BRAZIL

   
Letter From Rondônia
Part II: Strategic Reach
Norman Gall
 

The name Brazil had figured on European maps as early as 1325, as a legendary island located somewhere to the west of Ireland. After establishing their imperial claim in South America, the Portuguese had constantly pushed westward in search of their empire’s "natural" boundaries, believing Brazil to be an island continent, bounded by two great rivers, the Amazon and the Paraná, which issued from a central lake and flowed separately into the Atlantic. This myth was disproved slowly over the next two centuries by the heartland incursions of the bandeirantes, those buccaneers of terra firma who roamed the continent on foot and horseback during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, probing rivers, forests, and plains from the Atlantic as far west as the Andes in their search for gold, diamonds, and Indian slaves. Until the mid-twentieth century, however, this remained a "hollow frontier," a frontier of sporadic incursions, of brief booms in gold, diamonds, and rubber, of nomadic slash-and-burn agriculture, of isolated settlements on savannas and jungle rivers that survived precariously, if at all. In 1938 the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss traveled by foot along the jungle telegraph line that now forms the route of BR-364 through Rondônia. "As has often happened in the history of Brazil," Lévi-Strauss wrote, 

a handfal of adventurers, madmen and starvelings had been swept into the interior on an impulse of high enthusiasm, only to be abandoned, forgotten and cut off from all contact with civilization. Each little [telegraph] "station" consisted of a group of straw huts, 50 or 75 miles from its nearest neighbor—a distance which could in any case, be covered only on foot—their isolation was complete, and each individual wretch had to adapt himself to it by devising his own particular brand of insanity.... The tale is retold, with grim humor, of the missionaries who were massacred in 1933, or the telegraphist who was found buried up to his waist, with his chest riddled with arrows and his automatic sender perched on his head. For the Indians have a morbid fascination for the servants of the line. On the one hand, they represent a continuous danger, the more intense for the play of fancy; and on the other the visits of the little nomadic bands constitute the sole distraction of the telegraphist’s life—and, more than that, his only opportunity of human contact.

Nevertheless, the Strategic Telegraph Line from Mato Grosso to Amazonas was one of the first breakthroughs of this century in penetrating the sertão, or "backlands." At that time, nearly all of Rondônia was still part of an enormous and then vaguely defined Brazilian state known simply as Mato Grosso, or Great Forest, larger than the area of the United States east of the Mississippi River and north of the Mason-Dixon line. The jungle telegraph line was built between 1907 and 1915 by a government commission headed by an explorer and army engineer, Colonel Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, the national hero for whom Rondônia was later named. Born in Mato Grosso, partially of Indian descent himself, Rondon became a legend in his time and a symbol of Brazilian nationality. Some surviving photographs of him show a short, slightly built man in safari dress, Brazil’s version of the European explorers who crossed "Darkest Africa" in the nineteenth century. A retiring and somewhat enigmatic figure, Rondon was famous for his prodigies of energy and will in the jungle that, combined with severity and cunning, sustained the work of the army officers and penal battalions who built the telegraph line. He occasionally emerged from the .sertão to be received with adulation in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, only to vanish into the jungle once again. Rondon was known as a leading member of the Positivist church, which played a key role in replacing Brazil’s monarchy with a republican form of government in 1889; as a friend and pacifier of forest tribes and founder of the Indian Protection Service; and as a scientific explorer whose telegraph commission published more than 40 reports and monographs from geologists, botanists, zoologists, ethnographers, astronomers, and other specialists who accompanied the field parties. In 1913-14 ex-President Theodore Roosevelt traveled on an expedition with Rondon through part of what is now Rondônia. Roosevelt emerged from the jungle a sick and shaken man. His son narrowly escaped drowning in the rapids of the River of Doubt (later renamed Rio Roosevelt), and the ailing former president had to be carried for weeks through the jungle until the expedition reached the Madeira River. After the journey was over, Roosevelt told a press conference in New York:

However, the telegraph line itself soon became obsolete because of the introduction of radiotelegraphy. Only two decades later, Levi-Strauss found it to be "of merely archaeological interest... The poles were left to tumble down, the wire to go rusty; as for the survivors of the staff, they had neither the courage nor the means to leave."

