Stringing Together a Nation: Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906-1930 (review)

Cândido Rondon (1865-1958) enjoys a legendary reputation for braving the Amazon jungles to build telegraph lines, charting the nation's frontiers, and establishing the Indian Protection Service (SPI in Portuguese) in the early twentieth century. As Diacon's excellent biography makes clear, the real story is much more complicated and history's judgment more muddled than the legend suggests. By giving us the complex story, Diacon also throws light on another knotty problem, Brazil's modernization early in the last century.

Rondon bridged two cultures, his father's Brazilian and his mother's Amerindian. Neither parent survived long enough to raise him, so he went to live with an uncle and eventually graduated as an engineer from the army's higher education system. Rondon was a small man but extraordinarily tough, in both body and mind. In a sense, he dedicated himself to unifying the nation. His work on the telegraph and border commissions helped integrate the far west, where he was reared, with the modern southeast, where he was educated and spent much of his army career. Through his direction of the SPI and as an influential voice and opinion leader, he tried to synthesize the European and indigenous traditions from which he sprang. He was also a dedicated Positivist for his entire career and pursued the goals of that philosophy with zeal.

Rondon's famous pairing with Theodore Roosevelt for seven months during 1913-14 provides one of the liveliest sections in this book. Roosevelt requested an escort for an Amazon expedition, and the government assigned Rondon so he could reap the publicity and confirm that Brazil owned this vast territory. The expedition became a nightmare for Rondon and most of those who went on it because of logistical problems, illness, personality conflicts, deaths, and the sheer challenge of the jungle. Roosevelt and his son almost died, and the former president's lifespan may have been shortened by disease contracted then. Afterward the leaders made light of the problems, but the whole affair nearly became a disaster for all concerned. Oddly, despite Rondon's fame and glory, he was somewhat marginalized from the institutions of Brazil. The next generation of army officers, for example, eschewed Positivism and preached military professionalism learned from European armies. They found Rondon's work irrelevant to their new mission. Likewise, the Catholic Church bristled at Rondon's Positivist criticism and counterattacked vigorously, undermining his standing among social conservatives. Even the physical modernization that he hoped would result from laying telegraph lines ended sadly: the lines were extremely difficult to maintain, they never generated enough revenue to break even, and the whole system was soon rendered obsolete by radio telegraphy.

Diacon makes clear that the legend itself was intentional. Rondon, his superiors, and his representatives in Rio de Janeiro made full use of public relations media to broadcast the news of his successes on the telegraph project, explorations, Indian pacification, and potential development in the west. Thus emerged the heroic image of Rondon and his lieutenants. For all the hype (justified as for a good cause), the publicity campaign made it difficult to measure Rondon's real contribution. In the past several decades, a new revisionist literature, that Diacon summarizes fairly, has sought to argue that the entire Rondon project was designed to suppress and eradicate the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Diacon treats this literature with respect but correctly shows that it projects contemporary theories onto an era that could not have understood, much less embraced, them.

This book mines significant unpublished materials in Rio, principally the Museum of the Indian and of the Museum of the Army, as well as a huge volume of published reports from the telegraph commission. I suspect that the 20 newspapers cited frequently were accessed through...