Word: amazon
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From the Pacific, Peru stretches across an arid coastal desert, rises into the icy Andean highlands, then plunges into the trackless Amazon jungle. Until recently, the country's torn and fractured political life reflected the old Indian name. Now, under the hand of a shrewd and popular new president, Fernando Belaunde Terry, 52, Peruvians have an opportunity to join the quarters into a united nation...
...self-help plan for rural Indian communities in which the government provides tools and technical advice and the Indians build roads and airstrips. But he has been able to make only a token start on his favorite project: a vast superhighway system across the Andes to open the fertile Amazon Valley to settlers...
...company is ICOMI (for Indústria e Comércio de Minérios), which is owned 51% by Brazilians and 49% by Bethlehem Steel Corp. ICOMI owns the exclusive rights to one of the world's biggest known reserves of manganese ore, discovered in the Amazon Basin in 1946. By careful planning, efficient management and plain luck, it has not only launched a highly successful mining operation but completely avoided the abuse that Brazil's ultranationalists have heaped on other mining firms that have foreign interests...
Looking to Bethlehem. After manganese was discovered in the Amazon, a mineowner named Augusto Trajano de Azevedo Antunes obtained the mining rights and began looking for foreign help to swing the operation. A number of U.S. companies turned him down, insisting on 100% of the business or nothing at all. Finally, in 1949, Bethlehem Steel agreed to supply Antunes with financing and technical know-how in return for a minority interest. The arrangement has proved so successful that it has been imitated of ten by other mining, oil and industrial companies getting started in Brazil...
ICOMI laid a 122-mile railroad through the jungle, dredged a stretch of the Amazon so that it could handle ocean-going ships, built docks and roads. The World Bank helped out with a $35 million loan; the Export-Import Bank provided $67.5 million. Major construction was finished in 36 months instead of the projected 48 months, and the first big shipments began moving down the river and out to sea in 1957, enabling ICOMI to cash in on the unusually high manganese prices caused by the Suez crisis. Since then, ICOMI has shipped 5,900,000 tons, grossed...