The telegraph line’s one enduring contribution was access. The men who built the line cleared a path about 40 meters wide through the jungle— roughly double the height of the surrounding forest—so that trees would not fall on the telegraph installations. The clearing was planted with the reedlike pasture grass called capim colonião to prevent the jungle from growing back and to feed the oxen that would pull cartloads of supplies along the line. Rudimentary as it was, it was the first overland connection between southern Brazil’s population centers and the western Amazon’s rich rubber country. Before the telegraph line was opened, officials of the state of Mato Grosso had to travel a distance equivalent to nearly half the circumference of the earth to reach the state’s northern rubber-producing region along the Madeira River, a branch of the Amazon 800 miles away, from which Mate Grosso obtained much of her revenues. To reach the Madeira rubber port of Santo Antônio from Cuiabá, the capital of Mate Grosso, travelers had to journey by boat down the Paraguay and Plata River systems to Buenos Aires, then northward along Brazil’s entire Atlantic coast to the mouth of the Amazon, then back inland for 1,800 miles along the Amazon and Madeira Rivers. The building of the telegraph line from Cuiabá to Santo Antônio meant overcoming not only starvation, Indian attacks, and diseases such as malaria, hepatitis, and beriberi, but enormous logistical difficulties as well, using the same river routes to bring in supplies from overseas. After the line was completed, Rondon himself explained:

The pull of the Amazon rubber boom did more than enable the new Brazilian republic to complete a circuit of modern communications at the edge of its territory with the opening of the jungle telegraph line in 1915. It also led the countries of the Amazon Basin—Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia as well as Brazil—to begin seriously the arduous task of exploring and defining their remote boundary areas with geographical and scientific expeditions that continue today. The difficulties of penetrating and settling the continental interior increasingly challenged the Brazilian imagination and placed problems of transportation and logistics at the heart of strategic thinking.

In these schemes of continental geopolitics, the power and majesty of the world’s greatest river system have led men to envision the Amazon as the main artery of a continental transportation network. It pours into the Atlantic roughly 15 percent of the entire fresh water supply to the world’s oceans, 8 trillion gallons daily at high flood, enough to furnish 200 times the municipal water requirements of the United States. The Amazon discharges 60 times as much water at its mouth as the Nile, which it rivals in length, and 10 times as much as the Mississippi. Early explorers spread the word that the "River Sea" was so powerful that it pushed back the ocean itself and so fresh that a ship’s casks could be filled from it at sea? The Amazon’s 14,000 miles of tributaries extend in all directions across a continent that, in the words of the German scientist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt, "is still more remarkable for the extent and uniformity of its plains, than for the gigantic elevation of its Cordilleras." Moreover, the flatness of the terrain allows the ramifications of the Amazon system to reach to within a few miles of the tributaries of South America’s two other great river basins, the northward-flowing Orinoco and the southward-flowing Plata, stimulating travelers to imagine easy connections between these waterways. In 1803 Humboldt journeyed southward across Venezuela from the Caribbean to the Brazilian border, where he found branches of the great Orinoco and Negro Rivers connected by a natural canal, the Casiquiare, 180 miles long and "as broad as the Rhine." The imperial rivalries between Spain and Portugal had prevented the organized development of this route, but the Dutch used it in the seventeenth century to ship contraband manufactures from the Caribbean to points along the Madeira River in what is today Rondônia. Humboldt urged construction of an artificial canal to bypass the Casiquiare, providing a straighter channel and a more regular flow, that would be the key link in a system of waterways connecting "a country nine or ten times larger than Spain, and enriched with the most varied productions and navigable in every direction." While never implemented, the idea nonetheless has refused to die. In 1943 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed developing the Casiquiare as an inland route that would avoid German submarines, which had practically halted maritime traffic along the Brazilian coast. In 1967 the Hudson Institute proposed creating a "Great Lakes" system by construction of a network of small dams on the Amazon and its tributaries to be used for electricity generation, irrigation, and flood control and that would form navigable waterways connecting with rivers flowing in opposite directions. In the early 1970s, Venezuela’s public works minister broached a plan to create an artificial route between the Orinoco and Negro Rivers as the first stage of a continental system of connected waterways that would also include the Amazon, Madeira, Guapore, Paraguay, and Plata. A feasibility study calculated that the Orinoco-Negro phase of the project would require excavation of 92 M³ of granitic rock in blasting a 15-mile channel with high-energy chemical and nuclear explosives.

