The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  The ambitious Brazilian wartime campaign had two extraordinary predecessors: a great boom at the turn of the century and an expensive, megalomaniacal project by Henry Ford beginning in the 1920s that saw the creation of a Midwestern-looking town in the rainforest to produce rubber assembly-line style. Each remarkable preview foreshadowed the wartime “Battle,” and each held lessons that planners ignored at their peril.

  Roger warned [Negretti], pointing at the whip: If I see you use that on the Indians I’ll personally turn you over …

  And Roger never saw him flog the porters; he only yelled at them so they would move faster or harassed them with curses and other insults when they dropped the “sausages” of rubber they carried on their shoulders and heads because their strength failed or they tripped …

  On the second day, an old woman suddenly fell down dead when she tried to climb a slope with seventy pounds of rubber on her back. Negretti, after confirming she was lifeless, quickly distributed the dead woman’s two sausages among the other natives with a grimace of annoyance and a hoarse voice.

  —MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, THE DREAM OF THE CELT

  The Amazonian rubber fever of the late nineteenth century generated unprecedented prosperity. The rough Peruvian town of Iquitos, a deep-water port at the head of the Amazon system, grew into the world’s largest city inaccessible by road. Four thousand miles east, where the river meets the Atlantic, the old sugar port of Belém turned into a thriving metropolis with wide boulevards and stately mansions. Between Iquitos and Belém, in the deepest heart of the rainforest, a river outpost called Manaus, a jungle wall at its back, grew to become one of the richest cities of its size in the world.

  Even today, a visitor stepping out of the steamy heat into the city’s Belle Époque opera house marvels at the display of wealth and elegance: cool stairs and columns of Carrara marble, plush seats imported from Paris, Italian panels depicting scenes of drama and dance, a stage curtain painted to evoke the marriage of the nearby rivers Negro and Solimões as they join to form the Amazon. Fine glass chandeliers, seemingly innumerable, sparkle now, as they did in the 1890s to the astonishment of locals, with electric light.

  Inland from Iquitos and Manaus, the rubber tappers who produced all this wealth led such miserable lives they had a nickname, the flagelados (whipped ones). Their bosses, affluent rubber barons, commanded a network of brutish overseers like “Negretti”—the real name of one of them—in the Vargas Llosa novel. The Peruvian Nobel Prize laureate based his depiction of the era of the flagelados on reports by the Irish-born British diplomat Roger Casement, who saw Negretti and his ilk in action.

  In 1906, Casement’s superiors sent him to investigate allegations of mistreatment in the homeland of the Putumayo Indians, a region variously claimed by Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru where the woman in the novel fell under her burden of rubber “sausages.” Casement’s 165-page report said that henchmen went into the jungle to capture Indians for the rubber companies, some partly British owned. Not only were the tappers unpaid, but they became indebted for the tools and food they required, their wives and children subject to kidnapping and rape until the tapper returned with his assigned quota of rubber. The hostages, along with tappers blamed for infractions, were jailed in filthy stockades. They were “fathers, mothers, and children,” Casement wrote, “and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside of them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents.”

  Photos from the time show children with the marks of lashes on their backs and buttocks, emaciated men sitting on a bench in a cage, facing the camera, joined together by chains around their necks. The Indian population in the Peruvian region where Casement traveled plunged in the last years of the boom from fifty thousand in 1906 to eight thousand in 1911.

  In the Brazilian Amazon, the process of getting rubber from tree to oceangoing ship involved a web of relationships called the aviamento system, from the Portuguese word for “providing,” that included patronage and debt peonage. Import-export houses in Belém and Manaus, the major aviadores (those who facilitated the system), provided tools and food on credit to river traders. The river traders in turn raised the prices of the goods and delivered them on credit against future rubber deliveries to middlemen who controlled production for the owners of sprawling estates.

  At trading posts, the price of goods was inflated yet again and sold to the seringueiros on credit. When tappers brought in the rubber they collected, the middlemen and traders cheated them on its weight, and at times charged a commission for handling it. The tappers rarely saw cash and sank into perpetual debt. The rubber went to manufacturers in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and other industrialized countries.

  When the British Foreign Office released Roger Casement’s report, public reaction was swift to condemn abuses and call for reform. It was not respect for human rights that ended the boom, however, but economic competition.

  In 1876, an adventurer and naturalist named Henry Wickham surreptitiously sent Hevea brasiliensis seeds out of Brazil to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. The British, along with planters in their Southeast Asia colonies, developed the seeds and young trees and established plantations. By 1912, the British controlled most of the world’s rubber supply from trim estates in Ceylon and Malaya, where they produced latex more cheaply than the Amazon barons could do. The Dutch planted rubber in their East Indies. In the Amazon, rubber fever cooled, and the wild trees were left to sleep.

  Fordlandia, an up-to-date town with all modern comforts, has been created in a wilderness that never had seen anything more pretentious than a thatched hut. Water is supplied under pressure after it has been thoroughly filtered to remove dangers of fever infection, and electric light illuminated bungalows in a region where such inventions are proof of the white man’s magic.

