- The progressive decline of the rubber boom gave way to new extractivist interests. In the case of Brazil, a new boom was led by the Brazilian nut commerce. However, rubber became again essential for tire manufacturing during World War II.
- While in 1941, the Vargas administration maintained neutrality, selling Amazon rubber to Nazi Germany, once it became a US ally in 1942, Brazil guaranteed Americans the provision of rubber, in part by subsidizing the recruitment of rubber tappers and financing infrastructure, including both airfields and road networks.
- After Peru’s rubber boom had passed, successive governments promoted European migration. In Pasco, European settlers from Germany and Austria established the first coffee production landscapes in the country.
The period between the end of the rubber boom and the onset of the colonisation frenzy that began in the 1960s was a time of relative stasis in the Amazon. The governments negotiated the final configuration of their international borders with a series of treaties that formalised the facts-on-the-ground that had been established during the rubber boom. Amazonian rubber production did not disappear, at least not in Brazil, where the government subsidised an industry that employed tens of thousands of individuals. Revenues fell from US$ 2.8 billion in 1910 to less than US$ 175 million by 1925, while domestic consumption stabilised at between 15,000 and 20,000 tons per year.
Most of the migrants stayed and adapted to their new home. The collapse in the price of rubber coincided with an increase in demand for the Castanha do Para. Known in international commerce as the Brazil nut, it became popular in the United States in the 1920s, when families included it as a treat in the traditional Christmas stocking. Although harvests could be quite variable (Figure 6.6), the duopoly provided seringueiros with a level of economic security and probably avoided a mass exodus. Between 1910 and 1920, the population of Pará fell by only about 10% (50,000), but it increased by 30% in Acre (18,000) and 1.5% in Amazonas (5,000). The population stabilized at about 1.4 million in the five jurisdictions of the Northern Region until the next major geopolitical event that changed its future.
The second rubber boom (1941–1945)
The survival of non-Indigenous forest communities enormously facilitated the rejuvenation of rubber supply chains at the onset of World War II, when the loss of British Malaya cut off access to rubber plantations. This created a grave risk for the United States and its allies, as rubber was essential for the manufacture of tens of millions of tyres for military vehicles and aeroplanes. In 1941, Brazil was governed by Getúlio Vargas, an authoritarian who had adopted a position of neutrality while facilitating the sale of Amazonian rubber to Nazi Germany. The US entry into the war was preceded by a diplomatic campaign that led to the Washington Accords of 1942, which enlisted Brazil as an ally, committed the United States to defend Brazil and guaranteed the provision of rubber, in part by subsidising the recruitment of rubber tappers and financing infrastructure, including both airfields and road networks.
The Vargas administration established the Serviço Especial de Mobilização de Trabalhadores para a Amazônia (SEMTA), which blanketed the once again drought-stricken Northeast with recruiting stations to enlist ‘rubber soldiers’ (soldados da borracha). Originally conceived as a scheme to recruit young adult males, it soon included whole families, because authorities realized a family-based policy would give it stability and permanence. It was a chaotic process fueled by cash advances, haphazard logistics and accusations of fraud. Eventually, 55,000 Nordestinos would be transported into the Amazon. Desertion was common, as recruits dropped out in Manaus and Belem to pursue other opportunities. Some 10% reportedly succumbed to malaria and other diseases.
Many of the new migrants were sent to Acre and adjacent areas of Amazonas and Rondônia, which continued to be the largest source of rubber within Brazil. The long economic recession had loosened the power of the seringalistas, who now treated their seringueiros not as contract employees tethered by debt, but as leaseholders who could elect to obtain supplies from itinerant merchants via a modified system of aviamento. The increased freedom led to the organization of forest communities, referred to as colocações, which functioned as a type of informal communal enterprise. This cultural milieu eventually coalesced into the social movement (Sindical dos Trabalhadores Rurais no Acre) led by Francisco Alves Mendes Filho (Chico Mendes) and Marina da Silva, both of whom were children of Nordestinos raised in colocações. The concept of communal territories, pioneered by the seringueiros of Acre, was eventually formalised and expanded into an Amazon-wide system of extractive reserves in both the protected area system (ICMBio) and the agrarian reform agency (INCRA).
