by Gerard Colby
“You may well have inspired Nelson with the shining dream of regional development,”12 Friele wrote Cooke.
Nelson’s “shining dream” had, in fact, been percolating for well over a year, since Hanson had warned him that Vargas was making his own plans for the Amazon. Vargas, for his part, had been thrown into a quandary as soon as Nelson’s proposals for an Amazon survey had begun to circulate in the fall of 1941.
On the one hand, Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha had urged Vargas to allow the Americans to develop the Amazon. On the other hand, Finance Minister Souza Costa had urged caution and the principle of Brazilian control. Vargas decided to send Souza Costa to Washington into the bear’s den.
Nelson summoned all the forces at his command before this meeting with Souza Costa. He then had a formal resolution hurriedly drawn up for members of his Policy Committee, allocating $200,000 for a “comprehensive survey study of the Amazon basin, the survey to be used as a basis for carrying out specific cooperative projects.” Rockefeller wanted to send down survey teams of experts in agriculture, tropical settlement, tropical disease, transportation, nutrition, and labor, as well as economists to study the “present status of land ownership in various states of the Amazon basin,” all “under the guidance of an outstanding qualified administrator.”13 Nelson had already decided who that special someone would be: J. C. King. King was vice president of Johnson & Johnson, in charge of operations in Brazil and Argentina. He had a reputation among businessmen in both countries as a man who could get difficult projects under way. Most important for Rockefeller’s purposes, he also knew the Amazon, the source of most plants used in the preparation of medicines. His work had also placed him at the cutting edge of American penetration of the South American drug market and of Western medicine’s advance into the jungle interior.
He appreciated that Brazilian sensitivities would require a Brazilian president of his Amazon Valley Corporation. But that was all right; the real power would be in the hands of the managing director, King. True to his West Point training, King would also be loyal to his superior, namely, Nelson Rockefeller. “Nelson doesn’t expect you to be a yes-man,” one CIAA aide explained, “but he does expect you to be a Rockefeller man—first, last, and always.”14
Everything was in place as Nelson set up the first of his lunch meetings with the visiting Brazilians. All the CIAA’s rubber technicians were ready to go. King was waiting only for his appointment to be formalized, and he would begin his survey. Texas Congressmen Dick Kleberg and Sam Rayburn were also on board, thanks to Nelson’s backslapping and Friele’s “confidential” report to the Texans on the potentially explosive “Brazilian Political Situation” of an alleged 250,000 German and Japanese in the Amazon area.15 Rockefeller had also recruited high-level talent from the Department of Agriculture and other agencies.
Backed by some of the most powerful men in the U.S. government, Nelson tried to impress upon Souza Costa that “comprehensive development had to be under the direction of American experts.”16 He walked out of the conference convinced that his charm and power had won the day. He was wrong. Nelson had failed to line up the most important people of all: the Brazilians.
Souza Costa bought time by suggesting that the Americans put their proposal in writing. The CIAA drew up the proposal, got the approval of the other agencies, and set up another meeting. This time Souza Costa was ready. Nelson submitted a proposal for a joint $1 million Amazon Development Corporation to administer $5 million in loans from the Federal Loan Agency. There were three hitches: (1) the United States would name the managing director, (2) Brazil would have to establish and maintain a quota for the internal consumption of rubber, and (3) all the surplus would go to the United States.
The Brazilian representatives, although willing to try to get Vargas’s assent to the last two conditions, had no authority to agree to them. But they immediately took exception to losing control over the development of most of their own country.
Nelson dug in. He insisted that “we should be entitled to name the managing Director in a true charge of operation,” since “by far the greater part of the funds of the corporation would be advanced by us.” Besides, the Brazilians had allowed a “past history of decline in Amazon rubber production,” and the war created an “urgency compelling us to take no chances of its repetition.” He agreed only to “give the aspect of control further consideration.”17
Nelson believed that he held the trump card: $100 million in U.S. credits already offered to Brazil. Cotton magnate Will Clayton, now deputy administrator of the Federal Loan Agency, proposed that Nelson simply set up the Amazon Valley Corporation himself and use $5 million that could be advanced from the Rubber Reserve Corporation. It was a classic case of American big-businessmen thinking money could buy anything.
