Word: belem
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...island-hopped through the turquoise Caribbean were met at San Juan by a waiter with trays of Daiquiris. At Trinidad, they heard the calypso singers and the throbbing steel bands, and found everything up-to-date: the airport was an awkward 17 miles from Port of Spain. At musty Belem, they were met by the weird sounds & sights of the jungle and, in the air-conditioned bar of Pan Am's guest house, by a more startling sight-the statue of a single-breasted Amazon...
...green sweep of the Amazon Valley, and 81 more in the Rio Doce Valley far to the south. SESP has built and staffed three fine hospitals and Brazil's best nursing school. It has also built 42 health posts, 14,000 privies, and a dike at Belem that has reclaimed 5,000 acres of land from the sea. Over a two-year period in the Amazon, SESP doctors have made 297,000 medical examinations, 143,000 laboratory examinations, administered 156,000 treatments...
...Belem, mouth of the Amazon, the trekkers were treated to pep talks on the romance of the jungle, shown how to cut the bark of the hevea (rubber tree), and then pushed into the jungle. Disillusion came fast. The hevea did not grow in stands; sometimes the trees were miles apart. Dwellings were mostly mud huts which the men built themselves in tall forests through which the sunlight never entered. Flesh-eating piranha fish kept them from river baths. Snakes bit them. The atabrine that the U.S. sent down to combat malaria was stolen by middlemen...
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...
...threatened the trade of better than three-fourths of Brazil's 40,000,000 people. Up and down Brazil's 5,800-mile coastline, wallowing and pitching coastwise steamers provide shuttle service. For dozens of towns and villages, from Rio Grande Do Sul in the south to Belem, north of the bulge, these ships are the sole means of commerce, with the exception of airlines. Last year they carried over 150,000 passengers, nearly two million tons of freight, thousands of sacks of mail. To Brazil, 248,700 square miles larger than the U.S. but with only...