do Amazonas; and Marcio Souza took a deep interest in my work and placed me in contact with researchers at the Universidade Federal do Amazonas. In Belém, Geraldo Mártires Coelho offered a warm welcome, while

Marianne and Roberto Eliasquevici graciously opened their doors to me. In Porto Velho, Nilza Menezes and her staff deserve particular kudos for organizing and administering the computerized database of legal cases at the Centro de Documentação Histórica do Tribunal de Justiça de Rondônia. I would also like to express my gratitude to historian Valdir Aparecido de Souza, who guided me while I was in Porto Velho. In Rio Branco, I was fortunate to count on the collegiality of historian Francisco Pereira Costa. At the Museu da Borracha, Suziane Alves de Farias facilitated access to visual images and the reproduction of photographic material. At the Arquivo Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, Satiro Ferreira Nunes and Katia Borges provided very useful assistance. And for my stay in Princeton, I wish to thank my aunt, Lilian Minzer, for her hospitality and the challenging games of Scrabble.

Over the years, various colleagues and friends have provided letters of support, responded to academic queries, or offered professional guidance, and I wish to thank them for their generosity. They include George Reid Andrews, Cecilia Azevedo, Peter Beattie, Martin Berger, Leopoldo Bernucci, André Vieira de Campos, Matt Childs, Emilia Viotti da Costa, Ana Daou, Cynthia Gladstone, Regina Horta Duarte, Marshall Eakin, Priscila Faulhaber, Paulo Fontes, Alexandre Fortes, Jane Frank, Carlos Augusto Rocha Freire, John French, Greg Grandin, James Green, Francisco Foot Hardman, Susanna Hecht, Thomas Holloway, Gil Joseph, Mary Junqueira, Jeffrey Lesser, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Isabel Lustosa, Frank McCann, John Monteiro, Jodo José Reis, Stuart Schwartz, Gabriela Scotto, Louise Silberling, Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Barbara Sommer, Mauricio Tenorio, and Alan Tully. I offer special heartfelt thanks to Barbara Weinstein for her meticulous reading of my manuscript and her unstinting collegiality.

At the University of Texas at Austin, I have been fortunate to have wonderful colleagues. I particularly wish to acknowledge Jonathan Brown, Erika Bsumek, Virginia Burnett, Susan Deans-Smith, Neil Kamil, Denise Spellberg, and Ann Twinam. Geographer Gregory Knapp has also offered important feedback on my work. I thank as well Charles R. Hale, the director of the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, as well as former directors Bryan Roberts and Nicolas Shumway, for inviting me to serve as the Institute’s undergraduate faculty adviser. The dedicated staff at the Benson Latin American Collection facilitates access to an extraordinary selection of materials on Brazil: a special commendation goes to Brazilianist Ann Hartness, former director of the library; David Block, xii Acknowledgments the associate director of the library and the Latin American studies bibliographer; and Jorge Salinas, library assistant. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to a number of current and former graduate students in Latin American history and geography at the University of Texas for assisting me with my research: Felipe Cruz, Matthew Gildner, Christopher Heaney, Elizabeth O’Brien, Evan Ross, David Salisbury, and Edward Shore.

At Duke University Press, I am indebted to Valerie Millholland and Gisela Fosado for their dedication to my manuscript, and to Heather Hensley for the book design. I thank Gilbert Joseph and Emily Rosenberg for including my book in the American Encounters/Global Interactions series. I would also like to acknowledge the contributions of cartographer George Chakvetadze.

For their love and kindness, I thank my parents, Jack and Lyla Garfield. While I was growing up, they encouraged me to take paths less traveled, and I consider myself blessed to be their son. My in-laws, Rosa and Henrique Flanzer, have shown utmost carinho during my visits to Rio de Janeiro. I am grateful to my wife, Vivian Flanzer, for her love and support, and an integrity and resolve that continue to inspire me. I dedicate this book to my two daughters, Marina and Ana Clara, the lights of my life.

