Fordlandia (53 page)

Ruins of Pequaming sawmill
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The Pequaming mill whistle blew one last time in 1947, an old-timer thinks she remembers, to mark Ford’s death.

EPILOGUE

STILL WAITING FOR HENRY FORD

WHEN THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY ABANDONED ITS AMAZON holdings in November 1945, many of its workers didn’t know the Americans were leaving until the day they boarded ship and embarked down the Tapajós. “Goodbye, we’re going back to Michigan,” said the wife of Fordlandia’s last manager to her nanny, América Lobato. “They didn’t take anything with them, they just left, like that,” Lobato recalled.

In Belterra, the departure was just as quick. Workers from the rubber nurseries, some of whom had learned bud-grafting techniques from James Weir, were assembled and told that both plantations were being turned over to the Brazilian government’s Instituto Agronômico do Norte, headed by Felisberto Camargo. A progressive agronomist, Camargo believed that the rational application of science, technology, and hygiene could bring about a peaceful, satisfied world—a view obviously related to Henry Ford’s earlier technological optimism. Yet henceforth the agent of that application would be not an individual or a private corporation but a government organization of the kind Camargo worked for.

In Fordlandia, Camargo pulled up most of the rubber trees closest to the town, instead planting jute, cacao, and other experimental crops and grazing humpbacked, floppy-eared cattle imported from India. Fordlandia, he said in a report to the United Nations, was an “utter failure” due to “blank ignorance” and the refusal to “test its theories by experiment.” But Camargo did credit Fordlandia with being the “true cradle of the technique of double grafting,” which, while unable to save the plantation, had benefited others. “Above all,” the Brazilian agronomist said, the place was an “object lesson in applied science and a proof of human capacity in the face of a demanding and ill-understood task on the largest scale.” In Belterra, by the time the company left, Ford workers had planted thirty thousand acres of land with about two million rubber trees that were crown grafted and thus, finally, resistant to leaf blight. Camargo forecast that this one plantation would soon yield annually about a third as much rubber as all the Amazon did at the height of the boom. He also hoped that its large stocks of clones and hybrids could be sold to Goodyear and Firestone plantations, with the profits invested back into projects to develop the region.
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But though Belterra’s twice-grafted trees were running sap, they couldn’t compete with the low-cost latex that was flooding the world market following Japan’s defeat in the war. America’s revived auto industry was either buying its rubber from recaptured Malaysian, Indonesian, and Vietnamese plantations or synthesizing it from petroleum, now affordable as a result of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, who traded military protection for the cheap oil that fueled America’s postwar economic expansion. Yet it wasn’t just low-cost or synthetic latex that foiled Camargo’s plans to continue the work started by Ford.

Camargo, an appointee of Getúlio Vargas, understood it as his task to increase the Amazon’s agricultural output as well as to overturn its “semi-feudal” social structure. He proposed that the government support the creation of tapper cooperatives and help them sell their latex on the international market, thus bypassing parasitical middlemen and ending once and for all the “most irrational exploitation of man and natural resources”—the very system that Ford so many years ago had promised to do away with. But once the war was over, Vargas’s conservative opponents staged a coup and removed him from power. In the Amazon, old-guard merchants and traders, having waited out Ford, Vargas, and World War II, regrouped and went on the offensive. They lobbied Rio to stop subsidizing plantation rubber and reduce its assistance for health care, education, and other social services that threatened to undermine their power. Claiming there were millions of untapped wild rubber trees throughout the jungle, they said that the best way to revive the latex economy was to go back to the way things used to be, to forget about cultivating
Hevea
and paying wages and return to a reliance on “independent”—that is, indebted—tappers. Not content with having outlasted Henry Ford, the rubber barons wanted Belterra to be broken up into small lots and sold off.
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Belterra remained intact for the time being, yet the rubber merchants and traders got much of what they wanted. Camargo was eventually transferred out of the Amazon to a post in Rio and the federal government shifted its subsidies directly to rubber merchants, in effect reviving the old debt system that had ruled the region during the boom. But having won the skirmish against Camargo, the region’s old rubber oligarchy lost a larger war. In May 1951, the first latex shipment from Singapore arrived in the Brazilian port of Santos, produced from trees that were the direct descendants of the seeds Henry Wickham sent to Kew Gardens exactly seventy-five years earlier. Brazil has ever since relied on imported latex to meet its rubber needs.
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In the 1950s, Fordlandia and Belterra were abandoned a second time, passed from one government agency to another, each in turn less committed to their management and upkeep. Some families moved out, others moved in. Camargo’s “object lesson” in large-scale, industrial agricultural science reverted to an archipelago of small, dispersed hamlets where peasants, many of them former Ford workers, cultivated plots of land among the derelict rubber stands, then selling the fruits, vegetables, and other forest products in local markets.

