The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  “I was in the field with my dad, and a soldier came and told me to get on the truck to go to war,” eighty-three-year-old Lupércio Freire Maia told a Brazilian filmmaker in 2004. “I just wanted to ask my mother’s blessing, but the soldier said he didn’t have anything to do with that kind of business.”

  The roads, Maia said, were filled with men going to holding camps, miserable waystations short of clean water and basic sanitary facilities. Despite Vargas’s insistence that Brazil was a “racial democracy,” camp medics under the sway of the eugenics movement recorded the physical characteristics, biological types, and “racial” mixture of each conscript.

  Most recruits volunteered, a free choice to the extent that desperately poor men leading hardscrabble lives might be considered free to choose. Vargas broke new ground in communication, reaching out to the masses directly with the modern tools of radio and films, presenting mobilization for the raw material as a patriotic campaign. Now tappers were no longer flagelados, the most miserable cogs in the rubber-making machine, but guardians of freedom and champions of national defense. Popular mass-market magazines like comic books portrayed migration to the jungle as a path to manhood and to more social status than might be found scratching the northeast’s ungiving earth.

  The Swiss artist Jean-Pierre Chabloz designed visual propaganda, and Semta circulated it far and wide. A typical Chabloz poster showed a map of Brazil in sepia with line drawings in black; soldiers along the coast, rifles ready, rubber tappers working at a clutch of trees representing the Amazon. “Each One to His Station!” the legend cried. In small letters in a corner were the words “For Victory,” and a hand with fingers held up in a familiar wartime “V.”

  Vargas granted draft-age tappers deferment of military service for the two-year period of their contracts. As word spread that thousands of Brazilian soldiers would be shipping out to fight in Europe, many young men in the northeast decided it was better to sign up for the Amazon jungle, unknown as it was, than to be shot at on the Italian front. Sometimes families pushed the decision. “I enlisted as a Rubber Soldier because my mother cried a lot and didn’t want me to join the Army,” one rubber veteran recalled.

  Meanwhile, Semta booklets and collaborating press cast Rubber Soldier enlistment as if it were a moral choice of the highest order. Northeasterners had an “obligation” to fight for world freedom “in the blessed lands of the Amazon.” A Fortaleza newspaper exhorted, “It is time to guarantee for humanity the resources for the conquest of Freedom and the strangling of the Axis!”

  Entire families enlisted because they thought it would help them survive. In the northeast, many lived on the verge of starvation, and Semta offered money to relocate. Semta propaganda and Chabloz’s ubiquitous renderings presented the jungle as a lush and friendly place. “New Life in the Amazon” read one comely poster. In evocative color and soft light, a tapper cut the bark of a mighty tree near a homestead with a trim house made of logs. A woman hung fresh wash on a line as small domestic animals—pigs, chickens—ran about. “Amazon, the Land of the Future,” another ad declared.

  “My father was not interested in money,” a seventy-four-year-old café owner named Vicência Bezerra da Costa told the Brazilian filmmaker Wolney Oliveira. “He wanted a place where there was water. Where planting might grow.” Bezerra da Costa was thirteen when his father signed the family up, moving to the jungle with his wife and eight children. Vargas was populating the Amazon.

  At staging camps outside Belém, Recife, and Manaus, recruits waited for transport for days or weeks, sometimes singing songs glorifying “Getúlio.” Men and boys received uniform and kit: blue pants, white shirt, straw hat; a pair of canvas shoes with jute soles; a tin plate, mug, and eating utensils; a hammock; and a carton of cigarettes.

  The journey by ship was tedious, with passengers generally confined belowdecks. The passage could also be dangerous. One day, Bezerra da Costa said, the crew ordered passengers to come topside with their lifejackets. In the pockets were water and hard biscuits for survival, as well as a cyanide capsule in case of a submarine attack and capture by the enemy. Minesweepers accompanied the ship. Bezerra da Costa’s mother lifted the religious medals hanging from her neck and gripped them in her hands. “She didn’t stop praying,” he said. “We couldn’t make a sound, or light a match.”