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction

THE REAPPEARING AMAZON uxuriant, sublime, forbidding, denuded: images ofthe Amazon L arrest the beholder. Yet the Amazon enthralls us through more than its physical wonders. Its power is a social product, forged by people and institutions that have made material and symbolic investments in the region.’ This book examines an array of mediators in Brazil and the United States that delineated the nature of the Amazon during the twentieth century. Focused on the era of the Second World War, this study explores how conflicts raging within and over the Brazilian Amazon came to shape landscapes and lifeways in the region. It offers an analysis of the political and environmental history of the Brazilian Amazon as much as a reflection on shifting cultural representations of its nature.

The Brazilian Amazon, which comprises between 70 and 80 percent of the total area of the Basin, has long been knotted in disputes over labor, resources, and meaning. As forester Roy Nash aptly stated in The Conquest of Brazil (1926): “Many things the tropical forest has meant to as many men. To the Indian, abundant home. To the convict turned adrift by the early Portuguese, abominable hell.”?

More broadly, we might argue, for peasantextractivists and traders, the forest has presented the battleground or backdrop for struggles over sustenance and power. For outside promoters, proper use of the tropical forest promises to rescue societies from doom or disenchantment. For skeptics, the jungle defies remediation. Mirroring the broader Western oscillation between triumph and despair in imagining human capacity to transform nature, such visions in the tropics invariably enlist hierarchies of race and nation.” The Amazon’s vast geographic expanse, dense forests, and fitful integration into global markets have triggered and prolonged such conflicts and controversies.

During the twentieth century, the Amazon came to be summoned by a large number and range of contestants in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.* The expansion of state power, population growth, and rising demand for raw materials redefined notions of economic need and national security. Industrialization fueled the expansion of cities and mass markets, while new technologies fired urban elites’ faith in the capacity to vanquish space, distance, and time. Agricultural mechanization and land commodification displaced millions of rural smallholders. Policymakers and professional sectors identified or recast socioenvironmental problems in national or global terms, pitching solutions in the language of science and public planning. Mass media beamed news and images to far-flung consumers, and broader swaths of the population demanded the rights of citizenship. Amidst wrenching societal transformations, competing human designs on the Amazon proliferated.

As a hinterland, the Amazon challenged the competence of the Brazilian state to achieve governability and national integration. As a borderland, it crystallized geopolitical concerns with territorial defense. As a resource-rich land, the Amazon became increasingly entwined with patterns of capital investment in Brazil and trends in global consumption. As a promised land, it beckoned economic migrants, drought refugees, and adventurers. As a homeland, Amazonian landscapes comprised sites of concerted human intervention, founts of historical reference and environmental knowledge, and loci of conflicts over resources and power. As a tropical lowland, the Amazon was marked as much by distinct ecosystems as invidious canards about race, place, and national character.

Indeed, the varied delimitations of the Brazilian Amazon, reflective of disparate biogeographic and political-administrative criteria, illustrate the multiple perspectives of institutional and disciplinary fields. The hydrographic basin of the Brazilian Amazon encompasses the geographic region drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. The Amazonian biome comprises a set of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems that include tropical forests, floodplain forests, grasslands, savannas, mangroves, and palm forests. The “classic” Amazon is a geographic and political division comprising the six states of the northern region— Para, Amazonas, Roraima, Rondônia, Acre, and Amapá — where tropical rain forest predomi-

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Map Intro.1 Legal Amazon nates. The “Legal Amazon,” a federally created administrative unit dating to 1953, has extended the geographic boundaries of “classic” Amazonia by more than one-third through the incorporation of western Maranhão and the northern portions of Mato Grosso and Goiás (today the state of Tocantins)’ (see map Intro.1).

This book approaches the field of political ecology in the Amazon as a study in conflicts over the use, rights, and definition of territory and resources among distinct social groups.” While recognizing the fundamental material basis to such struggles, the book also explores the symbolic and affective relationships that groups maintain with the biophysical environment.’ Building on the concept of a “commodity ecumene,” which anthropologist Arjun Appadurai defines as the “transcultural network of relationships linking producers, distributors, and consumers of a particular commodity or set of commodities,” this study highlights how landscapes, politics, and things are constituted through such flows, processes, and interconnections.” Midway between the turn-of-the-century rubber boom and the contemporary environmental fracas, the wartime history of the Brazilian Amazon reveals the multiple mediations and networks that served to constitute the diverse region.

