Brazil on the Move (16 page)

Manaus is haunted by every feverish dream that has flitted through the shadows of this most enormous of the world’s rainforests ever since Orellana, more than four hundred years ago, after straying away from one of Pizarro’s expeditions, made his first desperate journey downriver. On the heels of the slavers and the prospectors for diamonds and the placerminers for gold came the
seringueiros
: the exploitation and the peonage and the quick riches of the great rubber boom.
Borracha
is still a word to conjure with.

An Englishman named Henry Wickham, whose name is a hissing among the riversettlements, smuggled seeds of
Hevea brasiliensis
, the wild rubber tree, out to the Malay States. Intelligent selection produced improved varieties and Amazonia lost its monopoly of the world market. The exploitation of Amazonian rubber strangled in its own ineptitude. Cultivated rubber soon proved it could outsell the wild product even in its home port. The production of synthetics, spurred on by the exigencies of the Second World War, relegated the natural product to a still more subsidiary position; but today an increasing demand, resulting from inordinately increased production in the automotive and electrical goods industries, has opened a new market for various natural rubber, latex, and gutta-percha products.

The challenge of Amazon rubber appealed to Henry Ford’s imagination. He was bound he’d find a way to cultivate the rubber tree in its natural home, but his carefully planned and segregated settlements; Fordlândia, and Belterra on the Rio Tapajós, have hardly left any more trace than the huts of the slaphappy seringueiros who plodded through the forests gathering the “tears” of the wild rubbertrees.

Ford’s was only one of a hundred projects that the junglevines have overgrown. The vast effort expended in the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, which was to link Amazonas with Bolivia and the Pacific coast, though trains do occasionally run on it, has left little behind except legend. Stories of failure in face of the rainforest hang about every streetcorner in Manaus. The city’s history is of great plans gone awry. Even the building of the new airconditioned hotel, which was to have brought in the benefits of the international tourist trade, ended in the bankruptcy of the promoter. Already the new hotel wears the air of having seen better days.

In the bar and in the patio of the Hotel Amazonas, cooled by the forced draft from a large ventilating fan, men sit in their shirtsleeves and talk excitedly of the great future of the state of Amazonas. The old bogeys of malaria and yellow fever have been driven back up into the most distant tributaries. Hygiene will do the rest.

Some airline should buy this hotel and renovate it and channel the flow of tourists with money to spend into sport-fishing on the rivers, and exploration, so easy with proper motorboats, of the watery wilderness.

They rattle off lists of minerals and their locations: gold, nickel, hematite, manganese, tin, bauxite, tungsten. Companies are promoting the cultivation of the Brazil nut and the palms and other trees that produce vegetable oils. There are said to be a hundred and nineteen varieties susceptible of exploitation.

Agronomists are catching fire at the first rumors of a technical breakthrough on the production of fertilizers suitable for the special conditions of the tropical rainforest. Locked in certain crumbling formations of rock in the worndown
mountain ranges of eastern Brazil there is said to be enough available minerals in a substance called biotite to revolutionize tropical agriculture. In northern Australia the experiment stations are turning under a nitrogenproducing plant named
Indigofera
that may solve the problem of nitrogen.

Agricultural colonies have been successful in the river valleys of Mato Grosso and Goiás. Why not turn the surplus population of the barren northeast into Amazonas? With proper farming and public health the merest corner of Amazonas could support a population equal to the present population of the entire nation.

While they talk they eat toasted Brazil nuts. Nothing better. Why not can them and ship them to New York and make a fortune?

The city of Manaus, when you walk around by day, does show a few signs of new construction. A new electric light plant, which is to operate on crude oil brought in from Venezuela and Peru, is about to go into operation to furnish muchneeded power and even light for the city streets.