Brazil has tried to close this circle a number of times. Tributaries of South America’s northward and southward-flowing river systems meander to within a few miles of each other. But they could not be connected easily because of rapids and the shrinking of their streams in the dry season. Portugal reached into the heart of the continent to place a network of missions and forts along the Madeira and Guaporé Rivers, tributaries of the Amazon that flow along Rondônia’s western flank and form part of Brazil’s present border with Bolivia. This strategy was aimed at defending imperial boundaries, safely transporting gold from Mato Grosso, and siphoning away the lucrative contraband trade with Spain’s silver mines in the Andes. But the Portuguese effort to subsidize both colonization and the transportation system died in the late eighteenth century with the brief gold boom in Mato Grosso. The captain-general of Mato Grosso reported to Lisbon in 1773 on efforts to link the Guaporé, running northward into the Amazon, with the southward-flowing Paraguay River that carries shipping past Buenos Aires into the Atlantic. "I am persuaded," the captain-general complained,

The most ambitious effort ever made to bypass the rapids of the Amazon’s tributaries was construction between 1871 and 1912, of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, to which Rondon’s jungle telegraph line was linked at Santo Antônio in 1915. The railroad became a legend in its time as the most audacious, costly, and death-ridden effort made until then to install a modern technological infrastructure in the tropics. Driven by the desire for higher profits from the rubber boom and by the strategic design of diverting the export trade of the Andean countries through Brazil’s Amazon ports, the Madeira-Mamoré was by far the most difficult of the engineering projects of an era that saw historic transfers of industrial technology to South America; the introduction of refrigerated warehouses and ships to open European markets to high-grade Argentine beef and North American markets to bananas from the United Fruit plantations of the circum-Caribbean region; the transfer by the Guggenheims of steamshovels from the Panama Canal to the deserts of northern Chile to open the world’s largest copper mine at Chuquicamata; and the creation of a tin-mining industrial infrastructure on the altiplano, the 12,000-foot-high desert of scrub and stone that runs the length of Bolivia.

The purpose of the jungle railroad was to bypass 19 rapids along a 228-mile route beside the Madeira and Mamoré Rivers to provide safe passage for valuable products between the rubber-rich forests of the western Amazon basin, including parts of Peru and Bolivia, and overseas markets. The rapids were a bottleneck in the commerce of the rubber boom, requiring 32 days of slow and dangerous portages, in which many lives and nearly half the cargo were lost, along a path that a railroad could travel in 2 days. According to a 1907 survey, the main engineering problem was

In The Sea and the Jungle (1912), H.M. Tomlinson described the incongruities of building this ‘‘mysterious railway’’ in the forest:

Santo Antônio das Cachoeiras, founded by the Jesuits in 1728, had remained a malaria-infested missionary village beside the easternmost of the Madeira rapids until it was swarmed over by outsiders—Americans, Barbadians, Brazilian North-easterners, Arab traders, Bolivians, Peruvians, Italians, and Spaniards—who had come because of the railroad. The main street was paved with old rails left over from an earlier effort to complete the project. Osvaldo Cruz, Brazil’s leading expert in yellow fever control, was requested by the company in 1910 to inspect health conditions on the railroad. He reported that Santo Antônio

Shortly thereafter, the railroad’s headquarters were removed to higher ground 7 miles away at Pôrto Velho, a new and more sanitary company town that today is the territorial capital of Rondônia, with 110,000 inhabitants. Construction of the railroad went ahead at a furious pace, engaging some 5,000 workers at a time. Environmental problems were overcome by establishment of farms to provide daily supplies of vegetables and eggs as a sustaining diet for the work gangs. Pôrto Velho got an ice plant, a well-equipped hospital, a movie house, and a local newspaper, but the cost in lives remained high.