The second rubber boom, which also included Bolivia, was short-lived and, as soon as the war was over, the American soldiers left, abandoning millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and supplies to local entrepreneurs who knew nobody was coming back to claim ownership. More importantly, the war highlighted the strategic value of the Amazon and motivated President Vargas to create two new federal territories: Guapore, now Rondônia, and Rio Branco, now Roraima. He also founded two institutions that would finance the transformation of the Amazon in the last half of the twentieth century: the Banco de Crédito da Borracha (now the Banco da Amazônia – BASA) and the Superintendência do Plano de Valorização Econômica da Amazônia (now the Superintendência do Desenvolvimento da Amazônia – SUDAM).
Mato Grosso and Rondônia
The rubber boom extended into Mato Grosso via the Rio Tapajós and its dismembered territory of Rondônia, which was greatly impacted by the decision to build the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad. The region’s strategic importance motivated the government to extend a telegraph line from Cuiabá to Porto Velho, which was built simultaneously with the railroad and commissioned in 1915. The line was one of several constructed by the Comissão de Linhas Telegráficas Estratégicas do Mato Grosso ao Amazonas, and although it was nothing more than a mule trail through the forest, it created a land route into the heart of the Amazon that would later become BR-130.
The region’s isolation did not end until the 1930s, when road connections linked Cuiabá to São Paulo, and the onset of commercial aviation in the 1940s, a consequence of the proliferation of air services during and after the war. The expansionist development policy was further advanced when Getúlio Vargas created the Fundação Brasil Central (FBC), which financed the exploration of northern Mato Grosso using a combination of trails cut by veteran woodsmen and light aircraft that would resupply the cutting crews and conduct aerial mapping. By fortuitous happenstance, the Expedição Roncador-Xingu, was led by a trio of charismatic brothers who were disciples of Rondon, and who convinced the government to create the nation’s first large-scale Indigenous reserve, the Parque Indígena de Xingu.
Mato Grosso’s agricultural economy consisted almost entirely of the cattle industry, which grew progressively through the export of live animals and the production of dried meat and hides. In contrast, mining grew exponentially in northern Rondônia, with the discovery of cassiterite deposits near Porto Velho and adjacent municipalities. Wildcat gold mining occurred throughout this period, particularly along the Rio Madeira, which had been identified as a placer gold deposit of global importance during the late 1890s.
The European colonization of the Selva Alta in Peru
Unlike Brazil, Peru’s rubber boom did not experience an extended period of low-level productivity, as neither the extractive system nor the dependence on coerced Indigenous labor was sustainable. After the rubber economy collapsed, Indigenous communities regrouped as best as they could, but most detribalized individuals joined ribereña communities and returned to subsistence livelihoods on the Ucayali, Marañón and Amazon rivers. Colonization by external migrants was underway, but mostly limited to the Selva Alta, the Peruvian term for the montane forests of the Eastern Andes.
Successive Peruvian governments started promoting immigration from Europe in the last half of the nineteenth century, partly because of xenophobic fears triggered by the influx of indentured servants from China between 1850 and 1875. European migrants settled in villages and towns across the country, but a particularly ambitious project was organized by Baron Damian Schutz von Holzhausen. The baron had obtained a land concession near Pozuzo (Pasco), where around 500 German and Austrian immigrants settled between 1859 and 1868. Their presence and relative success attracted hundreds of additional settlers of Germanic descent to the humid tropical valleys near Oxapampa (Pasco), Perené and Satipo (Junin). These European settlers established Peru’s first coffee production landscapes in an area now referred to as the Selva Central.
Their activities led the government to include the region in a financial operation to restructure its foreign debt in the aftermath of the War of the Pacific. In 1890, the government reached an agreement with The Peruvian Corporation Ltd., a holding company recently incorporated on the London Stock Exchange that was capitalised by equity issued in exchange for sovereign bonds issued in the 1870s during the War of the Pacific. The goal was to convert the bad debt into a business enterprise that would generate revenue from productive activities that would benefit the Peruvian economy. As part of the debt swap, one of the first in modern history, Peru granted the company mineral concessions and the right to export guano, while ceding infrastructure assets (including both rail and ports) and title to public land.