  The journey was no more comfortable when recruits transferred to local river transport. They traveled in steerage with livestock. Because of disorganization, they often went without food.

  Vargas “enlisted” the Rubber Soldiers military-style, but at U.S. insistence the men carried labor contracts complete with identification photos. Once the workers were on remote estates, however, the old aviamento system, which had never been truly dismantled, took over, and few were treated as soldiers or contract laborers.

  On the positive side, Brazilian government participation meant that estate lords no longer tortured tappers at will or chased them down with an armed posse when they escaped. Landowners who abused the tappers risked losing loans from the Brazilian Rubber Credit Bank, the RDC’s counterpart in the campaign. But the tappers’ lives remained harsh, and, as in Casement’s day, letters from activist Catholic missionaries to authorities on behalf of collectors described dire conditions.

  They lived in isolated jungle huts. Long hours left little time to grow their own food, and they suffered malnutrition. Trading-post operators overcharged for food and supplies bought on credit. The long-standing relationships that had governed rubber collecting since the nineteenth century were too deeply ingrained to be replaced overnight by government agencies or paper contracts. Tappers were supposed to receive 60 percent of the value of the raw material they delivered, but middlemen shortchanged them, and they went into debt. RDC staff members who reached remote estates reported anomalies, but neither Brazilians nor Americans had resources enough to police every corner of the region.

  As if the difficult working conditions were not enough, arrivals from the northeast had no natural resistance to endemic diseases, unlike natives of the Amazon. Rockefeller’s CIAA health and sanitation program became the basis for a Brazilian healthcare network, which included floating clinics on principal waterways and a nurses’ training program. In the same way that Henry Ford provided free healthcare in his Amazon installations, conscious that ill workers meant impaired production, so too the RDC considered health and sanitation fundamental to its aim of producing large quantities of rubber in the shortest possible time.

  But conditions overwhelmed intentions. Rockefeller’s health unit distributed millions of free Atabrine tablets to treat malaria, but the pills didn’t always reach their intended population. Corrupt locals skimmed deliveries to sell on the black market, often in cities. Middlemen charged for the tablets, and tappers usually did not have money. The innovative floating clinics were often too far away for seringueiros to reach without losing valuable work time. When a tapper’s skin went the color of saffron from hepatitis, he often just drank lavender tea and hoped for the best.

  “One day a branch blown by the wind hit me and I lost sight in this eye,” seventy-nine-year-old Alfonso Pereira Pinto told Oliveira in 2004. “Later, I caught a sickness and lost my leg. When the war was over, I did not have the money to go home.” Pinto stayed in Xapuri, in the western Amazon.

  U.S. doctors and scientists brought in by Rockefeller undoubtedly saved lives. Learning from this experience with tropical diseases, they subsequently applied it to situations in Africa and the South Pacific where U.S. troops were stationed—GIs too had little immunity to endemic illnesses.

  Despite Rockefeller’s food program, however, which aimed to serve the entire northeast, tappers died from poor nutrition. Without roads from the food-producing south to the north, ships guarded by antisubmarine escorts carried provisions by sea to the mouth of the Amazon River; but outside the main network of tributaries, Brazilian government distribution was inadequate. In the fierce climate, food rotted in warehouses or arr
ived at destinations unfit to eat. Price regulations were ignored in the outlands, where transportation and resale depended on the old, firmly embedded aviador network.

  Migrant tappers were most likely to survive if they brought families with them or formed unions with Indian women. While the head of the family collected latex, women and children cultivated food plots or gathered forest products for sale, such as brazil nuts in their heavy pods. Indigenous women in particular understood healing methods with medicinal plants, and traditional rainforest practices for avoiding dangerous animals.

  * * *

  In 1943, the United States received more rubber from Latin America, overwhelmingly from the Amazon, than from any other region on earth. In the other years from 1942 to 1945, the Brazil enterprise produced less latex than hoped for, about the same as African sources. Nevertheless, the Amazon’s contribution helped keep the rubber crisis at bay until 1944, when synthetic rubber was produced in quantity.