  —“MODERN CITY RISES IN JUNGLE,” Chicago Tribune, 1932

  Henry Ford, one of the wealthiest men of all time, was sick and tired of the British world monopoly on rubber. In 1922, worried that a new production cap by colonial producers would lead to increasing prices, Ford looked to the Amazon. Having transformed global industry with the assembly-line method, Ford decided he must control the entire supply chain for making his cars, including the raw material for tires. Ford was also bent upon a civilizing mission, intending to export his ideas of clean living—he was a teetotaler and strict vegetarian—while creating his center of efficient American-style production in the jungle.

  Ford obtained a concession for some four thousand square miles of jungle on the Tapajós River, one of more than a thousand tributaries that feed the Amazon. He trimmed the rainforest down to bare earth and sowed plantations with millions of trees. He laid out a miniature version of the kind of ordinary town that might have existed in the American Midwest in the years before the First World War. Managers from Detroit oversaw a diverse workforce: American technicians; laborers from Barbados; latex gatherers lured from jungle corners by better working conditions than the fraying aviador networks could provide; and three thousand laborers from the arid Brazilian northeast. As Fordlandia and its sister plantation towns grew over the years, new tappers arrived by boat at spanking wooden docks to a phantasmagorical sight, a slice of America transported whole to the Brazilian rainforest: neat bungalows, a hospital, a canteen, a powerhouse to keep the lights on and the sawmill running, a swimming pool.

  Ford employees earned a living wage, in cash. Their wives didn’t fish in the river and grind manioc as many once had done, but shopped in a market like women in cities. Discounted goods in company stores created consumers. Ford was transforming the Amazon. On the fringes of his holdings, shantytowns sprouted where workers went to brothels and bars forbidden in the Ford towns, and where they could eat familiar food, not the peaches, oatmeal, and soy-based meals Ford insisted upon serving in company dining halls. But the Michigan inventor seemed to have
created a miracle in the jungle, replicating a successful American industrial operation complete with time clocks.

  In 1940, Henry’s son Edsel invited Getúlio Vargas to visit Fordlandia. The first Brazilian president to travel to the Amazon, Vargas landed in a hydroplane downstream from Fordlandia at Belterra, which had become the showplace of Ford plantations, and he was formidably impressed. Vargas was a modernizer like Ford: he doubled Brazil’s road network, multiplied its airports from a couple dozen to more than five hundred, and, with U.S. help, would launch the steel industry that spurred Brazil’s postwar industrial boom. Vargas felt a kinship with the American industrialist. He saw before him what might be possible in the Amazon—modern-style development. At an elegant meal, dressed in a white tropical suit, Vargas stood under an arch of palm fronds before his entourage and addressed the American managers. Henry Ford, he said, had planted not only rubber but also “health, comfort and happiness.”

  Life at the Ford estates was not always as rosy as Vargas described. A decade earlier, workers had revolted against Ford’s suffocating lifestyle impositions, his “civilizing” mission. They bristled at the enforcement of U.S. Prohibition laws in the middle of the Amazon and they resented seeing spinach—the classic American health food—on their plates and attending mandatory social functions such as dance lessons. They were frustrated by the strict eight-to-five schedule, with no concession to ferocious tropical downpours or the traditional break to avoid the worst of midday heat.

  On December 20, 1930, simmering anger came to a head. Workers burned cars and pushed service vehicles into the river, torched buildings, and destroyed equipment. They smashed the time clocks. Reforms were made, and labor moved largely to the Belterra plantation. By the time of President Vargas’s visit, rebellion was a thing of the past.

  At home, Henry Ford crushed workers’ attempts to unionize, and at a Michigan plant in 1932, he set goons loose on a protest march of more than three thousand laborers; five marchers died, nineteen were badly injured. An anti-Semite and a leader with his good friend Charles Lindbergh of the isolationist “America First” movement, Ford aired his views in a series of booklets titled The International Jew, The World’s Foremost Problem. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, ran front-page stories exposing supposed Jewish plots and scandals, accusing the Jews of controlling the world’s press. Ford denounced German Jewish financiers and accepted a medal with swastikas from the Reich.

  What Vargas saw and admired in 1930, however, was only Ford’s deliberately crafted society in the Amazon jungle. Before returning to Rio, he went on the radio in Manaus to praise Fordlandia as a pole of industrial development for the region, but he also extolled its social programs—high praise from a politician who advertised himself as “the Father of the Poor.” He mirrored Ford’s optimism about modern technology and faith in development projects on a large scale, even in the rainforest. The speech marked a milestone. Thereafter, Brazil saw its Amazon in a different way: no longer as a perennially sleepy frontier but as a region ripe for economic expansion.

  Meanwhile, Fordlandia was offered to the wider world as an example of American can-do. When Walt Disney arrived in Rio in 1941 as one of Nelson Rockefeller’s Goodwill Ambassadors, Rockefeller sent him to the jungle. “Among the present-day pioneers of the Amazon who are lighting the way for others to follow is Henry Ford,” intones an authoritative voice speaking over a bright green map in Disney’s 1944 documentary The Amazon Awakens. Roads, power plants, state-of-the-art machinery, schools, telephones—the film showed them all. Manicured golf links against a stunning rainforest backdrop. There was nothing, it seemed, that Ford’s jungle world lacked.