But to patriotic Brazilians in the Vargas government, Brazil’s Amazon—seen then as Brazil’s future—was not for sale. Nelson had lost their trust. As long as Vargas was in power, it would never be completely regained.
State Department Undersecretary Sumner Welles took matters into his own hands. Although Nelson looked upon Welles as a mentor, the undersecretary was not prepared to sacrifice Brazilian cooperation to Nelson’s personal agenda for the Amazon. He ignored Rockefeller’s and Clayton’s proposals, conducted his own negotiations, and concluded an agreement with Souza Costa on March 3 that scrapped the idea of the Amazon Valley Corporation and gave the funding and carrying out of the rubber project to the Rubber Reserve Corporation. This left the approval of all Amazon projects in the hands of the Brazilians.
In his heart, Nelson never accepted the State Department’s edict about the Amazon. But when it came to policy, Roosevelt had already made it clear that the State Department had the last word.
“Look, Nelson,” the smiling president said from behind his big desk, “I know that you’re in a difficult situation in regard to State.… But understand this—it is up to you to get along with them because if it ever comes to a showdown between your office and State, I will have no choice but to back the Department and Mr. Welles.”18
Nelson consulted with Welles. He wanted to use his $200,000 allocation for the Amazon survey. But his ambition had already poisoned the well. Welles did not see any need for the survey. If tropical products needed to be developed, the new Rubber Development Corporation should easily be able to carry out the task with its $100 million. Asked by Welles to specify what tropical products were so important to require King’s survey, Nelson agreed to send him a list. He never did.
Time was running out. Friele and King decided to go ahead with the survey Rockefeller wanted. King left immediately for Brazil.
THE VALLEY OF DEATH
J. C. King was excited at the prospect of boarding a riverboat in Belém, Brazil’s major port on the Amazon. From here he would plunge into the interior, traveling more than 4,000 miles, surveying the people and resources as part of his month-long secret mission. Both he and Nelson knew that the Amazonian rain forest held many more secrets beneath its dense undergrowth than the locations of the ubiquitous rubber plant.
But he had barely stepped on board when he became uneasy. “I examined [the] crew of [the] ship,” he wrote Friele. “Out of 35, 24 admitted to syphilis, 22 have, or had, gonorrhea. Only 4 disclaimed either.… Every boy waiting on passengers’ table was syphilitic. Crew had 522 children; 20 dead.”19
It was a ship of death, taking souls into a Green Hell.
As he cruised deeper into the jungle, he passed whole towns that seemed to be dying. At ports where the boat stopped to pick up fuel and passengers, he confirmed his worst suspicions: The rampant disease he had found aboard was only a token of the horror on shore.
None of the villagers had received any medical aid. Nurses and doctors were unheard of, and medicine was nonexistent, “although several people offered to pay for anything I could supply. Besides malaria (and possible typhoid), people complained of liver, kidneys, intestines, young women of irregular periods or
complete stoppage with accompanying symptoms.