  Where the Battle for Rubber met defeat was partly because of the difficult terrain where it was fought. Estates were scattered amid a network of tributaries and waterways as complex as the system of veins and arteries of the human body. Geography itself made any orderly program difficult, let alone a campaign that unfolded on a frontier where state authorities were traditionally absent.

  But human failings, too, contributed to disappointment. “Neither the Brazilian government nor the RDC was willing or able to expend the funds and human resources necessary to monitor and enforce their price controls at the rubber estates,” wrote the Brazilian scholar Xenia Wilkinson. Contemporary criticism came from a U.S. diplomat, Walter Walmsley, who toured the Amazon in 1943 and condemned wasteful spending, even graft, on the U.S. side of the program, lamenting the lack of understanding of tappers’ conditions. “No darker picture exists anywhere of what in more progressive countries we choose to call corruption and exploitation,” he wrote.

  Through it all, Brazil prospered from the World War II rubber campaign far more than it had from the boom at the turn of the century, when rubber barons and import-export houses dealt more directly with New York and Liverpool than they did with Rio and São Paulo. The Washington Accords that governed wartime extraction earned income for the central government. And during the war, Vargas cemented his effort to make the Amazon part of the wider nation. Well into the twentieth century, elites had run vast swathes of territory as private fiefdoms; the Battle for Rubber brought the frontier under Rio’s government control.

  Of fifty-seven thousand Rubber Soldiers who labored between 1942 and 1945, thirty thousand died, whether from illnesses like malaria, yellow fever, and Chagas disease or from the bites and stings of serpents and scorpions; some drowned in rivers or were eaten by piranhas; others were mauled by jaguars. Of those who survived, some could not leave the Amazon because they remained indebted. Some did not know the war was over until a year or two after the armistices. Vargas, successful in starting the process of populating the Amazon, reneged on the pledge to return Rubber Soldiers to their homes. Many never received their promised pensions.

  Military rulers who took over the Brazilian government in the 1960s had seen how the Americans built roads and established supply lines during the war. They continued Vargas’s vision of the Amazon as a massive target for development, building more roads and dams. They moved the national capital closer to the rainforest, from Río to Brasília, and laid down a highway from the south, the Transamazonia, encouraging the influx of farmers, loggers, miners, ranchers.

  In 1972, the NASA Landsat camera began sending pictures of the earth from outer space, giving an unprecedented view of how the Amazon region was shrinking. Stretches of green one week went brown the next. The Brazilian rainforest was disappearing at the rate of an area the size of England, Scotland, and Wales, combined, every year. The Amazon basin alone provides a fifth of the world’s fresh water, and it accounts for 40 percent of the earth’s remaining rainforest; saving it became a global issue.

  In the Amazon, the challenge was joined by old Rubber Soldiers themselves, as well as by younger tappers who invoked the spirit of Rubber Soldiers past.

  In October 1985, 120 veteran Rubber Soldiers who still worked in the jungle joined their tapper sons and others in Brasília to demand pensions owed to veterans of the Batalha da Borracha. But they wanted more than just recompense. Their labor union in three Amazonian states of Brazil was organizing cooperatives to eliminate middlemen; they wanted support from other Brazilians, and security guaranteed by the state in their struggle. The demonstration was aimed to bring their issues into the public light. They sang patriotic songs from the war days: “Long live the Brazilian soldier! Your product will be useful all over the world.”

  By the late 1970s it was clear that extracting latex in the wild using the conservative ways of these local seringueiros was the most suitable production method in the Amazon. In the first rubber boom, tappers were flagelados, those who were whipped; during the war, as essential manpower for the Allies, they were “soldiers.” In the 1980s, the decade that saw the six hottest years on record until that time, they called themselves “defenders of the forest.”

  Global environmental interest groups became allies of the modern rubber tappers, recognizing that extractive modes of production, along with demarcating indigenous territories to keep outsiders at bay, were part of a solution to save rainforests. The struggling Rubber Tappers Union suddenly had a seat at the table with international finance institutions considering aid and loans for Brazil.

