The Eternal Conquest
Bunker, Stephen G.
IN FEBRUARY 1985, THE FIRST LOAD OF manganese and iron-i 1,500 tons in 160 railroad cars-left Carajds, a series of rugged hills in the southeast of the Brazilian Amazon. Discovered 17 years...
...Exploiting these minerals required the construction of an 890kilometer railroad to the port of Sio Luis-at a cost of $2.4 billion-the construction at the port of the largest iron loading complex in the world and the building of numerous roads into the jungle...
...The Bank, already under pressure to insist on protection for indigenous groups and fragile ecosystems in its projects, achieved only partial success in its negotiations with the Brazilian government...
...T HE BOOMS AND BUSTS OF RESOURCE extraction left the Amazon isolated and impoverished until the 1960s...
...The seringalistas traded rubber for provisions within the closed vertical system of aviamento houses...
...This accelerated migration into the area, and resulted in significant disruptions of indigenous societies and massive deforestation, with very little of the agricultural development which had been the project's justification.7 The second project, in southern Pard, was a massive undertaking to develop the largest iron ore deposit in the world at Carajis...
...Peasants and laborers near or within the few established urban centers provided labor for the early rubber markets, as did the surviving native groups in a few areas of terrafirme (uplands...
...Turtle-egg oil and turtle meat were sold as a delicacy on local and international markets...
...Persistent labor shortages led many seringalistas to prohibit tappers from growing food so that they could dedicate themselves exclusively to tapping and processing latex...
...Up to 40,000 prospectors flooded the area...
...The manatee, a large aquatic mammal, was intensely hunted both for local consumption and to supply oil and meat for ships involved in the West Indies sugar trade...
...Through mining, lumbering, and ranching concessions granted to large transnational and Brazilian corporations, the government hoped to stimulate exports to pay off its debt...
...The completion of the Bel6m-Brasilia highway in 1959 stimulated a massive immigration by dispossessed peasants from other regions, especially the Northeast...
...and The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983) by the same author...
...Others fled from the fertile river banks which exposed them to attack...
...I ( ) 29Ret"4Iv on t4 Americas AMAZON Making charcoal in igloo-like ovens to fire pig iron plants: a token nationalist policy requires some minerals processing before export dustrial capitalism-the production of machines for general consumer purchase and use...
...During the slow periods, miners tended to spread out to prospect in the surrounding hills...
...They set up ramshackle settlements, blasted the banks of streams with strong jets of water, and pumped mud through 27 VOLUME XXIII, NO...
...This battle highlighted the inherent conflict between two different modes of extracting natural resources from VOLUME XXIII, NO...
...The state of Pard and the municipality of Marabi, both already very poor, received little additional revenue to provide for the health, education and security of this rapidly growing and often violent population...
...Minor extractive economies sustained isolated households, particularly during the 1950s when national and international demand for skins of jaguars and caimans provided export opportunities...
...Joe Foweraker, The Struggle for Land (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981...
...It is all too easy to do things para o ingles ver, "for the English to see," in the cynical old Brazilian expression...
...Another mineral with an extraordinary impact on the region was gold...
...The zone of the huge Carajds iron ore deposits received the greatest share...
...University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1974...
...Under Brazilian law, in order to claim these untitled lands, hold them against other claimants or sell them, ranchers and peasants had to clear half the area they claimed...
...Not only had manganese been found there by Union Carbide in 1966, but in 1963 and again in 1967 large reserves of bauxite were discovered on the Trombetas River which flows into the Amazon 500 miles west of Bel6m...
...Work on the Tucuruf Dam started a year later...
...Its precarious water, drainage, sanitation, health and education services could not have served well a fifth of that number...
...Steel's shares in the project...
...Low prices have narrowed profit margins in extractive enterprises and have enhanced the pressures to exploit cheaply, with minimal environmental safeguards...
...The installation of power lines from Tucuruf and then the opening of the railroad stimulated massive invasion by peasant migrants and engendered a three-way conflict, between the large landowner, the new peasants, and the native people...
...Even more than Carajds, Serra Pelada spawned a large demand for prostitution...
...Migrants began flowing into the area around Carajis about 1971, encouraged by the prospects of jobs and by the certainty that the roads and railroads would open up new lands for settlement...
...and towns sprang up where two or three years earlier there were no houses at all...
...These riverine societies could maintain dense populations and complex social organization by coordinating hunting, fishing, and agriculture with the yearly rise and fall in the river's height...
