Road Building in Brazil

For much of its history, Brazil’s population remained bound along the coastline. Geographic features, such as coastal mountain ranges and a relative lack of navigable rivers, stymied efforts to settle and exploit the vast interior. Because of its inaccessibility to authorities based on the coast, the interior became a place of refuge for Indigenous communities and runaway slaves. During the colonial period (1500–1822) and several decades beyond, waterways and Indigenous footpaths (sometimes widened to allow for ox carts and mule trains) were the main routes for travel into the hinterland. Slavers and mineral prospectors known as bandeirantes founded scattered settlements in Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso. As the Industrial Revolution created new demands and technological possibilities in the late 19th century, efforts to connect the interior to the coast came via the telegraph and railroad. The rubber boom of that era precipitated greater settlement of the Amazon region and relied on riverine transport. Road building has intensified since the mid-20th century. The new capital, Brasília, centerpiece of President Juscelino Kubitschek’s (1956–1961) campaign to achieve “Fifty Years of Progress,” initiated a new network of highways, later expanded by the military regime (1964–1985). Those efforts aimed to promote economic development, redirect internal migration, and extend the territorial control of the central government. Migrants and entrepreneurs, traveling on official highways and illegal roads constructed along the way, set fire to grasslands and forests to convert them into pasture. Roads, both legal and illegal, thus opened the way for transformations of the ecosystems of the Brazilian interior. At the same time, they created conditions for intensified conflict between newcomers and those who had long called the interior home.

Anthropogenic Dispersal of Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis in the Americas: A Plausible Hypothesis

There are several gaps in our knowledge on the origin and spread of Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis, an etiological agent of cutaneous and mucocutaneous or American tegumentary leishmaniasis, to different biomes, hosts, and vectors, with important epidemiological implications, including the possible existence of an anthroponotic component. Historical, biological, and epidemiological evidence suggests that Leishmania (V.) braziliensis and its variants were preexistent in Amazonia with great genetic variability, where they dispersed with less variability to other regions (clonal expansion). During pre-Columbian times the parasite may have been transported by migrating humans and probably also their dogs, from western Amazonia to the high inter-Andean valleys and from there to other regions of South America. The same thing could have happened later, in the same way, when it spread to non-Amazonian regions of Brazil and other countries of South and Central America, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the so-called Rubber Boom and construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway in the Brazilian Amazon, by migrant workers who later returned to their places of origin, transporting the agent. The parasite’s dispersal in genetic correlated clusters, involving unexpectedly distinct ecosystems in Brazil (Amazonian, Cerrado, Caatinga and Atlantic Forest biomes), has continued until the present through human displacement. The infection of certain species of domestic, synanthropic and even wild animals, could be secondary to anthropogenic introduction of L. (V.) braziliensis in new environments. We admit the same phenomena happening in the probable transference of Leishmania infantum (visceral leishmaniasis), and of Yersinia pestis (plague) from the Old world to the New world, generating domestic and wild enzotic cycles from these agents. These assumptions associated with human infections, chronicity and parasite persistence with possibility of recovery of Leishmania in peripheral blood, skin and scars of cured or asymptomatic patients, (that may provide an alternative blood meal), along with the sand flies’ adaptation to the peri-domicile and the high susceptibility of domestic dogs, horses, mules and cats to the parasite, can reinforce the evidence of anthropogenic spread of L. (V.) braziliensis.

Amazon Development

While historically “Amazon” could refer to a river, a basin, and later a forest, it has been shaped into a coherent regional space by the development politics of governments, companies, and nongovernmental organizations throughout the 20th century, concealing a more complex cultural and ecological reality. Development discourses ignored the human technologies existing prior to the 16th century and drew on the imaginary of a “pristine” jungle, which actually resulted from the human depopulation that occurred in the Amazon during colonization. Colonialism (17th–19th centuries), nonetheless, connected the region to the global economy, indirectly leading to the “rubber boom” (1880–1920), when the Amazon became indispensable to the second industrial revolution. After state and business actors led different operations meant to “modernize” the region in the first half of the 20th century, “developing” the Amazon became a major target of the Brazilian government in the decades following World War II. The politics of the military regime that ruled from 1964 to 1984 in particular drove the expansion of roadways, cattle-ranching, mining, and dams. While statistically creating economic growth, this trend had disastrous consequences for nature, Indigenous livelihoods, and labor relations, which mobilized scientists, activists, and local communities against it. Yet, although by the 1990s the developmentalist model was highly contested, social and environmental movements did not manage to gather society behind a new consensus for the Amazon. Attempts to put development at the service of reducing inequalities and to reinforce environmental legislation achieved certain (mitigated) success in the early 21st century, but they did not prevent deforestation and land conflicts from trending upwards after 2015, threatening the Amazon’s very existence.