“… There is some rubber in the district, prices are high,” he reported, “but there is a feeling of hopelessness and abandonment, for what good is money if they keep on dying.… No new people have come in years for who would care to live in a village of despair and death.”20
What made the suffering of the Amazon Valley all the more tragic was its chronic nature. Like so many travelers before him, King was familiar with the Amazon’s tormented past. In his report to Nelson, he summarized it in the terse economic terms a Rockefeller could understand:
Before the conquest, two million Indians in 500 thriving villages lived between the moribund town of Guripa, on the Zingu (Xingu) and São Louis de Maranhão. A century later, the sword and the white man’s disease had reduced their numbers to 800 fighting men. After 400 years of civilized rule, the population is less than when Orellana crossed the Andes from Peru, in 1540, to descend the entire length of the Amazon. A well balanced economy was destroyed. Today a large part of the food consumed is imported.… The economic history of Brazil is a mirror of its racial origin.… Her record of internal migration is a record of pursuit of immediate wealth, from the sugar of Pernambuco to the gold of Minas (Gerais), to the cotton of the northeast, to the rubber of the Amazon.21
The situation did not improve when King boarded the J. P. Morgan-financed railroad at Pôrto Velho. Thousands of people had died building this railroad for rubber barons. At first, they were veterans from the Panama Canal, confident as they again pounded rails into ties between tropical hills. However, the night became a singing nightmare of millions of hungry mosquitoes. When these men were dead, their place in the Amazon sun was taken by sons of southern Germany and Italy, peasants dispossessed of their lands and hopeful of a new start in the New World. They found only an old one of exploitation and a final reward among rows of lonely crosses.
“Morgan’s Folly,” as it came to be called, slowly, mercilessly, bored its way through rivers and valleys, turning each hill it passed into a cemetery. Civilization had at last arrived, a Prometheus bound by iron pounded into wood at the cost, so legend said, of a human life for every tie.
King headed west into Acre, where the rubber forests were richer. Over and over, his notes were the same:
Of seringueiros [rubber collectors] moved in last year to Abuna region, 10% had died, 20% were non productive because of illness. This was normal.
… Seven families: Child mortality: 15 living, 5 dead; one girl under 21, 5 children, 2 dead. Now pregnant.
… Four families: Child mortality: 11 living, 9 dead. Was asked by father to help lovely one year old girl, dying.
… Nova Vida, 67 children alive, 53 dead.… Leprosy is said to be spreading on the Purus.
And what of the working conditions themselves?
The seringueiro is expected to work twelve hours daily from May until December, six days a week. He is exposed to the dangers of poisonous snakes, poisonous insects, poisonous worms, poisonous water, wild animals—sometimes wild Indians—and worst of all, to the deadly fevers. His only protection is his knowledge of the jungle, the quickness of his eye and hand, and the use of his knife and gun. There is no doctor—he is simply in the hands of God. For food and supplies he may pay double—triple—eight times the prevailing market of the big cities. For his rubber he gets a half to a fifth of the same market. And when his day’s work is ended he returns to his barraca, set on stilts—with its porch, the bedroom and kitchen. He goes to the nearby stream or river to bathe—careful of the alligators, water snakes, man-eating fish and electric eels. If he has been so fortunate as to kill a wild animal on the trail that day he will have meat for supper.… Many a time he has left at dawn, his breakfast a cup of black coffee and farina, his knapsack empty of food. Usually he has a bottle of one of the vilest and most powerful of all drinks—cacheca—his week-end companion and solace. His main fruit is the banana, sometimes an orange, seldom a lemon. Lemons are common, but he is convinced that they weaken his sexual powers, and it is for sex that he lives.…
The life of the seringueiro is the life of the far frontier; removed from all legal and moral restraint, a life of struggle and violence—a twentieth century replica of our old Wild West.
If that were ever to change, “the love of land, so necessary to build an agricultural economy, the backbone of any nation,”22 had to be developed. In his report to Rockefeller, King outlined his scheme: “At the same time every effort is made to increase the extraction of wild rubber, the ground work should be laid for small experimental stations in three or four key spots, there to serve as a foundation of a vast post-war program for expansion and colonization. These stations would serve equally for experiments with all tropical products supplemental to the economy of the United States of America.”23
Despite all the horror he had witnessed, King emerged from the Amazon with dreams of a sweeping development that rivaled, indeed surpassed, the settling of the American West.
