Of Rubber and Blood in Brazilian Amazon

Brazilians took part in their country’s drive to produce rubber for the Allies in
World War II. Vicência Bezerra da Costa, 77, who went to the Amazon with her father at the age of 12.
Foto de CreditLalo de Almeida

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — Alcidino dos Santos was on his way to the market to buy vegetables for his mother one morning in 1942 when an army officer stopped him and told him he was being drafted as a “rubber soldier.” Men were needed in the Amazon, 3,000 miles away, to harvest rubber for the Allied war effort, he was told, and it was his patriotic duty to serve.

Mr. dos Santos, then a 19-year-old mason’s assistant, protested that his mother was a widow who depended on him for support, but to no avail. He would be paid a wage of 50 cents a day, he recalls being told, and receive free transportation home once the conflict was over, but he had to go, that day.

More than 60 years after the end of World War II, Mr. dos Santos and hundreds of other poor Brazilians who were dragooned into service as rubber soldiers are still in the Amazon, waiting for those promises to be fulfilled. Elderly and frail, they are fighting against time and indifference to gain the recognition and compensation they believe should be theirs.

“We were duped, and then abandoned and forgotten,” Mr. dos Santos, who never saw his mother again, said in an interview at his simple wood house here in Acre, a state in the far west of the Brazilian Amazon that has the largest concentration of former rubber soldiers.

“We were brought here against our will,” he said, “and thrown into the jungle, where we suffered terribly. I’m near the end of my life, but my country should do right by me.”

The program originated in an agreement between the United States and Brazil. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had cut the United States off from its main source of rubber, in Malaya, and President Roosevelt persuaded Brazil’s dictator, Getúlio Vargas, to fill that strategic gap in return for millions of dollars in loans, credits and equipment.

According to Brazilian government records, more than 55,000 people, almost all of them from the drought-ridden and poverty-stricken northeast, were sent to the Amazon to harvest rubber for the war effort. There are no official figures on how many of them succumbed to disease or animal attacks, but historians estimate that nearly half perished before Japan surrendered in September 1945.

Lupércio Freire Maia, 86, lives in Acre State.Credit Foto de Lalo de Almeida

“Some of the guys died of malaria, yellow fever, beriberi and hepatitis, but others were killed by snakes, stingrays or even panthers,” recalled Lupércio Freire Maia, 86. “They didn’t have the proper medicines for diseases or snakebites there in the camps, so when someone died you buried him right there next to the hut and kept right on working.”

The work was exhausting, dangerous and unhealthy: rubber soldiers rose just after midnight, tramped through the jungle in the dark to cut grooves in the trees and returned later in the day to collect the latex that dripped into cups.

They would then toast the white liquid into solid balls weighing up to 130 pounds, a process that generated so much smoke that many were left blind or sight-impaired.

Though many of the rubber soldiers were forced into service, a few enlisted, hoping for adventure and riches. José Araújo Braga, 82, described himself as “a rebellious kid who wanted to see the world” and thus was easily swayed by government propaganda that spoke of the Amazon as an El Dorado where the “Rubber for Victory” effort could earn a hard worker a fortune.

“I could have joined the army and gone to Europe,” where Brazilian troops fought alongside American forces in Italy and are now honored as heroes, he said. “But I chose the Amazon because, foolish me, I thought that I could make a lot of money.”

Once the men reached the Amazon, though, their wages ceased and they were herded into cantonments, with no visitors allowed.

When the war and American interest ended, the people profiting from the arrangement were not about to let their free labor go. The rubber camp bosses “feared an exodus if the news got out, and so many rubber soldiers were still there in the jungle years later, unawares,” said Marcos Vinícius Neves, a historian who is director of a government historical preservation foundation here.

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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

publicado em 1991

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. #