The Peruvian Corporation took legal possession of 500,000 hectares (1.23 million acres) near the village of Perené, dispossessing the Asháninka people of their territorial rights. Over the next several decades, the company and its managers promoted the cultivation of coffee as an export crop. Originally, the managers of The Peruvian Corporation attempted to entice or coerce the native population into cultivating coffee, but the unwillingness of forest dwellers to adopt a peon-like existence eventually motivated the company’s managers to contract workers from adjacent areas of the Andean highlands. Part of their business strategy was to sell land-holdings to third parties, which stimulated additional non-native migration into the Selva Central and created Peru’s first deforestation frontier. Over time, the colonization front expanded north into the piedmont landscape near Pucallpa, which became connected to Lima in the 1960s by a trunk highway.
Another colonization vector targeted the Gran Pajonal, an apparently natural grassland located midway along an ancient road between the coffee plantations near Satipo and the village of Atalaya on the Ucayali River. The grassland and its surrounding forest had long been occupied by an Ashininka community that had been harassed and weakened by slave traders during the rubber boom. Franciscan missionaries arrived in the 1920s in an effort to evangelise the Indigenous residents, but they also opened the Gran Pajonal to migrants from the Andean highlands. Referred to as Colonos, the newcomers were Quechua-speaking families with a tradition of animal husbandry who were attracted to the region’s lush tropical grasslands. As enterprising small farmers, however, they also began to establish coffee plantations.
The growing population of Colonos led to conflict with the resident Ashininka and eventually to a military intervention to restore peace amongst feuding Indigenous communities. This cultural conflict presaged events in the 1960s, when Marxist guerillas unsuccessfully attempted to organise a peasant revolution, and again in the 1980s, when terrorists used the Gran Pajonal as a staging area. Resistance by the Ashininka, first to the invasion of their lands by Colonos and later to the abuses of the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso, catalyzed the organization of a self-defense force that evolved into one of the Peru’s first Indigenous organizations.
Further north, the natural resources of the lower Huallaga and Mayo rivers led to the development of commercial agriculture in the newly constituted Department of San Martín, particularly around its two major towns, Moyobamba and Tarapoto, key logistical centers that provided services to the province of Maynas (now Loreto). An influx of European settlers in the nineteenth century catalyzed the region’s agricultural development. Attracted by the valley’s alluvial soils and abundant water, the region’s creole elite developed an irrigation agriculture economy based on cash crops (rice, maize, cotton, sugar cane and tobacco). By the mid-twentieth century, the valley’s strategic position and relative wealth ensured it would play a major role in the next phase of development in the Peruvian Amazon.
The colonization of Caquetá
The border conflicts between Colombia and its neighbors were resolved in a series of treaties that were negotiated and ratified in the first decades of the twentieth century. The absence of geopolitical insecurity vis-a-vis its neighbors, however, did not mean that Colombia could forgo the requirement to establish transportation links between its population centers in the Andes and its scattered military outposts in the Amazon. Leticia is essentially a Colombian island in the middle of the Amazon, and the central government built a highway between Guadalupe (Huila) and Florencia (Caquetá) in the 1930s to create a transportation artery between its population centers and the military and commercial outpost at Leticia on the Amazon River. The route depended on fluvial transport along the Río Caquetá to Puerto Tagua, which connected, via a twenty-kilometer isthmus, to Puerto Leguízamo on the Río Putumayo, providing a shorter fluvial route to Leticia via the Rio Solimões. This roundabout connection explains why most transport occurs by air or by ocean-going transport on the Amazon River.
Although seldom used for commerce, the highway did open the piedmont to settlement, including by campesinos seeking to escape the economic domination of landlords who controlled access to land in the highlands. The region also attracted the attention of certain affluent families who began cattle ranching, including a prominent politician from Huila whose family went on to establish the country’s largest landholding. The flow of migrants increased during the Violencia, a civil war between 1948 and 1958 that was a precursor to the conflict with Marxists guerillas that started in the 1960s. Farms and ranches expanded along a road that paralleled the front range of the Andes, from San Vicente de Caguán in the north to Valparaíso in the south. Settlement was spontaneous and occurred with little or no support from the national government, but it created a process and culture that was recognised by the government in the late 1960s when it approached the World Bank to request funds for its first large-scale colonisation project in the Amazon.
Banner image: World War Two catalyzed a second Amazonian rubber boom when the US enlisted the Brazilian government as an ally. Together the two countries mobilized a war-time supply chain that recruited 60,000 rural workers to repopulate the seringales of Brazil. Courtesy of the Museu de Artes da Universidade Federal do Ceará.
“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).
To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.
Chapter 6. Culture and demographic defines the present
Credits