The Amazon basin, with its 2,772,000 sq. miles of almost unpopulated and undeveloped land, offers our greatest challenge and hope. Capable of supporting a hundred million people, a vast new outlet for industrial America, a giant reservoir of raw materials to the tropics, the Amazon stands today, the white man’s greatest failure.…
No plan for the development of the Amazon Valley, however sound in theory, can be successful unless provision is made for an infusion of new blood by selected immigration on a major scale, from impoverished Europe, under the direction of honest, intelligent, public-spirited men, free from selfishness, corruption, indifference and cruelty to man.
We, the United States, are facing one of the great opportunities of history—an opportunity of changing the balance of good and evil—by building a vital force—created from the energy, industry and genius of oppressed millions, whose love of freedom and strength of spirit will urge them to seek new horizons.
All the lofty ideals in this vision could not hide King’s Euro-American ethnocentrism, and it was not surprising that the State Department, duly warned by Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, would worry that such plans hatched out of the Rockefeller office might trigger an adverse Brazilian reaction that could jeopardize its cooperation in the war effort, including the rubber-procurement programs. Caffery’s experience in Latin America was appreciated. As ambassador to Colombia, he helped Gulf Oil secure the giant Banco concession; in El Salvador, he had prevented the dictator from drawing in U.S. troops during the Pipil Indian insurrection of 1932. His voice was listened to in Washington, and now he was drawing the line in the Brazilian sand against Nelson Rockefeller’s plans for the Amazon.
By the time King returned to the United States, Washington was buzzing with anticipation of a coming battle. Ambassador Caffery had alerted Secretary of State Cordell Hull that Rockefeller might try to resurrect his Amazon Development Corporation despite the Brazilian government’s objections.24
THE INDIAN QUESTION
During his month in the Amazonian interior, King’s thinking had ventured beyond the health conditions of prospective rubber workers. He also made contacts with Brazilian businessmen and government officials. Years later, when King, by then the CIA’s Chief of Clandestine Services for the Western Hemisphere, commanded CIA covert operations in Latin America, he created precisely such networks, so casually obtained in pursuit of seemingly liberal goals.
King appreciated that “Problem No. 1 is manpower.” And the number-one manpower question was whether the Amazonian Indians would be used.
To get some idea, King visited the director of Indian affairs for the state of Pará. The director worked for the renowned Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI), whose founder, General Cândido Rondon, operated on the pacifist principle “Die if it be necessary, but kill never.”*
Having just set up new posts in the Xingu and Tapajós river valleys, the director of Indian affairs in Pará was anxious that Americans not undo all he had begun. The Indians of these v
alleys were nomadic and elusive and would attack, he told King. “The hostile attitude is justified,” King reported to Rockefeller, “because of ill-treatment from whites. On the river Araguaya [Araguaia], twelve Indians were killed brutally eight years ago. They recently killed twelve whites. Reprisals are certain.”
“Before the Indian can be civilized the white settler must be. The present white habits of drink and transmission of venereal disease is serious.”
The SPI director saw “no possibility of permanent white colonization until further [health and sanitation] protection is afforded [the] seringueiro,” King wrote. “Predict new colonists … will not become permanent settlers until government action is taken.”25
King’s report came at a time when the Amazonian Indian had become a sensitive issue for Nelson Rockefeller. In March, the CIAA had received a telephone call from Charles Collier, John Collier’s son and the secretary of the National Indian Institute, inquiring about the status of the Indian in the Amazon region.
Because of past CIAA-BIA collaboration, Charles Collier’s inquiry was totally proper. Rockefeller’s CIAA had funded the BIA’s 1941–1942 survey of Indian programs in Latin America done by Ernest Maes.26 Maes reported extensively on relations between Venezuela’s Carib Indians and the Orinoco oil operations of Nelson’s Creole Petroleum, on Indian agricultural production in Colombia, and on the mobilization of Indians in Ecuador for the border war with Peru. Maes’s reports also inspired Nelson to fund a visit by nine Latin American Indian administrators to the United States, where they were given a tour of BIA reservations with special emphasis on John Collier’s reforms.27