IT WOULD BE tempting to read the story of Fordlandia and Belterra as a parable of arrogance, just one in a long line of failed bids to press man’s will on the storied Amazon. But the parable is not quite right. Other would-be jungle conquerors tended to be motivated by the sublime vastness of the Amazon itself, entranced with the idea of taming its wildness. The “sociologist manufacturer,” though, had his sights on a more formidable challenge. Ford, the man who in the early 1910s helped unleash the power of industrialism to revolutionize human relations, spent most of the rest of his life trying to put the genie back into the bottle, to contain the disruption he himself let loose, only to be continually, inevitably thwarted. Born more from political frustration at home than from the need to acquire control over yet another raw material abroad, Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and by extension Americanism. It reveals the faith that a drive toward greater efficiency could be controlled and managed in such a way as to bring balance to the world and that technology itself, without the need for government planning, could solve whatever social problems arose from progress’s advance. Fordlandia is indeed a parable of arrogance. The arrogance, though, is not that Henry Ford thought he could tame the Amazon but that he believed that the forces of capitalism, once released, could still be contained.

Ruins of Fordlandia’s powerhouse
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Those unfettered forces are most visible in Manaus, about three hundred miles west of Santarém. Once the gilded epitome of a rubber-boom excess, Manaus after the bust became a “city of the past,” as the
Washington Post
observed, with the drop in latex prices “acting more slowly but as surely as the ashes of Vesuvius in Pompeii.”
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The city revived only in the late 1960s, when Brazil’s military regime decreed it a free-trade zone. Exempt from import tariffs, Manaus became Brazil’s national emporium. Cargo ships arrived at its deepwater port from the United States, Europe, and Asia to unload consumer goods. In 1969, the
New York Times
was reporting that a “feverish prosperity” had returned, as Brazilians from Rio, São Paulo, and other points south took advantage of improved, subsidized air flight, flying into the city to purchase duty-free toys, fans, radios, air conditioners, and television sets. At the same time, the military government provided subsidies and reduced export taxes to stimulate industry, turning the city into one of the world’s first brand-name assembly zones—similar to the Mexican
maquilas
that were then beginning to press against the the southern border of the United States. Today, Manaus’s industrial parks are home to about a hundred corporate plants, including Honda, Yamaha, Sony, Nokia, Philips, Kodak, Samsung, and Sanyo. In 1999, Harley-Davidson opened its first offshore factory in the city. Gillette has its largest South American facility here. When a consumer in Latin America purchases a DVD player, cell phone, TV, bicycle, or motorcycle, there is a good chance it was assembled in the middle of the world’s largest tropical forest.
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With the highest population growth rate in Brazil, Manaus has gone from less than 200,000 people in the mid-1960s to nearly 3,000,000 residents today. The city bursts out of the Amazon like a perverse Oz, steadily eating away the surrounding emerald foliage. Like many other Third World cities, Manaus is plagued by rising poverty and crime, child prostitution, gridlocked traffic, pollution, and poor health care. There is no sewage plant in the city, and its waste flows untreated into the Rio Negro. Manaus accounts for 6 percent of Brazil’s total manufacturing, and provides about a hundred thousand jobs. Yet no matter how dynamic its export sector, the city can’t possibly give employment to all the migrants who travel from the rural Amazon and beyond, desperate for work. On flights in, visitors can see the luxury condominiums that rise high along the river’s sandy banks and, pressed up against them, low-lying slums built on wobbly stilts to protect against river flooding, a dramatic landscape of inequality in one of the most unequal countries in the world. It makes the distance that separated the homes of American managers from those of Brazilians in Fordlandia negligible in comparison.
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Cities like Manaus, based on the assembly of corporate brand-name products, are the true heirs of Ford’s legacy. Their economies are made possible by a process if not started than at least perfected by Ford’s factory lines, that is, by the breaking up of industrial production into a series of reducible, routinized, and reproducible parts. Ford, of course, imagined his industrial method as leading to greater social cohesion. In his more utopian moments, he envisioned a world in which industry and agriculture could exist in harmony, with factories providing seasonal labor for farmers and industrial markets for agricultural products like soybeans. It’s an easy vision to mock, especially considering the brutality and dehumanizing discipline that reigned at the River Rouge. Yet actual Fordism at its most vigorous albeit short-lived stage did result in a kind of holism, where the extraction and processing of raw materials, integrated assembly lines, working-class populations, and consumer markets created vibrant economies and robust middle classes. Anchoring it all was a belief that decent pay would lead to increased sales. Yet even as Ford was preaching his gospel of “high wages to create large markets,” Fordism as an industrial method was making the balanced, whole world Ford longed for impossible to achieve.

Today, the link between production and consumption, and between good pay and big markets, has been broken, invalidated by the global extension of the logic of the assembly line. Harley-Davidson, for instance, does not make motorcycles from start to finish in Manaus but rather assembles bikes from parts manufactured elsewhere, which it then sells in the Brazilian market. Sony likewise uses free-trade zones (not just Manaus but Colón in Panama, Ushuaia in southern Argentina, and Iquique in northern Chile) as low-tax entrepôts into national markets. The final confection of the product in these cities is a formality, done to exempt the product from import taxes. In Manaus, Sony puts together TVs (over a million a year) and audio equipment from component parts made in countries with even lower labor costs and certainly less labor protection than in Brazil.