Ironically, however, the railroad reached its western terminus of Guajará Mirim, at the Bolivian border, in late 1912, just as the Amazon rubber boom collapsed. Overseas markets were swamped with cheaper rubber from plantations in the Far East, where Brazilian rubber seeds had been secretly taken by the British in 1876. Between 1910 and 1930, Amazon rubber production dropped from 45,000 to 14,000 tons, while Asiatic production rose from 11,000 to 800,000 tons. Traffic on the Madeira-Mamoré railroad declined until the system went bankrupt, was nationalized during the Great Depression, and replaced by a highway in 1971. Two ancient locomotives stand today with trees growing from their smokestacks in the abandoned village of Santo Antônio, where I saw them on New Year’s Day 1977. The railroad survived long enough to develop a system of schools, towns, agricultural colonies, and a trading company that formed the infrastructure for creation of the Federal Territory of Guaporé (later renamed Rondônia) in 1943. But the railroad never became, as its early boosters proclaimed in 1871 and Brazilian strategists tirelessly reiterated,

an enterprise which carries so much of the commercial and political destiny of South America, ... the key to 200,000 square miles of territory in Mato Grosso. Bolivia, and southern Peru, ... the greatest area tributary to any single line of railway in the world, not excepting the Pacific road of the United States.

The sense of isolation remained. Even as railroads and canals were built on other continents to expand and integrate the network of human settlements, communications within Brazil remained very primitive. Until a railroad was extended westward from São Paulo into Mato Grosso on the eve of World War I, the only way for Brazilian officials to reach this trackless expanse was to travel a circular route by ship past Buenos Aires and up the Paraguay River. This presented Brazil with the kind of strategic problem that the United States would have faced if she had not acquired the Louisiana Purchase and if a potential enemy had controlled the port of New Orleans and, therefore, access to the Mississippi River and all her tributaries. The immediate cause of the Paraguayan War (1864-1870), South America’s bloodiest conflict since the Wars of Independence, was the seizure by the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López of a Brazilian steamer as it passed Asunción on the river with the new governor of Mato Grosso aboard. Brazil had just invaded Uruguay and had asked Britain and France to assent to Uruguay’s annexation to Brazil. The Paraguayan dictator thought his country would be next and decided to strike first. His troops invaded southern Mato Grosso, but a Brazilian courier had to ride 47 days on horseback to bring the news of the invasion of the government in Rio de Janeiro. It took a year for Brazilian troops from São Paulo to reach the scene, and half the expedition died en route. Brazil’s logistical difficulties resembled czarist Russia’s inability, for lack of a railroad, to relieve besieged Sevastopol a decade earlier during the Crimean War, leading both countries to intensify their railroad-building and modernization. But while the first U.S. transcontinental railway was completed in 1869 and the trans-Siberian railroad was finished by 1902, Brazil’s effort to build a rail link from the Atlantic port of Santos to Arica on Chile’s Pacific coast—connecting with the railroads serving Bolivia’s Andean mines—began only in 1905 and still is incomplete.

In the half century between the outbreak of the Paraguayan War and the beginning of World War I, no fewer than eight major transportation plans were published in Brazil as the diabolical problems of continental logistics engaged the imaginations of politicians, strategists, and engineers. Most of these plans tried to exploit the advantages of Brazil’s river systems by interconnecting them with projected canals and railroads. The Moraes plan (1869) envisioned six canals that would connect the great rivers that flowed in opposite directions at points where the extremely gentle gradients of Brazil’s Central Plateau permitted their tributaries to flow within a few miles of each other. The Queiroz plan (1874) urged construction of an east-west railroad from the Atlantic coast through Mato Grosso to the Guaporé River on Brazil’s border with Bolivia, The railroad would intersect with a Grand Meridional Canal, extending navigation on the Paraná River northward onto the Central Plateau. Influenced by Manifest Destiny and the first U.S. transcontinental railway connection, the Rebouças plan (1874) proposed ten parallel east-west railroads that would form a vast cross-hatched pattern of rivers and canals over the entire area from the Amazon River to the southern border with Uruguay. But none of these plans brought Brazil much closer to continental integration. Brazil’s expanding web of communications and influence had to await the surge of highway-building in the decades following World War II. As recently as 1939, the American geographer Preston James could still report:

