In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, The United States, and the Nature of a Region by Seth Garfield (review)

In his book, Seth Garfield asks how tensions between groups in the Brazilian Amazon in the World War II era “came to shape landscapes and lifeways in the region” (p. 1). Among these groups were the governments of Brazil and the United States, migrants, labourers, scientists, journalists, artists, and others. His thesis seems to be that these groups each exploited the Amazon for their own ends, in the process redefining its “nature” with multilayered meanings as a “hinterland,” “borderland,” “resource-rich land,” “promised land,” “homeland,” and “tropical lowland” (p. 2).

At war’s eve, the Amazon had already long been integrated into global trade patterns, but the need to secure a steady source of rubber suddenly drove up its economic and geopolitical value. As the first chapter demonstrates, in the previous decade, the Getúlio Vargas regime (1930–1945) had already begun to redefine the Amazon from a neglected region where rubber production had declined to less than one percent of global output in 1932 to an object of nationalist pride, placing the future of the region in the hands of Brasilia’s officials. The Estado Novo (1937–1945), especially, promoted this March to the West by giving away free land, promoting research in new crops, improving transportation, and subsidizing education and public health. Here already were several contests — between industrialists in the south and the Amazon’s rubber producers, between the military and landowners, between sanitarians and peasants, between intellectuals and technocrats.

Chapter two highlights the other side of this binational redefinition of the Amazon, this time by the United States, which had lost ninety-two percent of its rubber supply when Japan invaded the Malayan peninsula. US officials wished not only to boost rubber production but also keep it from the Axis and stabilize Latin America. They had trouble convincing US corporations to invest in the Amazon, but eventually did centralize the purchase of rubber. Congress appropriated funds for development in the Western Hemisphere, and Washington and Brasilia agreed on fixed prices for rubber and on subsidizing health and labour costs. The US government also built several airports in northeastern Brazil. The agreements spoke of Brazilian success not only in supplying short-term US demand but also in achieving long-term development.

Chapters three and four shift from geopolitics to labour history, looking at the workers who toiled on rubber plantations and the experience of migrants to the region. Plantation owners and managers struggled to rationalize production against the scattered and autonomous tappers of the Hevia trees from which the latex flowed. Violence sometimes resulted. Brazilian officials, meanwhile, aimed to bring tens of thousands of workers up north, and their ideology of trabalhismo celebrated those who came as patriotic “strong men” and shamed those who stayed at home. In addition, the welfare state guaranteed a minimum wage and a share of the latex (p. 108). During the war, almost 55,000 migrated to the Amazon, subsidized by the government. “Migrants were neither dupes nor passive victims but agents of change in their sending and receiving communities,” argues Garfield. Many came, for instance, from the drought-ridden and deeply unequal northeastern province of Ceará and were only too happy to relocate to where they could support their families. Others left to seek adventure or to escape their parents.

Chapter five looks at specific conflicts between US and Brazilian policymakers, workers and bosses, progressives and conservatives, and locals and outsiders. For instance, US officials blamed uncooperative locals for low rubber yields, and Amazonian bosses did divert state subsidies to rig debt merchandising. But as the war dragged on, US advocates of collaboration with Latin America such as Henry Wallace lost favor to conservative skeptics. The fixed price for rubber that should have benefited Brazil ended up losing it $66 to $264 million. The epilogue charts post-1945 redefinitions of the...