Mr. Maia said: “It wasn’t until 1946 that I learned that the war was over. We didn’t have any radios, and we were completely cut off from the outside world.”
But those who heard the news right away also encountered problems in leaving and collecting their wages. Many were told that they owed money to the rubber camp bosses for food, clothing or equipment, and would have to remain until their debts were paid off.
“Oh, I was so happy the day the war ended, because I thought, ‘Now I can finally go home,’ ” Mr. dos Santos recalled. “But when I went to talk to the boss about leaving, he said, ‘Who are you kidding?’ and told me to get back to work.”
With no money and no transportation, most of the rubber soldiers resigned themselves to remaining in the Amazon. They married, had families and continued to work in the rubber camps or became rural homesteaders, ignored and anonymous.
“How do you suppose Brasília was built?” said José Paulino da Costa, director of the Retirees’ and Rubber Soldiers’ Union of Acre. “The United States paid money to Brazil, but it went to other projects instead of the rubber soldiers, which was a terrible injustice.”
In 1988, though, Brazil ratified a new Constitution with an article that called for the rubber soldiers to receive a pension valued at twice the minimum wage, or $350 a month currently. But many who served here found themselves ineligible because they could not supply the required documents. Their original contracts had been lost, destroyed by rain or handed over to rubber plantation bosses and never returned.
Those who have qualified receive a pension that is barely one-tenth of the amount paid to Brazilian soldiers who fought in Europe during World War II. In 2002 a member of Congress from the state of Amazonas introduced a bill to pay rubber soldiers “who are living in misery” the same amount, but the bill remains stalled in committee.
“When I watch the Independence Day ceremonies on television and see the soldiers who fought in Europe parading in their uniforms I feel sadness and dismay,” Mr. Maia said. “We were combatants too. Everyone owes us a big favor, including the Americans, because that war couldn’t have been won without rubber and us rubber soldiers.”
publicado no NYT
Manaus Journal: For the Rubber Soldiers of Brazil, Rubber Checks
Graying now and less firm of step with the passing years, the veterans marched recently through this Amazon city. The front ranks held banners reading, "Rubber Soldiers Demand Pensions."
Someone in the back recalled the rubber soldiers' marching song, and soon, as if it were 1943 again, the marchers were singing: "Long live the Brazilian soldier! Your product will be useful all over the world."
After the march, Clovis Barreto, an organizer, urged an American visitor here, "Ask the American Government to pressure our Government to pay our pensions."
In 1942, Japanese troops swept through Indonesia and Malaya, occupying vast rubber plantations and cutting off the allies from 95 percent of the world's rubber supply. In the United States, rubber stocks were low and a synthetic rubber industry was in its infancy.From airplane tires to surgical gloves, rubber was crucial to the war effort. In desperation, the United States turned to Brazil. With as many as 200 million wild rubber trees in the Amazon, American experts calculated, Brazil could quickly increase its rubber production. With an injection of manpower, the Americans reasoned, Brazil could raise output eightfold, hitting 100,000 tons a year. 'Fighting in the Trenches'.
Soon recruiting posters for rubber tappers were appearing in Brazil's drought-stricken northeast, a traditional source of migrants to the Amazon. Referring to Brazil's expeditionary force in Italy, one poster made the patriotic appeal, "While our soldiers are fighting in Italy, you are fighting in the trenches for rubber."
Marinho El Rey de Alencar was a 20-year-old road worker in Iguatu, in Ceara State, when he became a "soldado da borracha."
"I enlisted as a rubber soldier because my mother cried a lot and didn't want me to join the army," Mr. Alancar, now 68 years old, recalled recently as he relaxed in a worn armchair on the front porch of his wooden shanty here.
In addition to learning the marching song, Brazil's rubber soldiers received a uniform -- white shirt, blue pants and hat -- as well as a pair of rubber sandals, a backpack, a hammock, a plate, a cup and a knife.
Germany took the rubber campaign seriously enough to send submarines to prowl Brazil's northern coastline, searching for troopships entering the mouth of the Amazon.
"It was midnight when the captain sighted a submarine," Mr. Alencar said of his trip to the Amazon in 1943. "We doused all the lights and put on life jackets."
The submarine scare passed uneventfully for Mr. Alencar. Indeed, more debilitating than Nazi submarines was the United States War Department's underestimation of the Amazon. Snake bites, tropical diseases and Indian attacks ravaged "forest battalions" soon after they arrived in the unfamiliar jungle.
"If it wasn't malaria, it was the snakes, the jaguars or the Indians," said Mr. Barreto, the 66-year-old president of the Association of Rubber Soldiers of Amazonas State. A native of the semi-arid northeast, Mr. Barreto estimated that half of the rubber soldiers never made it out of the jungle alive.
Of a projected fighting force of 100,000 rubber soldiers, only an estimated 25,000 actually completed the four-month voyage from Brazil's northeast to distant Amazon areas where latex was harvested from wild rubber trees.
Downstream, American officials based in this Amazon River port nervously waited for a rubber boom to materialize.
"From the U.S. point of view, the thing was a colossal failure," said Warren Dean, a New York University professor who has researched the history of rubber in Brazil. 'A Great Fiasco'
"The American investment must have been $30 million, but at the high point, in 1944, only 13,684 tons of rubber were exported to the allies," he said. "It was a very, very tiny amount, when you consider that we needed hundreds of thousands of tons."
From the Brazilian side, it was "a great fiasco," said Samuel Benchimol, speaking the American English he learned almost 50 years ago as a shipping agent for Catalina airplanes flying rubber from here to Miami.
"After World War II ended, nothing changed; rubber production declined again," Mr. Benchimol, now 68, said of this equatorial city whose graceful turn-of-the-century opera house dates back to Brazil's first rubber boom. Because South American leaf blight precludes growing rubber in plantations in most of Brazil, the nation imports almost two-thirds of its rubber.
But the militant legacy of the rubber soldiers has endured across the Amazon.
In the 1980's, in the western Amazon state of Acre, a new generation of rubber tappers started to fight back against ranchers who burned down rubber groves for cattle pasture. The conflict gained world attention in December 1988 when two ranchers killed the rubber tappers' leader, Francisco (Chico) Mendes.
In belated national recognition, Brazil's 1988 Constitution stipulated payment of a monthly pension of two minimum salaries (about $130) to "rubber tappers who, responding to the appeal of the Brazilian Government, contributed to the war effort, working in rubber production in the Amazon region during World War II."
But three years later, down at Mr. Alencar's zinc-roofed shanty on Ajuricaba Street here, the veteran has yet to see a cruzeiro of his pension. He lost his rubber soldier commission papers when his canoe capsized decades ago.
The Social Security Administration "only pays men who have old documents," Mr. Barreto, the union leader, said. "After 48 years, a lot of men don't have their papers." Of 5,000 eligible veterans of the rubber war in Amazonas State, he estimated, only 300 receive their pensions.
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