...GOODYEAR DISCOVERED RUBBER VULcanization in 1839...
...Discovered 17 years earlier by an affiliate of U.S...
...The prices of goods the tappers received were inflated at each of the multiple intermediary levels, as was the price of the rubber exported...
...One of CVRD's projects to conserve native fauna, for example, is an extravagant zoo which embarrasses even the company's environmentalists...
...The Amazon is seen as a reserve of natural resources which can diminish a swelling national debt, and land which can resolve growing tensions between classes...
...The Japanese held 49% of the capital and the Brazilians the rest...
...Stephen G. Bunker, "Extraqo e Tributaqgo: Problemas de CarajAs," Pard Desenvolvimento, No...
...Rubber trees grow widely dispersed through vast areas of jungle...
...Individual ranchers struggled to prevent prospecting on their lands, but could seldom resist the large numbers who arrived...
...Mineral extraction would go hand in hand with the opening of new agricultural and forest lands, they claimed, as the PGC was inspired by the "government's concern to...achieve inter-sectoral integration...
...Shortly beyond Marabi, and across the 2.5 kilometer bridge over the Tocantins, the train entered the Mae Maria Indian Reserve, home of the GaviAo people and the site of another set of problems created by the development of the region...
...Planners, politicians, and academics often equate high levels of natural resource endowment with the capacity for economic development, assuming a natural progression from dependence on the export of raw materials to a diversified economy.' In fact, economies based on resource extraction tend to remain isolated enclaves supplying foreign markets and enriching absentee owners...
...quarrels over shares of gold spilled over into the towns where miners went for amusement, supplies and banking...
...The seringalistas (owners or lessees of rubber forests) soon had to import labor from outside Amaz6nia.7 Only after a long and especially severe drought in the 1870s that caused famine in the Northeast and drove many peasants to seek work elsewhere were the seringalistas able to keep up with world demand...
...As early as 1693 there were complaints from slavers that it was necessary to go upriver as far as the present boundaries of Peru to find slaves...
...015 (1974), (Brasilia: CDE...
...By 1987, the three pig iron plants nearing completion had already stimulated the construction of at least 200 charcoal ovens, and engendered a new series of conflicts over access to forest resources...
...The national labor force would be protected by legislation requiring minerals to be at least minimally processed before export...
...In these ways, the Brazil-nut groves represented everything that a self-consciously modernizing society seeks to overcome...
...Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento, POLAMAZONIA: Exposidao de Motivos Interministerial, No...
...2 T HE AMAZON BASIN CONTAINS THE world's largest rainforest and its largest river system...
...I (MAY 1989) z 0 N Co In Er D 0r E AJ r W W) Settlers watch the forest burn: Though Brazil-nut groves may not be cut, nothing prevents killing them by fire A few Brazilian critics pointed out that the PIN roads supposedly built for colonization and communication appeared to connect the major minerals deposits discovered in the 1960s...
...its completion dislocated both indigenous and peasant communities and left the recent migrants unemployed...
...Raw materials prices, always unstable, have been particularly soft during most of this decade, in part because of the same global economic downturn which worsened the debt position of the developing countries...
...Rubber could be found in various forms throughout the humid tropics, but only the Amazon basin offered the quantity and quality necessary for industrial use...
...Where PIN distributed access to resources in order to encourage domestic markets, POLAMAZONIA concentrated resources in order to accelerate exports to the rest of Brazil and overseas...
...The local merchants would advance the tools and provisions necessary for an extended stay in the groves at the beginning of the rainy season, when the nuts started to fall from the trees, and then discount the price of these goods from the price of the nuts gathered, setting the price for each...
...and it was locally controlled...
...Against the advice of some of its own officers and consultants, the World Bank financed asphalting of the road...
...77-93...
...PIN stressed road-building and colonization with a strong emphasis on small farms, agricultural extension and integrated rural development.' 4 The enormous public relations campaign which accompanied it made migration to the Amazon seem a real option for millions of landless peasants...
...These animals were depleted just as the manatee and turtle before them...
...Brazil-nut grove owners can invoke the ecological integrity of their traditional ways to marshal outside support, even when they themselves are transforming the groves into pasture and charcoal...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 28 - -------- -T HE DEVASTATION AT CARAJAS IS THE latest chapter in the long saga of natural resource exploitation in the Amazon...
...During two centuries, Portuguese colonists devastated the resources they extracted and sold...