Why had the effective conquest of the Brazilian backlands, or .sertão, been delayed so long? Why was Brazil able to participate only weakly in the worldwide surge of railway construction that laid 500,000 miles of track between 1830 and 1900? Why could she not compete in European capital and settlers with the United States, Argentina, and Australia? The main reason seemed to be that South America’s unpopulated interior produced no export commodity comparable to the furs and grain of North America and Siberia or to the silver and tin of the Andes, where railroad lines were climbing into Peru and Bolivia under extremely difficult conditions. A Portuguese crown official observed in 1772:

Just as the colonial fortunes of Mato Grosso depended entirely on its ability to meet the demands of the European economy, so the next wave of penetration and settlement of the sertão had to await the second industrial revolution in Europe in the late nineteenth century.

Unlike the earlier phases of the Industrial Revolution, when Europe provided for its own basic material needs (coal, iron, cotton, wool, and wheat), the advanced countries after 1850 moved into a stage of higher levels of personal consumption and technological articulation that required primary products which could only be obtained at the periphery of the world economy. Commodities such as rubber, copper, oil, bauxite, coffee, and tin began to figure heavily in the trade between nations, while a rapid diffusion of capital and technology moved into these peripheral areas to provide for a continuous flow of these products into world markets. In Brazil, coffee production in the coastal hills behind Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo generated a pool of capital and entrepreneurial talent that provided the means both for the beginnings of industrialization and for deeper and more sustained penetrations into the continental interior. Since then, the Brazilian frontier has expanded into the South American heartland along the lines of magnetic force generated by São Paulo, the world’s fastest growing industrial metropolis. Between 1890 and 1900, São Paulo’s population rose from 65,000 to 240,000; in this century it has doubled roughly every 14 years, to approach 10 million today. Early in this century, the railroads that initially reached into the coffee-growing coastal hills were extended northward and westward into the interior. By the start of World War I, a new ‘Northwest" railway line— the transcontinental connection that is still incomplete—pushed across the plains and swamps of southern Mato Grosso to link Brazil’s Far West with her Atlantic ports for the first time. By the 1930s another rail link had pushed northward from São Paulo into Goiás State on the Central Plateau, opening a new ‘rice frontier" that contributed to a tripling of Brazil’s per capita rice consumption over the next four decades, even as the population as a whole also tripled. A third frontier railroad gave access to the fertile terra roxa soils beneath the forests of Paraná State, turning Paraná into the world’s leading coffee-producing area. By that time, however, these incipient railroad links were superseded by the road-building effort that, since World War II, has tied the regions of Brazil together for the first time in history.

Each new frontier incorporated into the world economy has brought a new wave of technology as well as people into unsettled areas. In this sense, the truck, tractor, airplane, and helicopter are doing for Brazil what the railroad and reaper did for the American West and what development of the horse-drawn, iron-shared plow did for the Germanic migrations east of the Elbe between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. A similar process occurred in southern China between the eighth and twelfth centuries, when mastery of the techniques of wet-field rice cultivation allowed a great southward migration into this previously little-developed area that became the driving force behind an economic revolution. Each of these advances opened new areas and brought forth increases in food production that created a sense of abundance and promise over a horizon extending far beyond the regions of recent settlement. During the 1930s the road network on the rice frontier of Goiás State multiplied fourfold. In these backlands, hand implements, such as the digging stick and the hoe, still prevail as the standard agricultural tools. The animal-drawn plow was introduced in the more intensely farmed regions only after World War II, with the plow giving way swiftly to government-subsidized tractor sales in the 1960s and 1970s. As recently as 1950, the cost of shipping a sack of grain to market from the rice frontier of Goiás was several times the farmer’s selling price. In other words, it cost proportionately as much as transporting Midwestern wheat to New York and Philadelphia before construction of the Erie Canal in the 1820s. But the entrance of trucks into the Brazilian sertão over the past two decades has provided a much wider choice in the location of farms than was possible in the American West, where commercial agriculture was confined to within 10 or 15 miles of railroads or canals. Moreover, the proliferation of truck entrepreneurs has given the farmer greater flexibility in transportation and marketing by avoiding dependence on a single carrier and by broadening competition among purchasers of his products. Professor Paul Mandell of Columbia University surveyed the rice frontier in the 1960s and described the emergence of "trucker capitalism":