Of Jungle Explorers and Historians: Stories and Methods

Jungle explorers revel in recounting their arduous journeys, so I follow in their footsteps in enumerating the difficulties of writing a history of the Amazon. My tale is devoid of hair-raising brushes with piranhas, anacondas, stingrays, malarial mosquitoes, and treacherous rapids that comprise the standard fare of such accounts. Rather, as a historian, the greatest challenges that I encountered stemmed from social conditions in the Amazon, which pose particular problems for historical record-keeping and research, and consolidation of a historiographical canon." In places where state power and capital falter, impunity flourishes, and humidity rules, archival material often ends up being poorly preserved and spotty (in both senses of the word).

Yet the Amazon has always fit uncomfortably into Brazilian historiography for epistemological reasons as well. Peripheral to the eastern slaveplantations that propelled colonial integration into Atlantic markets and to the import-substitution industrialization that fuelled economic growth in twentieth-century Brazil, the Amazon seemingly confounds the grand narratives of empire and the nation-state—the muses of History. Nor has the study of frontiers and borders coalesced as a specialized field in Brazilian historiography to situate the history of the Amazon in the process of nation-state formation.” In any event, the Amazon’s longstanding integration into the global economy, the spatial fragmentation of its populations due to territorial size and dispersal of resources, and the variegated patchwork that characterize its social history complicate its conceptualization as “a frontier,” if the latter is perceived as modernity erupting uniformly onto an uncharted hinterland.” In addition, the decades-long concentration of Brazil’s doctoral programs in the nation’s southern industrial core consolidated a formidable historiography covering the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro axis, and drained academic talent from the north as well; and the prohibitive airfares from southern Brazil to the Amazon further dissuaded those unblessed with research grants from foreign universities, foundations, and governments.

Amid the so-called nature-culture divide grounding Western ontologies, the Amazon’s academic banishment to the former realm has further deterred, or detoured, historiographical exploration.” It is not for nothing that the natural sciences and the social sciences — particularly geography and anthropology, with their disciplinary origins in the colonialist study of the “organic” rootedness and “primitive” mores of rural populations —have long claimed, and given rise to, the study of the Amazon.” Geographically distant from the centers of political power, economically “underdeveloped,” and environmentally challenging to outsiders, the nature of the Amazon was declaimed a problem by scientific experts, policymakers, and international advocates, rather than a matter for historical inquiry.

Since historians, like jungle explorers, tend to overstate the originality of their discoveries, a number of qualifications are in order for the wary reader. Native sons of the Brazilian Amazon, notably Arthur Cezar Ferreira Reis, Leandro Tocantins, and Samuel Benchimol, were pioneering and prolific chroniclers of the region’s rich history."® Moreover, Brazilian historiography’s early emphasis on boom and bust cycles in national economic development spurred robust scholarship on the Amazon’s legendary turn-of-the-century bonanza.” In a similar fashion, research on the region’s boomlet during the Second World War has flourished over the last decade. And our understanding of recent Amazonian history has been immeasurably enhanced by the groundbreaking work of geographers Bertha Becker and Susanna Hecht and sociologists Marianne Schmink and Charles Wood focusing on government policies, investment from the nation’s core economic regions, and highway construction in the processes of regional formation and integration into the nation-state."

