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Chapter 3 Rubber Tappers: A Century’s Struggle The Amazon has always been coveted, ever since the “discovery” of Brazil. As early as the sixteenth century Spaniards made their first journeys on the river they called the Amazon because, it is said, when they went up the river, they met indigenous populations that included women on horseback, and so they called it “the river of the Amazons.” The vastness of the forest and its secrets inspired greed. Everybody imagined that in a region so teeming with trees, greater riches would be hidden underground. They were right, as we’ve seen in recent years (gold in Yanomami territory,at Serra Pelada,1 and in the Carajás Mountains).In addition to gold there are dozens of other minerals, some important for nuclear fuel processing, manganese, porcelain, bauxite, and so on—almost all looted, especially during the military government and continuing during the postdictatorship governments. That is how the myth of “Amazonia, the great Eldorado,” began that has been cultivated and reinforced over the centuries up to the present. The history of rubber tapper occupation of the Amazon stretches over about one hundred fifty years. On the explorers’ many journeys in the region, a product of great elasticity, used by its traditional inhabitants, the Indians, attracted their attention: It was natural rubber, produced by extracting latex from a regional tree later called the rubber tree. The explorers thought it might have some commercial value in Europe, which was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. Sent to Europe, rubber came to have multiple uses that kept increasing as new technologies were discovered: vulcanization (by Charles Goodyear) and pneumatics (discovered by chance by Dunlop, a veterinarian), among others. These discoveries, in conjunction with the needs of young industries in Europe for transmission cables with greater durability and resistance and especially for a raw material with multiple uses, created a sizable market for rubber produced in Amazonia. The problem was that the Indians did not produce it on a commercial scale, as industry required. To respond to the demands of the consumer market, it was necessary to have a workforce dedicated exclusively to its production. Thus were encouraged the first migrations of people from the Brazilian Northeast to theAmazon,and the aviamento2 system was set up to finance the influx of these populations. As early as the middle of the nineteenth century the number of northeastern migrants in the Amazon forest was considerable,but“official history” claims that the main factor responsible for the massive arrival of northeasterners in the region was the great drought that devastated the Brazilian Northeast around 1877. Nothing could be further from the truth.This was only one more reason.What encouraged the influx were industrial interests, especially those of the British. They were also behind the big disasters in South America during the nineteenthh century,such as the ParaguayanWar.3 As we will see, they did not consider the consequences of their greed when they cultivated thousands of hectares of rubber trees in Southeast Asia,which has had deadly implications for the Amazon populations up to the present. This was the first great act of biopiracy in the Brazilian Amazon. For their part, the rubber tappers came from the Northeast with the expectation of quick riches—rubber was “white gold”—and they wanted to return as quickly as possible to their home region as rich men, so they wouldn’t have to suffer anymore from the problem of chronic drought. When they arrived in Amazonia they were selected by the rubber barons, or bosses, who controlled vast areas of the forest.They were called “colonels of the riverbanks” because the rubber estates were normally located along the rivers, the only roads to the heart of the forest. From the moment they were chosen,practically bought,the rubber tappers were in debt to their new bosses for the costs of the journey from their homes to their arrival on the estate, as well as all the necessary equipment for settling on the homestead and starting to process the rubber. The rubber barons were “dispatched” (financed and supplied) by the dispatch houses4 (in great part financed by English industrial capital) and had to deliver the crop every year to these financiers. The relationship between the rubber baron and the rubber tapper was like master and slave.The rubber tapper could sell the fruit of his labor—in this case, rubber that he processed at the homestead—only...

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