In 1942 truckers going from [the big cities] to Goiás looked with great trepidation across the broad planalto as their trucks lumbered over the laterite roads with their loads of manufactured goods. The risk of breakdown was great. The cost of fuel was very high. Return cargoes were hard to find and hardly covered costs. All this changed dramatically as agriculture and the trucking industry developed in the region.... Government transportation policy sought to promote domestic truck and auto production by a combination of import substitution, road building and the subsidized importation of petroleum. Both this policy and the almost complete failure to invest in and improve the railroad system led to the relative cheapening of trucking costs. Under these conditions there arose the merchant truckers, the caminhoneiro, buying cereals in the producing zones and selling at regional markets or in the consumption centers.... The merchant trucker not only made marketing more competitive in the producing zones but also sought to short-circuit existing marketing arrangements, selling directly to large rice dealers and even urban retailers.

Brazil’s critical departure from past frontier experiences is that her commercial agriculture depends not only on massive infusions of new technology but also on imported petroleum supplies, in the form of fuel and fertilizer—at prices that have risen fivefold in the 1970s—to maintain soil productivity and logistical ties with distant markets. The drive to cultivate ever greater areas is part of Brazil’s design to conquer her sertão and to pay for imports of fuel and capital goods by becoming a leading food exporter to the world. But her recent increases in agricultural production have not come from higher yields, as in India and Mexico, but from farming new areas. The problem with this policy of extensive cultivation is that, as the frontier pushes farther into the interior, soil quality generally becomes poorer, notwithstanding such islands of fertility as the terra roxa in central Rondônia, the wet, loamy plains of the remote Amazon state of Acre, and some areas along the Transamazon and Belém-Brasília highways. Farming these poorer soils will demand greater energy and logistical subsidies. Thus development of large areas of the Brazilian frontier will pose an enormous economic and technological challenge, involving subsidized inputs of machinery, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and agricultural research. One of the great questions of the final decades of this century is whether this kind of economic development can continue at the new price of oil.

The road that eventually became BR-364, following the route of the jungle telegraph line from Cuiabá to Pôrto Velho, appears on the earliest Brazilian transportation plans involving highways in the mid-1920s. Even before, during construction of the telegraph line, Rondon cleared a dirt road that ran 120 miles northward from Cuiabá, over which supply trucks traveled on crude tractor treads. In 1933, an army construction battalion began extending the road another 200 miles northward, reaching the old telegraph station and rubber-collection post of Barracäo Queimado. In 1942, as the United States tried to revive Brazilian rubber production after the Japanese seized the plantations of Malaysia and Indonesia, another army battalion worked southward from Pôrto Velho, opening 85 miles of road before money ran out. At that time, the road battalion’s work was directed by the head of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, Colonel Aloysio Ferreira, who previously had been superintendent of the telegraph line and later, in 1943, was appointed Rondônia’s first territorial governor. Today a vigorous 80, Colonel Ferreira told me recently in Rio de Janeiro:

On February 6, 1960, President Juscelino Kubitschek announced during a television interview that he would open the remaining 400 miles of jungle in the western Amazon, to connect Cuiabá and Pôrto Velho by land, within the next 10 months. His government had already completed the Belém-Brasília highway and was searching for another dramatic project that it could complete in the months remaining before Kubitschek left office. The governor of Rondônia at the time was Colonel Paulo Nunes Leal, an energetic and well-connected army engineer who had fought in Italy during World War II with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, from whose ranks some of the army’s most important leaders emerged in the postwar period. Nunes Leal had been lobbying in Rio and Brasília for completion of the highway, arguing that one day it would provide a strategic trans-Andean route to the Pacific for Brazil, end the isolation of the distant territories of Acre and Rondônia, and open large areas for colonization and mining.