Rather than an integrated analysis of the multiple networks and processes that mutually construct natures and societies, however, much of the existing scholarship on the Amazon has tended to depart from and isolate such poles. Environmental histories of Amazonian biota can obscure the role of labor, social conflict, and representation in the making of nature; or that nature is knowable through the mediation of the sciences, networks of instruments, and the intervention of professions and disciplines.” Social science texts examining the impact of public policies in the Amazon can conceal how the realms of discourse and the content of objects also serve to construct societies. And discourse-centered analyses can overlook that although rhetoric, representation, and semiotics impact things and social contexts, they are not worlds unto themselves.” Thus, whereas scholarship on the Amazon has tended to focus on modes of production and systems of land use, (geo)politics and public policies, or cultural representations, I intertwine these analytical strands to explore the multilevel processes of region making. My conceptualization of the Brazilian Amazon is informed by geographer David Harvey’s insight that places are constructed and experienced as material, ecological artifacts and intricate networks of social relations; are the focus of discursive activity, filled with symbolic and representational meanings; and are the distinctive product of institutionalized social and politicaleconomic power.” I employ intersecting local, regional, national, and global scales to assess the multiple processes involved in the social production of space.”

Practitioners of environmental history, a field traditionally situated at the intersection of natural history and intellectual and cultural history, have examined the role of the environment in shaping human behavior, in shifting human relations with the nonhuman natural world, and in questions of sustainability. Others have explored the material and discursive production of nature, and the political processes that have shaped environmentalism.” My analysis of the Amazon’s history heeds sociologist of science Bruno Latour’s directive that nature and society should not serve as explanatory terms but rather as something that requires a conjoined explanation. Since “nature” cannot be separated from its social representations, and “society” itself has to be made out of nonhuman, nonsocial resources, Latour urges a historical-minded focus on the mediators and networks, composed of associations of humans and nonhumans, that create natures and societies.” In tracking the Amazon’s intermediaries, I examine the region’s laboring classes both as key instruments in the production of nature, through modification of its material base, and as shapers and subjects of public policies and debate.” But I also analyze other collectivities in Brazil and the United States—sanitarians and mosquitoes, doctors and pathogens, engineers and automobiles, journalists and newspapers, filmmakers and movies, botanists and rubber trees, chemists and synthetics, migrants and drought profiteers, ecologists and deforestation—that forged the Amazon during World War II and its aftermath. Thus, my lens shifts from the political and professional strongholds and media outlets in Washington and Rio de Janeiro to the boardrooms and laboratories of the large rubber goods manufacturers; from the highways of the United States to the parched backlands and war-wrecked economies of the Brazilian northeast; from the hardscrabble rubber properties, boom towns, and frontier health posts in the Amazon to the contemporary struggles of tappers and environmental organizations. The making of nature, as much as politics, emerges as a contested process that must be understood outside of conventional geographic and historiographical boundaries.

In exploring the “productive friction of global connections” that have framed the history of the Brazilian Amazon, this study ambles across continents rather than within them.” Although transnational analysis along a north-south axis may seem untoward given the physical dimensions of the Amazon Basin, which spills into eight different South American countries and one overseas territory, the decision stems from the particular story that I wish to tell: one that interlinks the histories of the United States—the place where I live, teach, and much of my readership resides—and Brazil, my country of study. Some may feel that my transnational take on the Amazon is redolent of colonialist literary production, marketed as it was for domestic consumption.”* Or perhaps others will see a response to Eric Wolf’s salutary injunction to uncover “the conjoint participation of Western and non-Western people in this worldwide process” of history—although I prefer less ideologically loaded, and inaccurate, labels to conceptualize the respective histories of the United States and Brazil”? My focus also reflects the challenge of conducting multiarchival, binational research in collections teeming with the documentation characteristic of twentieth-century bureaucracies. Ultimately, if all regions are made up of networks of social linkages and understandings that transcend bounded notions of place, any transnational method can only go so far or deep in narrating the historical past. Of greater importance is that a transnational optic need not jettison region- and nation-based analyses of the historical formations of race, space, class, culture, politics, or nature; nor need specialization in any historical subfield restrict practitioners to a singular methodology or research agenda.