Arqueologia Histórica e Contemporânea na Amazônia: por uma arqueologia elástica

O presente artigo visa abordar aspectos da arqueologia histórica e contemporânea na Amazônia abordando a “Arqueologia do Período da Borracha” como ponto de partida para construção de uma noção de modernidade. A partir da criação de materiais como luvas, botas de borracha para neve e, finalmente, com o advento dos pneumáticos, a borracha propiciou aos humanos esticar suas interações com o meio. À medida que tais interações foram expandidas com a invenção e consolidação do ocidentalismo (ou modernidade), os actantes e conhecimentos emaranhados foram separados, produzindo os discursos da cientificidade e conhecimento em oposição aos saberes locais, enredando complexa trama de significados, devires e agências. Através de uma abordagem plural e multiespecífica, pretendo situar o estudo da materialidade do período da borracha como um campo de estudo da arqueologia do capitalismo, da arqueologia da modernidade e ecologia histórica em aproximação à arqueologia pública e contemporânea de modo mais elástico, mirado para as materialidades e comunidades. Abstract: This article aims to address particular aspects of historical and contemporary archaeology at Amazon Rainforest, addressing the “Archaeology of Rubber Boom” as starting point for building up a notion of modernity. From the creation of materials such as gloves, rubber snow boots and, finally, with the advent of tires, rubber allowed humans to stretch their interactions with the environment. As these interactions were expanded with the invention and consolidation of Westernism (or modernity), the actants and entangled knowledge were separated, producing discourses of scientificity and knowledge in opposition to local knowledge, entangling a complex web of meanings, becomings and agencies. Through a plural and multispecific approach, I intend to situate the study of the materiality of rubber boom as a field of study on archaeology of capitalism, archaeology of modernity and historical ecology within more elastic approaches to public and contemporary archaeology, aimed at materialities and communities.

Eyewitness Accounts during the Putumayo Rubber Boom

Between 1870 and 1915 Peru experienced a rubber-boom, extending into the Putumayo River region in 1893. This huge region of Amazonian forests was controlled by the Peruvian Amazon Company (P. A. Co.). Although Peruvian, they had British company directors and a British-Barbadian workforce. Their methods of extraction generated unimaginable degrees of human and ecological violence. Roger Casement, a British diplomat, was sent on a harrowing mission to investigate these allegations made by travelers. His Amazon Journal takes precedence; however, Peruvians also responded to the situation, reporting to the Geographical Society of Lima. Included are two forgotten yet influential Peruvian explorers: the geographer Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro and the engineer Cárlos Oyague y Calderón. By highlighting some of the early debates that circulated between Europe and Latin America on the natural resources and people of the Amazon forests, the focus is to draw out textual examples of perceptions on race, environment, and early consumer responsibility. Supported by coloniality/modernity theories, it also asks whether this form of travel writing was functioning as a resistance literature to imperialism for the time. Thus, this study investigates alternative readings that might also inform twenty-first-century scholars and activists as they articulate environmentalist and even social and ecological positions.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Cauchero of the Amazonian Rubber Groves

This essay explores the iconic figure of the "rubber baron," during the rubber boom era (1890-1920) in the Amazon. Portrayed by travelers and fiction writer as Janus-faced, the rubber baron can be both elegant and brutal. Historical names of Rubber Barons all exemplify the double-sided nature of this type of individual. In this essay the author argues that, mirroring personal and cultural attributes of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s notion of the "homem cordial”, the rubber baron evades simple characterizations, which makes him a unique social type and a sinister by-product of colonization in Latin America. Liminal in his ability to suspend his brutality, the rubber baron can become a gentleman and then rapidly return to his original barbaric state. This allows him, for example, to traffic between the Amazonian rainforest and Paris with ease, until all his wealth is wasted and he is then forced to return to his rubber estate, once again, to re-build his fortune. Finally, the essay posits that the ambiguous character epitomizes the rubber industry. By wearing different masks the rubber baron conceals from the "civilized world" the horrors of slavery, rape, torture, and mass murder that were perpetrated in Amazonia's hellish gardens of rubber.

Hildebrando Fuentes’s Peruvian Amazon: National Integration and Capital in the Jungle

In this essay Cardemil-Krauze reconstructs the life and writings of Peruvian politician Hildebrando Fuentes during and after his tenure as mayor (Prefecto) of Iquitos, the most important Amazonian riverine port in Peru. Fuentes’ rarely studied memoirs, Iquitos: Apuntes geográficos (1908) are explored here, exposing the sordid years of the Rubber Boom from the perspective of one of the members of the city’s governing elite. Written contemporaneously with Euclides’ texts, Iquitos attests to Peru’s nationalizing plans for the Amazonian region and its indigenous population. Cardemil-Krauze’s analysis portrays the painful and oftentimes contradictory impulses Fuentes navigates as he tries to negotiate Loretano regionalism (Loreto is an Amazonian department of Peru) with Lima’s centralism, while simultaneously attempting to create a viable state presence in Iquitos.