...Both CVRD and the ranchers found these activities threatening and disruptive...
...Both because of the added fertility along the river and because the rivers allow for easy movement, people have tended to cluster near the waterways...
...The mines have stimulated road building, brought in new social services, and opened up new agricultural lands...
...The construction of the dam attracted huge armies of workers...
...These events coincided with a major new development in inVOLUME XXIII, NO...
...The Andean waters, rich in sediments, are joined by more sterile waters flowing from plateaus north and south of the main river, where the soil is old and weathered...
...During this period the military regime experimented with greater political openness as it moved toward a return to civilian rule...
...Roberto Santos, Histrria da Amazdnia, 1800-1920 (Sao Paulo: TAO, 1980...
...Small towns grew from a few thousand inhabitants to cities of over a hundred thousand...
...As these two modes of extraction were so located that they affected and used the same space, their differences brought them into direct conflict, both as symbols and as physical operations...
...The government's planners simply asserted that the program, together with the material and infrastructural resources that mineral extraction made available, would induce private investment...
...In 1974 the government announced a new development strategy, POLAMAZONIA, aimed to promote mining, lumbering, ranching, fishing, agriculture and hydroelectric energy.'" During the following decade, most subsidies were applied in three "growth poles" centered around large mineral deposits...
...It is extremely unlikely there will be serious reforestation as long as much cheaper sources of vegetable charcoal remain available in the native forest...
...but the central idea underlying the plan was expressed quite boldly: The time has come to take advantage of the potential which the Amazon region represents, principally to obtain a significant contribution for the growth of the Gross National Product.' The Amazon was thus declared a resource reserve whose purpose was to finance Brazilian industrial development...
...2. See Stephen G. Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988...
...The Japanese idea, strongly supported by the Brazilian Government, was to build a huge hydroelectric dam on the Tocantins River about halfway between MarabB and Bel6m and generate electricity to turn bauxite and the alumina derived from it into aluminum for export...
...Peasants, prospectors, ranchers, and lumber companies led the rush for land, and an even greater assortment of people came looking for work...
...At the same time, the exploitation of Brazil nuts required very little foreign capital...
...It was the steady rise in prices, however, and a growing appreciation in Europe of long-term industrial demand for rubber, which inspired the long, costly, and uncertain process of developing a plantation-cropped variety.' When the English succeeded at this in Asia in the early 1900s, the high costs of the Amazon system priced its rubber off the market...
...Raw materials exports in the twentieth century is admittedly more problematic, as the complexity of technologies and the scale of capital investment necessary to be competitive in most sectors of the modern economy restrict opportunities for transforming naturally produced exports into socially constructed enterprises...
...8. Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role ofthe British Royal Botanical Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979...
...3 The large ranching and lumbering concerns used various tactics to assert legal claim to lands which peasants had settled: purchasing old or lapsed titles, forging and fraudulently registering deeds, buying state lands, or simply occupying the land...
...Beldm suffered a series of devastating epidemics which ravaged the Indian populations there...
...36 (1974), pp...
...diss...
...Subsequent technological refinements made vulcanized rubber sufficiently heat resistant for use in internal combustion motors...
...In the first, the Brazilian government promoted small- and medium-scale colonization in Rond6nia, an area of relatively fertile soils which had been accessible only by river transport...
...As it turned out, they were right...
...2 " T HE IRON MINES, HOWEVER, WERE ONLY part of the revolution which turned Pard into a minerals-exporting province...
...4 Indigenous societies exploited a wide range of natural resources at rates which allowed for their regeneration...
...In 1976 NAAC and CVRD set up a joint venture to build the Albras aluminum processing plant at Maranhdo...
...Charles Wood and Marianne Schmink, "Blaming the Victim: Small Farmer Production in an Amazon Colonization Project," Studies in Third World Societies, No...
...Many of the dispossessed and the unemployed gravitated toward Marabd...
...Government propaganda and plans call for reforestation and the eventual use of plantation fuel but, at least around Marabai, the first experiments with eucalyptus groves all failed...
...Brazil-nut extraction was older, depended on a self-regenerating plant, required far less capital investment, and had engendered a social organization of labor and distribution of access to resources which epitomized the most backward and reprehensible aspects of underdevelopment or of a "traditional" economy...
...The Amazon's economy stagnated until the mid-1800s, when technological changes in the industrial world started a new round of extractive exports...
