Word: amazonia
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...Brazil, where the nuts come from," said Charley's aunt, thus inadvertently assessing the extent of nearly everyone's knowledge of a country that covers 6% of the earth's land surface. But Brazil, especially Amazonia, is the last old-fashioned Eldorado left, a trove of unexploited gold, rare woods, precious stones, exotic pelts and untold deposits of minerals. It is also one of the last places where the bloodshot eye of the fatigued humanist can still see in progress the fatal consequences of Eldorado: the destruction of indigenous peoples. Lucien Boclard, a French journalist and author...
...miles of the coast; the rest are scattered in pockets of poverty across thousands of miles of inaccessible jungle and remote highlands. The government's solution was Projeto Rondón (named after Brazilian Explorer Candido Mariano da Silva Rondón), which takes student volunteers into Amazonia and the northeast territory for month-long "vacations" of unpaid toil among the area's impoverished people...
Brazil boasts the largest supply of uncultivated, uninhabited and cheap land left anywhere in the world. Its vastness stretches from the rugged jungles of Amazonia southward to the plains of the state of Goias, where the sky is so immense that half a dozen thunder storms can often be seen brewing in it while the sun shines. For years, the gov ernment has offered ten-year tax exemptions on some land and various other lures to attract settlers to the country's largely undeveloped interior. The drive has also attracted hundreds of Grileiros (land grabbers), who have come...
When Belgian-born Author José André Lacour outlined his Death in That Garden, he found himself at a writer's disadvantage. The setting was the upper reaches of Amazonia, but Lacour had never been there. So he left his home near Paris and spent three months in Brazil; including ten days on the Amazon-though quite comfortably on a friend's yacht. When his novel was published, one French critic flatly hailed it as "one of the masterworks of his generation." It is not that, but it is still one of the grimmest stories in some...
Death & Slavery. Of the 18,000 men who went to Amazonia, only a few were ever seen again. Most of these, ragged derelicts, now beg in the streets of Manaus and Belem. Others have staggered home to tell bitter stories of slavery and death. Said one: "The thieving rubber buyers and the mosquitoes were our worst enemies. Those of us who tried to escape were captured and beaten senseless. Those who really escaped were imprisoned in the mysteries of the jungle...