  Except dependable rubber production.

  Growing the wild Hevea brasiliensis trees together plantation-style in the Amazon, a jungle version of Ford’s assembly-line production method, does not work. Even as the Fordlandia model was being touted, its trees died by the hundreds of thousands. Leaf blight spread across their uppermost branches, jumping from the top of one tree to the next, devastating the canopy.

  “The pests and the fungi and the blight that feed off of rubber are native to the Amazon,” historian Greg Grandin has explained. “Basically, when you put trees close together in the Amazon, what you in effect do is create an incubator—but Ford insisted.”

  Could Henry Ford have combatted the destruction of his trees and made the plantation idea succeed, thus providing the rubber that would be needed for the war? With more workers, one argument goes, he might have carried on the intensive work necessary to fight the blight. But the old rubber patronage system still operated in places, and tappers were discouraged from taking Ford’s jobs. And the word was out about unpleasant regimentation on Ford estates. Grandin, the historian, argues that Ford’s cultural arrogance in trying to impose U.S. social and behavioral norms helped defeat efforts to recruit and keep laborers.

  It may be that no number of workers under any conditions could have overcome the leaf blight. When Hevea brasiliensis trees grow relatively far apart amid a variety of other trees and vines in the wild, they resist pests. But the linear way Ford insisted on planting the trees together on cleared land allowed fungi, caterpillars, and other organisms to proliferate. (Outside the Amazon, the pests don’t thrive enough to destroy rubber trees, even on plantations.) On his assembly lines, Ford tried to turn men into machines. In the Amazon, he tried to industrialize rubber production, but the trees weren’t having it. Nature had the last word.

  Even as Ford’s vision was failing, U.S. war planners were identifying the Brazilian Amazon as the place to find rubber. One way or another, they must create another boom. Of course, a repetition of the abuses of workers that Roger Casement described would be intolerable. But Henry Ford’s model would not work either.

  An army of collectors would have to go into the wild to tap the trees where they grew naturally amid the diversity, and dangers, of the rainforest. And they must do it under the aegis of Getúlio Vargas.

  The army of the Rubber Soldiers is a brave legion of our countrymen entering the jungle under a glorious banner of staunch patriotism to extract from the miraculous tree the precious latex that is so necessary for the Victory of the United Nations.

  —BRAZILIAN NEWSPAPER, 1943

  The rubber campaign rolled out in the largest rainforest on earth, which spreads over two million square miles, covering more than 40 percent of the South American continent. The Amazon’s jungles and rivers are home to forty thousand species of plants and hundreds of mammals, including jaguars and giant anteaters; thousands more species of fish; birds, from scarlet macaws to gracile white herons; reptiles like the anaconda; creatures like the penis snake, which is not a snake but an amphibian; and frogs that live not on ponds but in trees. It is the richest system of life on the planet.

  What the Amazon did not have was people. Even counting its port cities, the Brazilian Amazon’s population density in 1942 was just over one person per square mile. The adjoining drought-plagued northeast served as a labor pool.

  In Manaus, the U.S. Rubber Development Corporation (RDC), which answered to the U.S. Office of Economic Warfare, established headquarters in the opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, still elegant and spacious despite dust that had gathered in the decades since the rubber bust in 1912. Working in these unusual surroundings, RDC staff oversaw financing for Brazil’s recruitment and transportation of migrant labor—Rio received a commission of US$100 per person, about US$1,700 in today’s value. Program officers managed loans to the owners of estates where collectors harvested the raw material. Agronomists and other advisors calculated needs and progress. Personnel fanned out into the deepest corners of the jungle, developing transportation infrastructure networks.

  Before the accords that gave Washington access to Brazil’s raw materials, Nelson Rockefeller had attempted to get control of its rubber with a U.S.-dominated development corporation, aiming to open the region to investment by U.S. businesses. Vargas’s economic advisor
furiously complained that Rockefeller’s idea was “American imperialism.” Oil had just been discovered in the northeast Brazilian state of Bahia, and if the Standard Oil Company heir had his way, U.S. petroleum companies might begin to operate there, too.

  Roosevelt stepped in to stop the Rockefeller effort, because he had a single goal in the Amazon: to get rubber. Instead of Rockefeller’s plan, Washington financed an independent Brazilian government economic development corporation directed overall by Brazilians. The RDC placed Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) in charge of key branches of the campaign: sanitation and health, including malaria and yellow fever control, and transporting food.

  Establishing RDC headquarters in the Teatro Amazonas, the monument to rubber baron excess during the first boom, was a matter of efficiency—plenty of space, near a major port—but symbolic, too. No longer would the Amazon’s white gold, as it was called, its precious rubber, be managed by a traditional Amazonian elite of property owners. A central office of technocrats was now in charge.

  Brazilian authorities, however, waged the Battle for Rubber like a military campaign. To draft laborers, Vargas created a Special Service for the Mobilization of Workers for the Amazon, known as “Semta” for its initials in Portuguese. Semta operatives sometimes dragooned unsuspecting young men at the point of a gun.