...By this time, the Brazilian government was so committed to the project that it went ahead with these huge and very expensive projects by itself...
...5 European demand for animal oils eliminated natural resources crucial to the subsistence of dense populations...
...The low prices set for their rubber output kept most of them in perpetual debt, bound to their masters by the threat of violence...
...In 1987, GETAT managed to expropriate enough old Brazil-nut groves to resettle the invaders of the Gavido reserve at MIe Maria...
...The decimation of native populations accelerated as the colonial economy declined...
...The language used to promote the strategy alternated between lyrically rhapsodic and coldly economic...
...In 1980, a discovery was made at Serra Pelada about 20 miles west of Marabd...
...Governor Jader Barbalho, a populist committed to reclaiming state control over unused lands, used environmental arguments to dissuade GETAT from expropriating the Brazil-nut groves to resettle the invaders...
...Since Serra Pelada was worked manually as an open pit, it was subject to slowdowns during the rainy season-when mudslides would kill many-and to occasional closing when the walls became too steep for safety and the top of the pit had to be widened...
...of forest are turned into charcoal each year I VOLUME XXIII, NO...
...Plans for the dam were announced in 1974...
...The following year the Japanese made it clear they would not invest in either the dam or the equally necessary port facilities...
...Most gatherers ended the season with debt to carry over into the next...
...GETAT was not particularly concerned with the legislation protecting those trees, but the Brazil-nut groves were also the only lands around MarabA still under the state of Pard's jurisdiction...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 32Z 0 Ic processing tin ore at tom -uturo mine, Hondonia In 1980 the Minister of Planning inaugurated the Greater Carajis Program (PGC) to "promote the most efficient domestic use of the benefits [from mining] in the region...
...The only available areas for resettlement around Marabi were Brazil-nut groves...
...The town near the mine remained a protected enclave but the second community was quickly engulfed by a spontaneous agglomeration of laborers, merchants and prostitutes, growing from three homes in 1980 to over 20,000 inhabitants today...
...One account claims that a single society, the Tapaj6, was capable of fielding an army of 60,000 men...
...In practice, the only industrial projects proposed or approved have been for technologically simple, environmentally destructive basic minerals processing, primarily of iron ore into pig iron...
...Dennis J. Mahar, Government Policies and Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon Region, (Washington: The World Bank, 1989...
...6 The massive exploitation of turtles and manatees disrupted critical links in the riverine ecosystem and thus reduced the other resources, such as fish, on which human populations depended...
...Dennis J. Mahar, Frontier Development Policy in Brazil: A Study ofAmazinia (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1979...
...The old Brazil-nut economy was in rapid decline as agriculture, ranching, and lumbering took over the land and polluted the air which supported the old groves...
...The Brazilian Amazon has been severely affected by these pressures, and is particularly susceptible to being treated as a panacea for debt and deficit in the rest of the nation, as its ecological fragility and economic history have left it politically and economically weak...
...The company built a smaller town just outside its land claim to support its rail operations...
...7 (1979), pp...
...Yet closer examination of U.S...
...7. This account relies heavily on Barbara Weinstein, "Capital Penetration and Problems of Labor Control in the Amazon Rubber Trade," Radical History Review, No...
...By opening Amazonian terra firme to colonization, it hoped that increasing political tensions and demand for land reform, caused by the mechanization of agriculture in the South and recurrent droughts in the Northeast, would be alleviated...
...The Eternal Conquest 1. This notion is particularly powerful because it reflects the nineteenth century experience of the United States and Canada, two of the more impressive cases of late industrial development...
...This migration intensified land conflicts already underway at the edge of the old Brazil-nut groves...
...This book explains the close connections between violence and the extension of capitalist investment into the Amazon...
...121-140...
...Steel in what had then been a heavily forested and little explored wilderness, Carajis turned out to contain one of the world's largest mineral deposits with 18 billion tons of high grade iron and smaller but significant amounts of manganese, bauxite, copper, nickel, gold and silver located nearby...
...In the uplands, dense vegetation of highly diverse and often interdependent species provides a cover whose exuberance and depth disguises the poverty of the underlying nutrient base in the soil...
...Projeto Grande CarajAs, "Programa Grande Carajais: Andlise a Situaqdo Atual e Novas Diretrizes," (Brasilia: mimeo, 1985...
...The use of mercury to extract gold dust from alluvial deposits poisoned water and diminished the fish catch, an important source of protein for both rural and urban poor along the Tocantins and its tributaries...
