Word: amazon
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Last week, back at his base in Rio, De Carvalho dutifully reported on the former U.S. army colonel who calls the Amazon city of Belém "better than ten New Yorks put together," and on the doctor who said that the town of Manaus "is really a fine place to live-all it takes is some psychological adjustment." As for his own views, Correspondent de Carvalho left the clear impression that he felt both the cities and the jungle around them were interesting places to visit, but he would not care to live there...
Rubber Barons. The biggest development of Amazon riches was the rubber boom, which began when Charles Macintosh started making raincoats in 1823. Vulcanization and later the automobile fed the prosperity; output rose to a peak of 42,286 tons in 1912-at prices that hit $3 a lb. In the jungle, the rubber barons enslaved Indians and immigrants, drove them so hard that 300,000 died; a 230-mile railroad, built to carry rubber from Bolivia, cost 70 lives a mile to build. In Manaus, the rubber tycoons built mansions and watched Pavlova dance in a $10 million opera house...
...Wanted. The Amazon's new awakening is beset with old problems. Tennessean Ronald Richardson, now 46, who after World War II duty in Belém stayed on to set up a lumber mill outside the town, knows them well; jungle vines are spreading over the mill and pigs root through his crumbling office. "It's here," he says. "No doubt about it-all the riches on earth. I don't know how to get it out, but dammit"-he pounded his desk so hard the Scotch bottle jumped-"it's here! We need men, real...
...disease. Malaria, yellow fever, yaws, trachoma and filariasis (a forerunner of elephantiasis) sap men's will to work and win. But disease is being fought hard and successfully. During World War II, the U.S. launched a Special Public Health Service (SESP) to protect vital rubber workers from the Amazon's scourges. Now only eight of SESP' 3,153-man staff are U.S. citizens, and 97% of its annual $10 million budget comes from Brazil. The outfit runs 249 rural clinics, 22 hospitals, 109 city water systems, 97 sewage-disposal systems. It has broadened life expectancy from...
...other big problems are power and transportation. Brazil's Amazon development board has built or is building plant to boost power by 61,000 kw. It has cut roads into millions of empty acres and most important, has connected the Amazon basin to the rest of Brazil by a 1,363 mile jungle highway from Belém south to the new capital of Brasilia...