Word: manaus
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President Vargas certainly ought to have known that. In his 10,000 miles, which had carried him up the Amazon basin from Belem to Manaus and beyond, he had rubber-necked at a few of an estimated 300,000,000 untapped wild rubber trees, visited Fordlandia and Belterra, where Henry Ford has a $20,000,000 investment in some 2,500,000 acres. On his return the President had some pretty fancy plans to announce...
Sixteen hundred ships a year called at Pará (now Belém do Pará); and a thousand miles up the orchid-stinking Amazon ocean freighters pulled up to the $40,000,000 stone pier and floating dock at Manaus. They took away a single cargo, bolachas (crude rubber balls). They brought a more varied one: pink tiles, champagne, pâté de foie gras, grand pianos, gold watches, diamond rings, French lingerie for rubber kings' naked native wives, French mistresses to replace them. Manaus went cultural, built a $5,000,000 opera house, closed it again...
...plantation rubber production overtook wild. Always superior because of controlled quality, it pushed wild rubber from expanding markets till, in the peak year of 1934, out of a world production of 1,019,000 tons Brazil contributed but 9,000 tons, a catastrophic 0.89%. In Iquitos, Peru, upriver from Manaus, docks fell into disrepair. Manaus grew clean and hungry. The State of Amazonas defaulted both internal and external debt regularly each year...
Those who expect synthetics some day to push rubber off the market entirely, those who think the Mexican guayule bush a better bet, looked dubious; but Vargas was confident. That he had rubber-worried Uncle Sam behind him to some extent was indicated by the fact that at Manaus he received exhaustive reports from experts of the U. S. Department of Agriculture working in conjunction with private experts from Goodyear. In Belem, Vargas lunched with John Ingle, head of Goodyear's Crude Rubber Division, who flew there from Akron as guest of Vargas' golf partner, Brazil...