...II In glossy brochures with extensive photos and maps, the program's objective was put forth as "the harmonious growth of the country's diverse regions, industrial decentralization, redirection of migratory flows by generating new employment, and payment of the external debt...
...Initial and probably conservative estimates are that 33,000 hectares of native forest will be consumed each year for charcoal...
...The Brazil-nut oligarchy, still using coerced indebted labor, found it convenient to ally themselves with the governor, a very awkward alliance for a government publicly committed to land reform and dependent on support from left-wing labor...
...Despite a series of delays the dam was finished in 1984 and started to back up water in a 200-kilometer long lake whose upper end almost reached Marabi, the center of the old Brazil-nut groves and site of fierce disputes over land...
...The mining company proclaims its concerns for the environment right around the mine, but pays little attention to the chaos and violence beyond it...
...Depletion of native spices near colonial settlements obliged collection to expand further inland and upstream...
...When the resource is depleted, extractive regions are left socially impoverished and environmentally degraded...
...No matter how much care is taken to minimize the environmental impact of megaprojects in the jungle, the very existence of a project sets off a devastating dynamic of massive immigration and forest clearing that is difficult, if not impossible, to control...
...By 1985, when the first load of minerals was shipped out, much of what had been dense jungle between Carajis and Marabi-the nearest town 163 kilometers to the east-had disappeared, leaving only the whitened trunks and branches of the largest trees standing...
...Otivio Guilherme Velho, Frentes de Expansio e Estructura Agrdria (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores, 1972...
...Nothing in the plan took account of the isolation, capital intensiveness and technological dependency of economies based on mining...
...it will place permanent limits on the Amazon's potential for sustained autonomous development...
...An influx of large ranching and lumbering enterprises soon followed the peasant migrants...
...Using their greater political and economic power, and frequently force, they were able to take control of the land which the peasants had cleared and then to take advantage of the labor reserve which their expulsion from it created...
...Environmentalists normally sympathetic to the territorial claims of indigenous groups were put in the position of denying the peasants on Gavido land access to the Brazil-nut groves, thus subordinating both peasants' and Indians' needs to the protection of the forest...
...POLAMAZONIA's greatest impact was in two new extractive frontiers...
...This book describes the ways in which industrial capital captured wild rubber and other Latin American plants, turning them from extracted to plantation-cultivated commodities...
...These houses traded goods down through a series of intermediaries (aviadores) who advanced goods against eventual repayment in the rubber which would be traded up through the same sequence...
...3. Ibid...
...They usually offered small sums, and then, in collusion with local police and military, employed violence to remove those who would not leave...
...They yield latex in slow drippings which must be collected daily...
...T HUS ON THAT MORNING IN 1985 WHEN THE first trainload of iron and manganese left the Carajds Searching for gold: the use of mercury poisons the watermountains, it crossed a landscape whose vegetation had been substantially altered, where patterns of ownership, commerce, and transport had been transformed, and where the economy and topography of the rivers, the towns, and the land itself had changed dramatically...
...Total investment amounted to over $5 billion, undertaken by the Companhia do Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD), a state mining enterprise that bought U.S...
...1 (MAY 1989)Rt AMAZON Amer4es AMAZON AMAZON BASIN "" MAJOR FEDERAL HIGHWAYS " HYDROELECTRIC DAM PROJECTS , STATES a1 b ARGENTINA SII.rl 61 1ll1q " -1 " 0 _90Rio de Janeiro U Sao Paulo sluices to separate out the precious dust and the occasional nugget...
...The dense riverine populations would have been enormously susceptible to the rapid transmission of new diseases, even ahead of direct contact with Europeans...
...The growing indebtedness of many countries that attempted to industrialize during the 1950s and 1960s has pushed them back toward dependence on raw materials exports...
...Each extractive cycle has intensified the devastation and-seduced by the lure of world markets-limited local opposition...
...Lumber merchants hurried in to set up sawmills, buying cheaply the big trees that remained after the smaller trees had been burned...
...it was protective of the natural environment...
...Contrary to its claims, the PGC's fiscal incentives will likely reduce much of the area along the railroad line to a smoky wasteland of depleted forests, impoverished soils, and fouled waters, a degradation that will only exacerbate the mounting problems of unemployment, landlessness, and violent conflict over land, which resulted from massive migration to the region...
...The colonial economy, in contrast, exploited a few, highly marketable resources to exhaustion...