Through a composite of synchronic snapshots, multisited in nature and often thick in descriptive content, this book focuses on an array of war-era mediators involved in the making of the Amazon, bearing in mind that “what are called environments, that is relations between people and nature, get made and remade not so much in the plans but in the process.”*º Chapter 1 examines the coterie of white-collar professionals, military officials, intellectuals, and traditional oligarchs in Brazil who endeavored to remake populations and landscapes in the Amazon during the first Vargas regime (1930-45). Chapter 2 traces the origins and objectives of U.S. government investment in the wartime Amazon, precipitated by the nation’s loss of 92 percent of its rubber supply following the Japanese invasion of the Malayan peninsula in early 1942. Chapter 3 explores how Brazilian and U.S. policymakers sought to transform the local terms and meanings of forest labor, recasting the Amazon as an arsenal for hemispheric defense and a laboratory for social uplift. Chapter 4 analyzes the socioenvironmental factors that led tens of thousands to migrate from northeastern Brazil to the Amazon during the war. Chapter 5 assesses the varied wartime outcomes and historical legacies in and for the Amazon region. The epilogue, tacking from the 1970s through the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development of 1992, charts the Amazon's political reappearance as global ecological sanctuary, highlighting both historical links and counterpoints to the war era.

While introductions to contemporary accounts of the Amazon often begin by rattling off a list of superlatives that seemingly provide readers with definitive answers, this one closes with them to pose fundamental questions. At 2,700,000 square miles, the Amazon Basin is threequarters the size of the continental United States, and a million square miles larger than all of Europe exclusive of Russia. Covering two-fifths of South America and three-fifths of Brazil, the Amazon Basin contains one-fifth of the planet's available fresh water, one-third of its evergreen broad-leaved forest resources, and one-tenth of its living species. The Amazon River, the longest in the world (at 4,255 miles) and the most voluminous, has some 1,100 tributaries, seven of which are over 1,000 miles long. And the Amazon's forests, with rainfall averages of 2,300 millimeters (7.5 feet) per year, represent, along with the adjacent Orinoco and Guyanas, over half the world's surviving tropical rain forests.” Shall we now ask: Who has brought such inventories to light? Why have the realities that they represent carried diverse social meanings? How has their significance evolved over time?

CHAPTER 1 The Amazon and the Estado Novo

| 1941, U.S. historian Hubert Herring noted the Amazon's capacity to stir nationalist sentiment in Brazil. While residents of the more industrial states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Sul looked upon the rest of Brazil with condescension, he affirmed, they exhibited “indulgent imperial pride in the uncharted Amazon empire”! Three years later, geographer Earl Parker Hanson made a similar observation. Whereas elites once shunned discussion of the Amazon because it conjured images of a nation consisting largely of “vast jungled wildernesses, filled with poisonous insects and unpleasantly savage Indians” many had since decided that “there is the future South America.”?

Such “pride” in the Amazon's “future” had been nurtured. Indeed, the nationalization ofthe Amazon “question” represents one of the dramatic transformations in twentieth-century Brazilian politics. Its origins can be traced to the first government of Getúlio Vargas (1930-45), and particularly to the authoritarian period of the Estado Novo (1937-45), when the rehabilitation of Amazonia morphed from a localized oligarchic longing into a state-backed crusade. While the economic nationalism of the Vargas regime has been extensively explored, this chapter examines the efforts of state officials and elites to promote the regional development of the Amazon.’

As economists have noted, in a country with one area that is rich and prosperous and another poor and stagnant, the peripheral region is only likely to attract public investment during periods of extraordinary prosperity, inflationary excess, or when the promotion of such growth assumes paramount national importance In 1937, the southern states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul accounted for more than half of Brazilian agricultural and industrial production; coffee comprised 70 percent of Brazil’s exports, two-thirds of which came from São Paulo? Moreover, residents of southern Brazil tended to view the Amazon as a Green Hell, or merely harbored general indifference to extraregional concerns in a continental nation.º This chapter analyzes the confluence of factors that redirected public policies and state investment toward the Amazon during the Estado Novo. Rising national and global demand for rubber offered new bidders for Amazonian latex. Geopolitical doctrines legitimized the military’s quest to colonize the Amazon and tap its natural resources. And the Vargas dictatorship, disbanding the legislature, banning political opposition, and blaring official propaganda, upheld the development of the Amazon as a nationalist imperative. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that another full-blown, state-driven program to develop the Amazon would recur decades later in Brazil under military rule.)