After Kubitschek announced his decision to build the highway, a mobilization of men and equipment began. A steamer carrying a large shipment of road machinery was sent up the Atlantic coast from Rio, then westward to Pôrto Velho along the Amazon and Madeira Rivers. The jungle was cleared near the telegraph stations for landing fields and workers’ camps, as helicopters and DC-3 cargo planes made their entrance on the scene for critical logistical support to the clearing operations. Within six months after the project was announced, on July 4, 1960, Kubitschek himself appeared at the old telegraph post of Vilhena—which three months before had consisted of one house inhabited by the Pareci Indian who was the telegraphist—symbolically to fell the last tree on the highway’s route through the jungle. But the real significance of this act was to inaugurate the era of the truck, the airplane, and the helicopter in the western Amazon Basin. The road was opened in 1960 but had been so hurriedly designed and constructed that after a few years, it became completely useless during the rainy season and badly rutted during the summer. The principal rivers along the route had to be forded by ferries until the U.S. Agency for International Development provided funds for bridge construction in the late 1960s. Meanwhile, the Brazilian army construction battalion created a more stable roadbed. The paving of BR-364 began in 1976, but only a few miles have been completed because Brazil’s oil import burdens have limited her ability to buy asphalt abroad. In 1975 the northward reach of BR-364 was extended to the entrepôt of Manaus on the Amazon River, and in April 1977 the final link north of the Amazon was completed in the land route from Brasília to Caracas on the Caribbean coast. The Pôrto Velho newspaper O Guaporé reported government instructions that, because the new road passes through the territory of the Waimiri-Atroari Indians, "motorists should maintain a minimum speed of 50 miles an hour, not stopping for any reason. All kinds of firearms and alcoholic beverages are prohibited. Traffic should proceed only during certain hours, because all massacres by the Waimiris occur either at dawn or sunset and never during the day.

By the late 1970s, penetration and settlement of the South American heartland was advancing rapidly despite economic uncertainties. While Brazil has been building roads northward and westward into the Amazon, Peru and Bolivia have been extending their highway network east of the Andes into the jungle. In the western Amazon regions of Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia, 5 cities have grown to more than 100,000 inhabitants during the past decade where none existed before. Just as Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis depended on shipments of flour from the eastern United States until the mid-nineteenth century, so also do the new towns and cities of the Amazon rely on supplies of basic foodstuffs from more settled areas far away. Just as the Texas livestock driven to the new Kansas cattle towns in the 1870s provided the railroads with badly needed eastbound freight—at reduced rates—for the trains that brought manufactures from the Atlantic coast, Brazilian frontier farmers similarly are able to ship their products cheaply to distant markets on trucks that carry goods from São Paulo and would otherwise have to make the return trip empty. According to a history of the Kansas towns, "the imbalance of westbound over eastbound freight reflected the typical underdeveloped area’s need for goods in excess of its ability to furnish a compensating volume of products in return."

Urbanization is accompanying agricultural settlement on the Brazilian frontier, just as it did in the American West a century ago. Since the opening of BR-364 to regular traffic a decade ago, the forlorn telegraph posts along the route have become flourishing towns, inhabited by an ever-growing proportion of the incoming population. Before the first tentative opening of the road in 1960, what is now the town of Vila Rondônia was an isolated mining camp and rubber barração at the junction of two rivers, where Rondon had founded a telegraph station a half century before. The settlement still consisted of a few houses grouped around the telegraph station, although the line itself stopped functioning around 1940, when wireless communications were introduced. To bring supplies to this settlement of a few hundred people from Pôrto Velho, 200 miles away, it was necessary to journey 25 days, crossing several rivers with 14 different portages in the jungle. Supply shipments, therefore, were made only once a year. The opening of a primitive road to Pôrto Velho reduced the trip to six days, and it has since been cut to six hours in the dry season. Since then, Vila Rondônia’s population has grown very rapidly, to 4,000 in 1970 and to an estimated 35,000 in 1976. It has become the main commercial emporium of the fertile terra roxa belt that has drawn settlers to Rondônia from all over southern Brazil. It has developed intimate ties with the rest of Brazil through radio, television, and satellite telephone communications, as well as through the frequent bus service along BR-364 that connects Rondônia with the distant rural areas of Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, and Paraná, where droughts, frosts, and agricultural mechanization have driven away small farmers and peons, to seek something better on the frontier. In this way, Brazil’s rural population of 45 million seems constantly on the move, in one of the great rural migrations of our time, heading toward an extremely uncertain future.

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