...To assure safe passage of the railroad line through Gavido territory at Mde Maria the mining company supported the Indians' claims and looked to the official Indian agency (FUNAI) and the military's land agency (GETAT) to remove the invaders and resettle them elsewhere...
...It went ahead with the loan despite the weakness of the controls agreed to...
...Food supplies were sufficiently large to sustain the inhabitants and a Spanish expedition of 900 men for over a month in a single village...
...The establishment of an authoritarian and centralist military regime in 1964 created the conditions for further disruptions of land tenure guarantees,' 2 leaving peasants extremely vulnerable to repeated expulsion...
...Each new form of resource extraction, from the reduction of river animals to the transformation of vast areas of forest into pasture, has severely limited the potential for subsequent human settlement and economic use of the forest...
...Europeans had conquered the Amazon, using those portions of it which had commercial value-indigenous labor, turtle and manatee oils and meat, wild spices and grass-for their own shortterm profit in ways which precluded sustained economic exploitation...
...GETAT and the Gaviao simply wanted an expeditious solution, as did CVRD, especially when the Gaviao threatened to block the railroad tracks in 1986...
...Trade with the missions would also have spread epidemics...
...Ibid...
...They did, however, allow the jungle's flora and fauna to reproduce themselves...
...Until two decades ago the economy of this region was in many ways primitive, violent and exploitative...
...Extraction organized in response to technologically driven market changes and to politically determined economic decisions is not only a short-term disaster...
...I 1-13...
...numerous captured Indians died from malnutrition on the home-bound trip...
...85-101...
...Since then, a series of government initiatives have aimed to use the Amazon as a solution for the political and economic problems caused by Brazil's attempts to industrialize...
...The name Mde Maria comes from the huge Brazil-nut grove exploited by a single family since 1923 but partially ceded to the Indians who were resettled there from further east in 1947...
...I (M 9)ReAo oN AmicaX s AMAZON aluminum plant where the Tocantins River flows into the bay of Guami near the city of Bel6m...
...9 DURING THIS PERIOD, THE ECONOMY OF the Marabi and Carajis region-later the site of the iron mines-revolved around the extraction and sale of Brazil nuts from huge groves covering over r million hectares...
...As the idea of an Amazon rich in natural resources was incorporated into national economic policy, the old fear that other nations might wish to control those resources was resuscitated...
...The rubber tappers who remained turned to a mix of agriculture, hunting, and fishing...
...Gold prospectors also rushed into the area...
...The distance between trees-up to 100 meters-and the need for constant attention made rubber collection extremely labor-intensive...
...By the end of the eighteenth century, the twin assaults on native populations and natural resources had created a demographic and economic vacuum, broken only by a few small and impoverished cities...
...As it had after the exhaustion of its first round of extractive exports, the Amazon's economy sank into a Au REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30 REPORT ON TIHE AMERICASprofound depression...
...As with rubber, the rest of the local population lived in direct dependence on these families...
...N 1970, THE BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT EMbarked on a new development effort, the Program for National Integration (PIN...
...At the top of the hill across from the mine, the CVRD mining company built a carefully planned town for miners and administrators, with electricity, communications, and other social service infrastructure...
...The tappers were obliged to pay heavily inflated prices for their transport, food and tools...
...4. John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979...
...Within less than a decade, Amazonian rubber fell from supplying nearly 100 percent of the world market to only 20...
...Now the 900,000 square kilometers around the mine-nearly a fifth of the Amazon's total area-is the focus of government strategy for the entire region...
...Carrying water and soils east from the Andes, it starts its journey to the Atlantic less than 100 miles from the Pacific coast...
...The city of Marabd, into which the train pulled 163 kilometers down the line, had more than 200,000 inhabitants, over twelve times what its population had been when the iron ore was first discovered in 1967...
...Amazonian sugar could not compete with sugar from Bahia in either quality or price...
...The tension between the progress symbolized by large loans and big machines, on the one hand, and the preservation of the forest under exploitative labor regimes on the other, puts progressive regional politicians and environmentalists at a disadvantage in their campaigns to protect the fragile jungle ecosystem...
...I T IS DIFFICULT FOR ENVIRONMENTALISTS operating at a distance to judge the effects of supporting or opposing particular political groups in Brazil, as these have learned to use environmental rhetoric for their own purposes...
...Smith, "Destructive Exploitation of the South American River Turtle," Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Vol...
