Word: amazon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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President Vargas certainly ought to have known that. In his 10,000 miles, which had carried him up the Amazon basin from Belem to Manaus and beyond, he had rubber-necked at a few of an estimated 300,000,000 untapped wild rubber trees, visited Fordlandia and Belterra, where Henry Ford has a $20,000,000 investment in some 2,500,000 acres. On his return the President had some pretty fancy plans to announce...
Best all-round rubber tree is Brazil's Hevea brasiliensis, and for decades Pará was another name for rubber. As world demand arose, grew, skyrocketed, upper Amazon adventurers rose to be bloody kings and barons. Their technique was simple: enslavement, torture, rape, starvation and murder, plus a fantastic use of company-store methods that had washerwomen in sleazy evening gowns and everybody in debt till the year after eternity. Hundreds of miles up the jungle rivers they fought feudal wars with one another. At the height of the rubber boom in 1909-10, rubber...
Sixteen hundred ships a year called at Pará (now Belém do Pará); and a thousand miles up the orchid-stinking Amazon ocean freighters pulled up to the $40,000,000 stone pier and floating dock at Manaus. They took away a single cargo, bolachas (crude rubber balls). They brought a more varied one: pink tiles, champagne, pâté de foie gras, grand pianos, gold watches, diamond rings, French lingerie for rubber kings' naked native wives, French mistresses to replace them. Manaus went cultural, built a $5,000,000 opera house, closed it again...
Slowly but inexorably plantation rubber production climbed. It was only three years after the orgiastic peak of the Amazon Valley boom, in 1913, that plantation rubber production overtook wild. Always superior because of controlled quality, it pushed wild rubber from expanding markets till, in the peak year of 1934, out of a world production of 1,019,000 tons Brazil contributed but 9,000 tons, a catastrophic 0.89%. In Iquitos, Peru, upriver from Manaus, docks fell into disrepair. Manaus grew clean and hungry. The State of Amazonas defaulted both internal and external debt regularly each year...
...Clear malaria out of the Amazon basin, settle hardworking, nonmigratory families there with Government...