  A hefty, round-faced Rubber Soldier’s son, Francisco “Chico” Mendes, articulate and seemingly indefatigable, became the movement’s figurehead. There were no schools on the rubber estates; in his late teens, Chico had been educated by a tutor, an escaped political prisoner jailed for participating in the revolt of the charismatic Communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes, the “Horseman of Hope.” Chico’s tutor led him to books and taught him how to find the Portuguese broadcasts of international news programs on the radio, advising him to count on the BBC for the most impartial coverage. He was also influenced by priests of the Liberation Theology movement, which interprets the gospel of Jesus with concern for liberation of the oppressed. A voracious reader, Chico became an organizer with a natural political skill to get people to reflect on their condition and to act.

  Despite the putative protection of international connections and rising fame, or perhaps because of them, the unionized jungle workers made enemies of those who wanted land for themselves and who were linked to the old Amazon elite. “If a messenger came down from heaven and guaranteed that my death would strengthen our struggle, it would even be worth it,” Chico told a friend. “But … rallies and lots of funerals won’t save the Amazon. I want to live.”

  A gunman assassinated Chico Mendes on December 22, 1988, just outside his home.

  * * *

  Eight years after the activist’s murder, during my assignment in the Amazon I went to the seringal where Chico Mendes had grown up and worked, in the municipality of Xapuri. I visited his grandmother, stayed at the wood-plank house of one of his cousins. Every day, well before dawn, Sebastiao Mendes, who was fifty-two, mechanically completed a morning ritual: he broke off a tiny piece of rubber from a ball of the raw stuff, lit it like a wick, and tossed it flaming onto a pile of wood in the stove, then put the coffee on. “You don’t think about the cold,” he said, “but about how hot it’s going to get later.”

  We walked a trail soggy from overnight rain. Sebastiao Mendes etched a diagonal cut in a marked tree. He watched the white latex ooze, beginning its descent into the tin cup nailed to the trunk. He worked quickly and expertly alongside his son Antonio, who was eighteen. Throughout the morning they went from tree to tree, as each had done since childhood, half watching their strides for vines and exposed roots that could grab an ankle or twist a leg like a pretzel. They kept an eye out for stinging plants, rattlesnakes, and yellow-headed vipers.

  “We trust to faith, beca
use the snakes bite through your shoes,” young Antonio said, grinning. In rubber-soled tennis shoes, he had it better than the tappers of his great-great-grandfather’s day, who went barefoot or in thin sandals. He had it better than the tappers of his grandfather’s Rubber Soldier generation, with their shoes of jute.

  PART II

  The Undesirables

  4.

  “WHERE THEY COULD NOT ENTER”: JEWISH LIVES

  On the small, dry island of Baltra in the Galapagos archipelago that soldiers called “The Rock,” Saul Skolnick, a pipe-smoking American serviceman, loaded ordnance onto B-17s and B-29s. The airplanes patrolled the western entrance to the Panama Canal, watching for enemy subs. Had Skolnick been a pilot, his days might have been more exciting, but loading bombs was dull. Skolnick soon realized that there was not much after-work action either on the lonely island located more than five hundred miles off the Ecuadoran coast.

  A cinema and a beer garden served 2,400 servicemen and 750 civilians, but you could only go to so many movies and drink so much beer. Off base, you could only shoot so many photos of basking land iguanas—Charles Darwin described them as having “a singularly stupid appearance”—or tame so many feral goats, a favorite hobby of some GIs. Even nature seemed to have been stingy with the island. The giant tortoises that made the bigger Galapagos Islands famous were absent on tiny Baltra. Darwin’s legendary finches did not frequent the cactus and dry palo santo trees that grew in the red dust around the base.

  To break the monotony, on a bright day in December 1943, Skolnick and some friends took one of the bombers on a joyride to Peru, seven hundred miles east, to do some Christmas shopping for companions at the base, some of whom gave Skolnick a few bucks to buy alpaca blankets. Skolnick, barely into his twenties at the time, would remember that trip for the rest of his life.