Yet if nature, regions, and nations are produced from the power-laden struggles involving discrete human and nonhuman mediators, the task here too is to examine their protagonists during the Vargas era.” The Amazon’s social 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 during the Estado Novo reflected its embodiment of multiple aspirations in a society undergoing tumultuous change. Industrialists in southern Brazil favored access to cheap raw materials, tariffs, and subsidies, while Amazonian producers and traders clamored for higher prices for forest commodities.* Military officials strove to secure national borders and patriotic loyalties, while oligarchs defended local fiefdoms and prerogatives. Sanitarians groomed robust workers to sustain national development, while forest peasants resolved to use their bodies as they saw fit. Intellectuals searched for Brazil's organic roots, while technocrats heralded its future.” And poor forest dwellers repudiated the lifestyle overhauls and social stigmatization intrinsic to developmentalist projects. Amidst such cacophony, however, standard refrains sounded. Policymakers and professionals trumpeted the potential of science, technology, and state planning to remake nature and society in the Amazon. And elite pronouncements compartmentalized the Amazonian region and the purported cultural lag ofits populations, even as the centralization of state power and the expansion of 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 Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha reportedly stated. “What is needed is the audacity and imagination of new people accustomed to taking a chance, that is, to win and lose.” Indeed, the region's prospective developers confronted numerous challenges. Socioeconomic, environmental, demographic, and epidemiological factors in the Amazon hindered the flow of capital, the rule of law, the control of labor, the extension of social services, and popular identification with the nation-state. An area of roughly 1,845,500 square miles, the Brazilian Amazon comprised 54 percent of national territory in 1942. Yet its population of between one and a half and two million, an average density of one inhabitant per square kilometer, represented less than 5 percent of the national total. Geopolitical thinkers admonished that the Amazon’s sparse and dispersed population imperiled national security when colonial powers ogled tropical lands for raw materials and population resettlement, and neighboring countries schemed. With scattered rural dwellers combing forests and rivers for tradable commodities and means of subsistence, Amazonian employers howled 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’s vast natural resources.

The Amazon’s economic stability and long-term growth, moreover, seemed forever hostage to cycles of commodity booms and busts, seasonal harvesting of forest products, mobility of labor, and dependency on imports of food and consumer goods. As Agnello Bittencourt noted in his survey of the state of Amazonas (1925):

The economic life of Amazonas is based on the extraction of forest products, chiefly rubber and Brazil nuts. The commercial and financial activity of the State is always dependent on the prices of these commodities, which are, for their part, at the mercy of speculative schemes and other unforeseeable circumstances.

When rubber prices dropped, workers abandoned the properties, commercial firms collapsed, and public finances contracted. But when they rebounded, “everything comes to life again: ships that had been docked load up with merchandise and passengers; businesses hire new employees; imports increase as do customs receipts; and new buildings and other urban improvements crop up in Manaus, where life pulsates in the streets, the theaters, the schools, and the business firms.”!*

The region's stark socioeconomic and racial stratification further clouded the Vargas regime’s vision of development with social justice. Observers spoke of two classes in the Amazon. An urban elite of largely Portuguese, Middle Eastern, and Sephardic Jewish descent possessed trade goods, ships, docks, warehouses, and processing mills; in the countryside, (absentee) landlords claimed the most accessible territories along the rivers in vast, uncultivated holdings that extended far beyond legal property lines.” The other class consisted of peasants, whose fight with the forest environment was “very direct and very severe.” Tied by debt to landlords and merchants, they relied on subsistence and the extraction of scattered natural resources to acquire commercial goods under highly unfavorable terms of exchange. This class also included small farmers relegated to far-off, meandering channels (igarapés) and burdened by usurious terms of credit, punitive taxes, and lack of formal land title.” In the Amazon’s urban centers, the underclass aggregated throngs of domestic servants, stevedores, washerwomen, prostitutes, vendors, beggars, and jacks-of-all-trades.” The poor were largely nonwhite, made up of caboclos of indigenous and mestizo origin, and northeastern migrants and their descendants; the 1940 census classified more than 50 percent of the Amazon’s population as pardo, or “brown.”?º