Word: frontier
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...favorite TV show? Did you crave the sight of Chuck Connors shooting 'em up on The Riflemen? Well, Jonathan Kandell wants you to experience the real thing. Just hop a flight to Rio, but don't tarry too long in Sugar Loaf's shadow. To see the world of frontier adventure you must go inland to the heart of South America, the Amazon basin. There, in a climate only somewhat wetter than Dodge City, is the familiar world of shootouts, corrupt lawmen and hardy pioneers...
Passage Through El Dorado's best moments come when Kandell describes the frontier's conflicts and the people who fight them. As a chronicler of the new frontier he varies between the sociological reasoning of a Frederick Jackson Turner and the adventure-packed storytelling of Louis L'Amour. He does a better job at the latter. While he makes many interesting observations about the changes the settlement of the frontier will have for South America, the book remains very much a fun read, highly suitable for beach-towel browsing. In what current novel can you meet Robert Suarez, the "Cocaine...
...settlement of the frontier also has a deeper meaning; it is a new turning inward by a continent used to relying on its ties with other parts of the world for its sustenance. The Amazon basin represents a huge region whose conquest and utilizations is one of the continent's brightest hopes...
...regions. As Kandell notes, this has already taken place along the Paraguayan-Brazilian border, where the two nations have been united by the building of the world's largest hydroelectric dam on a river which separates the two nations. Unfortunately, this analysis is overly optimistic; the increased importance of frontier areas can just as easily create new tensions. The recent discovery of oil deep in the jungle along the border between Ecuador and Peru, for example, has only intensified the long-standing feud between the two nations...
...Kandell does note feuds of another sort that are commonplace in certain areas of the new frontier. In Brazil the encouragement given by the government to settlers in the agricultural regions newly carved out of jungle has had the unexpected side effect of creating large numbers of poor squatter settlements, where would-be settlers wait to receive land. In Paraguay, the sudden influx of large numbers of settlers to the region around the Itaipu dam has caused many Paraguayans to become concerned over the security of the border...