...0 The few families that bought them and shipped them down river for export controlled the region's politics, rotating in and out of office and monopolizing the rental of the Brazil-nut groves from the state of Pard...
...The need to placate domestic opposition and to satisfy foreign banks who voiced concerns about environmental destruction and indigenous rights stimulated ambitious statements about how the "minerals pole" would contribute to national development...
...These infrastructural projects opened up previously inaccessible lands and created the prospect of employment...
...At the same time, landowning and corporate interests have managed to present the concerns of foreign environmentalists and indigenous rights advocates as cynically disguised incursions against Brazil's sovereignty, using this to discredit Brazilian environmentalists...
...The technology required to make charcoal is simple and can be subcontracted to local entrepreneurs and peasants...
...The company and the government argue convincingly that the labor and living conditions of these new enterprises are vastly superior to the socially repressive but environmentally sounder extractive economies of the past, though relatively few enjoy these benefits...
...Companies, which have benefited from fiscal incentives and tax holidays, use the abundance of native woods to make charcoal for smelting the pig iron...
...The combination of crowding, excessive work, and poor nutrition made urban slaves particularly vulnerable to disease...
...In 1968, the central government, acting through the Superintendency for the Development of the Amazon (SUDAM), extended its program of fiscal incentives to large ranching enterprises in the Amazon...
...The commodities extracted have varied considerably, but they have all reduced the chances for subsequent development by damaging the environment, and by instituting exploitative labor relations and unstable human settlements...
...6. Nigel J.H...
...As SUDAM was not obliged to consider the validity of titles for the land on which its enormous subsidies were to be applied, their immediate effect was to aggravate the already severe land tenure crisis...
...The region was directly subordinated to the nation, and to the national debt...
...The rising costs of extraction and exchange in this system were more than compensated for by the rise in prices...
...Once again the reduction of fauna had profound effects on other parts of the ecosystem and further impoverished human communities...
...3 Early European chronicles related that large indigenous settlements along the rivers maintained stores of maize, manioc, sweet potatoes, dried fish, live turtles and fowl, together with plantations of pineapples, avocados, guavas, and other fruits...
...it depended on a beautiful and noble tree, which symbolized for many the ideal of a self-sustaining relationship between humans and nature...
...It had been supplanted by road and rail, and cut in two by the Tucurui Dam...
...19 (1986), pp...
...The Tocantins river was no longer the only means of transport to Bel6m and to world markets beyond...
...and Canadian cases shows that luck, timing, and location were all crucial...
...Fishing, tapping rubber, or gathering Brazil nuts did not sustain high living standards, nor could they sustain their contributions to Brazil's trade with the rest of the world...
...Portuguese attempts to extend sugar cultivation into the Amazon, along with strong European markets for native spices, created extensive demand for Indian slaves, fostering raids and wars between different groups, and causing drastic depopulation...
...Aviadores at each level in this chain maintained control through the indebtedness of those at the next level down...
...I ( ) the same environment...
...Certain tribes, including the Tapaj6, were held to ransom in exchange for slaves from other tribes...
...33,000 ha...
...5. Infectious diseases brought in by the Europeans may have reduced native populations even more than slavery did...
...The iron mine and the railroad stood for modernity, for high technology, for rational labor organization based on bureaucratic position, technical qualifications, and regulated wages, and for connection to the rest of the world...
...Only when the discovery of raw materials coincided with strong international markets and the materials themselves were located in places that offered advantages to other enterprises did raw materials extraction tend to foster further development...
...The most fertile areas of the basin are therefore those where the annual floods drop the Andean soils...
...By 1973 a consortium of Japanese aluminum companies called NAAC (Nippon Amazon Aluminum Company) had started negotiations with CVRD, the state mining company, to set up an 33 VOLUME XXIll, NO...
...Slaving expeditions became more and more wasteful of Indian life...
...27 (1982), pp...
...9. Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon...
...Current development doctrine and the large-scale enterprises it promotes promise to repeat the history of previous conquests of the Amazon...
...The filth, disorder and dangers of this unplanned city and the chaotic landscape around it are as much a product of Brazil's development policies as the planned community which spawned it...
...See David Sweet, A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed (Ph.D...
...SUDAM, II Piano Nacional de Desenvolvimento: Programa de Aqio do Governo para a Amaz6nia, 1975-1979, (Bel6m: SUDAM...
Vol. 23 • May 1989 • No. 1