The explanation of why this plant had to be bought entire was not without interest. A good deal of the component machinery could have been manufactured in Brazil, but the result of the laws passed by the federal congress seeking to insure the use of Brazilmade products was that if any item were bought in Brazil the whole inventory of things that had to be bought abroad: generators, various sorts of piping and tubing, copper wire and all the rest, would have had to be approved item by item by the interested government bureaus. Every purchase would be endlessly obstructed by the appropriate bureaucrats. The result would have been interminable delay. To buy an entire plant abroad only one authorization was necessary. A neat case of selfdefeating legislation.

A thoroughly uptodate factory newly installed produces laminated veneer woods. There German and Czechoslovakian
machinery is powered by American furnaces. A nearby jutemill has just doubled its capacity. Each of these projects has brought in a group of foreign engineers to supervise the new installations. There aren’t enough Brazilian engineers, and those who are competent would rather work in the cosmopolitan regions of Rio and São Paulo. In spite of themselves the imported engineers catch the speculative fever.

A tall young Hungarian working on the generators at the electric light plant could talk of nothing but the bauxite and manganese he’s found on his wife’s ranch in Amapá at the northern mouth of the Amazon and his vast catches of fish, trolling up the Rio Negro north of Manaus, every afternoon after work.

The pleasantest part of Manaus is a region of gardens and candycolored villas which rambles among the hills that rise behind the old town. In these latitudes even the elevation of a couple of hundred feet above the river brings a noticeable freshness to the air. A new hardtop road extends between gardens, plantations of pineapple and sugarcane and shady mango groves, out into the sandy redsoiled uplands.

Since it’s a fine Sunday morning the road is full of small cars and families on bicycles or on foot headed out for the picnic grounds and swimming holes improvised wherever the road crosses a clear stream. Every rustcolored sandy beach is full of bathers, brown amid the vivid greens of mangoes and banana trees. We pass a nightclub where roulettewheels, supposed to be illegal in Brazil, spin undisturbed by the local authorities.

After the baths and the resorts, the road cuts through rolling hills planted with experimental groves of rubber trees grafted with new varieties imported from Africa and the Far East. Here, we are told, the present state governor, still hopeful in the face of the failure of the largescale experiments of the
Ford Company years ago, is promoting a fresh effort to put Amazon rubber cultivation on a commercial basis.

Beyond the rubber plantations the homesteaders begin. Wherever a new road opens in Brazil a band of settlement spreads out along it. Here settlers are encouraged to build themselves houses and to clear small farms on six and a half acre tracts with a good wide frontage on the road. If the planting meets the requirements the settlers are supposed to get title to the land with the lapse of a year.

Clearing land in these parts is a rough business. We heard the same story from Iquitos on. Everything favors the growth of trees over other types of vegetation. Clearing a small patch is long and tedious, even with a bulldozer. It is doubtful whether it is worth the effort and expense. If, as in most cases, a man has only his own two arms and an axe and machete, about the best he can do is burn the underbrush and let the big trees lie where they fall. Grubbing with his machete or a long brushhook he’ll plant corn or manioc in the scorched loam. Chemical fertilizers are unobtainable and even if they could be had the types used in regions of moderate rainfall would wash away with the first tropical downpour. Often, after the tremendous labor of clearing, the patch will only yield one crop because whatever plantfoods there were in the soil will have been dissipated by the continual rains. The procedure is to let the land grow up after harvesting and to go to work to make another clearing.

The region we are going through this morning has, for Amazonas, better than average soil and a better than average climate. We find ourselves passing some flourishing plantations of corn, papaya and of the inevitable bushy manioc with its fivefingered redtinted leaves.

We notice a bristlebearded man walking out with a firm step down the center of the road. He wears a battered slouch hat. His clothes, all rags, are stained with the red color of the
land. A long shotgun is slung over his shoulder. He makes no move to get out of the way of the car. It’s the car that has to swerve to get around him. “He’s a hunter,” says the stout citybred man who owns the car. “No struggling with unfriendly vegetation for him. He’ll shoot the animals and pick the wild fruits.” There’s a touch of awed admiration in his voice. “For weeks he’ll stay out in the forest alone, hunting game … The forest is his home.”

