Word: boomings
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Commercially Brazil is a backward Colossus. The torpor of her tropic citizens and the very plenitude of projects at their disposal has made the land somewhat notorious as el pasado manana-"the country of tomorrow." A succession of get-rich-quick booms-during which immense numbers of Brazilians have actually gotten rich quickly-has not stabilized the national character or promoted the development of a pioneer class, so needed to develop Brazil's boundless resources. At first it was too easy to make a fortune out of sugar, then cacao, then cotton, gold, diamonds, rubber. When the rubber boom...
Plantation rubber from the British and Dutch possessions in the Far East broke Brazil's virtual rubber monopoly and burst her rubber boom in 1910. Only recently has Henry Ford stirred Brazilian hopes of reviving the good old rubber days, by leasing over 3,000,000 Amazonian acres on which Fordized rubber plantations are being started. Some wild rubber is still gathered on the upper tributaries of the Amazon. Notably a ferocious and somewhat mysterious Italian who calls himself "The King of the Xingu" has terrorized and virtually enslaved several tribes on the Xingu River who now meekly gather...
...last and continuing Brazilian boom crop is coffee. Some 15,000,000 132-lb. bags are exported yearly, over 7,000,000 to the U. S., and a mere 20,000 to the tea-addicted British Isles. Seventy per cent of Brazilian exports consist of coffee. So long as the bean is crushed and drunk, the ideal-for-coffee-growing southern states of Brazil will remain rich-if overproduction is avoided. During the overproduction crisis of 1906 the Government of Brazil bought and held 8,500,000 bags of coffee, lest the market be gutted. Unlike most such desperate measures...
Venezuela is becoming suddenly famed as an oil boom country. Though in 1920 she exported less than half-a-million barrels, she is shipping this year just over 85 millions. Seldom indeed does a country's principal boom 17000% in less than a decade! Still more interesting, if possible, is the fact, that Venezuela's stupendous oil tax revenues all pour into the Treasury of one man, an absolute dictator of 20 years' standing, the stern and venerable President Juan Vicente Gomez...
Just as General Gomez came before Venezuela's oil boom so he came after General Cipriano Castro. General Castro's name is the key that unlocks the cipher of President Gomez's enigmatic Power...