The surprise of the morning was when, in an open lot fringed with palms, we came upon a group of boys playing baseball. The ballplayers were the first sign we saw of a colony of fifty or sixty Japanese families settled here during the last three years. They have organized a cooperative under the management of a Japanese agronomist to grow black pepper. We began to see carefully weeded rows of staked pepper vines. The palmthatched huts began to take on an indefinable Japanese look. Men wearing conical straw hats were pushing light carts rigged with bicycle wheels. Each house had a vegetable patch and an occasional flowering vine.

The settlers’ houses, built on a framework of poles, lashed together in the local manner by jungle vines, and roofed and walled with palmleaf thatch, were hardly more than shelters against the rain and the sun, but a great neatness prevailed inside. Their tables and benches were hewn out of the local woods.

Everybody had a transistor radio. Their few utensils were cheap imports but shining clean. The kitchens had white enameled gas ranges fired by bottled propane gas trucked out from Manaus. The women were all smiles when we noticed how new they were.

A young man walked us around the cleantilled pepper vines. They grow on heavy stakes like polebeans. The foliage has a darker, glossier look. Once they start to bloom they keep on
bearing the racemes of green shotlike peppers for a number of years. When we asked about fertilizers our friend answered with a certain embarrassmet that all they could get was the hulls of the
castanha
or Brazil nut, sold by the small factories that shell and pack the meats of this most characteristic of Amazonian products. Not much good but it was all that could be had.

When we were about to leave the Japanese picked a couple of the fragrant yellow melonlike fruits of the passionflower vine and insisted on our taking them as a present.

We were shown their school. The school is named for Ryoto Oyama.

Ryoto Oyama was the Japanese who, acting as a sort of opposite number to Henry Wickham, smuggled seed of the jute plant out of Bengal and introduced it in Brazil. Jute is now one of the principal crops of the region. The Japanese are popular in Amazonas.

Back in Manaus, at the exhibit put on by the Association of Commerce, the face of the man in charge lights up when I ask him about jute. The dollar value of jute as a cash crop is fast catching up with all the wild rubber, latex, and guttapercha products combined. Brazil nuts, veneer woods, vegetable oils, tropical fruits, pepper and guaraná roots and berries (the basis of the Brazilian soft drink), fish and chicle; he rattles off the export products.

Petroleum … he frowns when the word comes up.

He tells us that Petrobras, the Brazilian government corporation in charge of the oil industry, has two hundred and fifty prospectors in the field looking for oil. Nothing. He has been told that no results are to be expected till 1966. Meanwhile the local distillery has to depend on Peru and Venezuela and on an occasional shipment from the fardistant Brazilian field at Bahia.

Now jute. He is smiling again. It is suited to the soil. It is easy to cultivate and to process. The growing of jute will give Amazonas a breathing space while the exploitation of other products is being developed.

Like Iquitos, Manaus consists of two towns, the musclebound old city on its hills and a floating town which is the buying and selling center for the dwellers on the rivers and creeks for miles upstream and downstream. Fifty thousand people are said to live on the
flutuantes
, as they call the floating houses around Manaus. Since the stages of the river have a different schedule here than in the Peruvian region a thousand miles upstream, the water is high now. The rafts are all afloat.

A large bay downstream from the steamship wharves is full of anchored rafts with houses on them. No taxes. No difficulties with the police or shakedown from the politicians. Ample sanitation.

This floating city is more uptodate than the rustic port of Iquitos. There are warehouses with galvanized iron roofs, there are large grocerystores and hardwarestores, filling stations for motorboats and outboards. There is a goodsized clinic advertising the names of a number of doctors. There are repair-shops, warehouses of wholesale merchants who advertize for pelts and crocodile and snake skins, restaurants, cafés and bars, a barbershop.

Watermen, who skull small skiffs or row blue and green painted boats, take the place of taxicabs. They row standing, leaning forward on their oars. Canoes peddling hot coffee from raft to raft have romantic names like
Star of the Dawn
. A motorized coffee boat is labeled
Café Jango
, after the nickname of the President of the Republic.