Open Veins of Latin America

by Eduardo Galeano

  yards carried to the Caribbean

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  massive cargoes of fresh and smoked fish, grain, beans, flour, fats, cheese, onions, horses and oxen, candies and soap, textiles, pine, oak, and cedar for sugar boxes (Cuba had the first steam saw in Hispanic America but no timber to cut), and barrel staves, hoops, rings, and nails.

  The whole process was a pumping of blood from one set of veins to another: the development of the development of some, the underdevelopment of others.

  THE RAINBOW IS THE ROAD BACK TO GUINEA

  From Santo Domingo, a lawyer named Alonso Zuazo reported to Charles V in 1518: "Fears of a possible rising by the blacks are groundless; there are widows living tranquilly with eight hundred slaves in Portuguese islands; it is all a matter of how they are handled. I found on arrival here some cunning niggers, and others who had taken to the Woods; I thrashed some, cut off the ears of others, and there has been no more trouble." Four years later the first slave rising in the Americas broke out: the slaves of Diego Columbus, son of the discoverer, started the revolt and ended on gallows lining the sugarmill lanes.

  Other rebellions followed, in Santo Domingo and then in all the Caribbean sugar islands. A couple of centuries after the Diego Columbus uprising, at the other end of the island, runaway slaves fled to the Haitian mountains and there reconstructed African life, growing their food, worshiping their gods, practicing their ancient customs. For the people of Haiti the rainbow still symbolizes the road back to Guinea--in a ship with a white sail. In Dutch Guiana (Surinam) communities of Djukas, descendants of slaves who fled into the forest, have survived for three centuries across the Courantyne River. In these villages "obeah shrines like those in Guinea can be seen, ceremonial dances are performed that could take place in Ghana, and the people talk with drums, which are made like Ashanti drums."15 The first big revolt in Guiana occurred one hundred years after the flight of the Djukas: the Dutch recovered the plantations and burned the slave leaders in slow fires, but in Brazil a little before the Djuka exodus, fugitive slaves had organized the black kingdom of Palmares in the Northeast, and throughout the eighteenth century had successfully resisted dozens of military expeditions sent to 83

  suppress them, first by the Dutch and then by the Portuguese. Assaults by thousands of soldiers were fruitless against the guerrilla tactics which, until 1693, made the refuge invulnerable. The independent kingdom of Palmares--a call to rebellion, a banner of liberty--was organized as a state, similar to the many that existed in Africa in the seventeenth century. It extended from near Cape Santo Agostinho in Pernambuco to the northern Rio Sao Francisco zone in Alagoas, an area one-third the size of Portugal and surrounded by dense, wild forests. The ruling chief was elected from among the wisest and most skillful: the man, of greatest prestige and success in war or command. When the sugar plantation was at its height of omnipotence, Palmares was the one corner of Brazil where agriculture was being diversified. Guided by their own experience or that of their ancestors in African savannas and forests, the blacks raised corn, sweet potatoes, beans, manioc, bananas, and other foods. The colonial troops, assigned to bring back the men who had crossed the sea in chains and deserted the plantations, believed--and not without reason--that the destruction of these crops was their main purpose.

  The abundance of food in Palmares contrasted with its lack in coastal areas at the zenith of the sugar prosperity. The slaves who had won liberty defended it ably and bravely because they shared its fruits: land in the black state was held in common and no money circulated. No slave rebellion in world history lasted as long as that in Palmares: Spartacus's rebellion, which shook the most important slave system of ancient times, lasted eighteen months.16 For the final onslaught the Portuguese Crown mobilized the biggest army seen in Brazil until the colony became independent much later. No fewer than 10,000 people defended the last bastion of Palmares; the survivors were beheaded, thrown from precipices, or sold to merchants in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Two years later the chief Zumbi, whom the slaves believed to be immortal, was betrayed and captured. He was surrounded in the forest and his head cut off.

  And rebellions continued. Not long afterward Captain Bartolomeu Bueno do Prado returned from the Rio das Mortes with trophies of victory over another slave rising. He brought 3,900 pairs of ears in his horses' saddlebags.

  In Cuba, too, there were risings. Some slaves committed mass suicide, mocking their masters, as Fernando Ortiz has put it, "with 84

  their eternal strikes, their unending flight to the other world." They thought they would thus be brought back to life, body and soul, in Africa. By mutilating the corpses so they would return to life castrated, maimed, or decapitated, the masters dissuaded many from killing themselves. Around 1870, according to a recent account by a Las Villas 100-year-old slave who took to the woods as a youth, blacks in Cuba no longer chose suicide. A magic chain gave them power and they "flew through the sky and returned to their own land"; or they lost themselves in the mountains because "everyone wearied of life, and the ones who got used to it were broken in spirit. Life in the forest was healthier."17

  The gods of Africa remained alive for the slaves, as did the nostalgia-nourished legends and myths of their lost fatherlands. In their ceremonies, dances, and incantations the blacks clearly expressed the need to affirm a cultural identity that Christianity denied, but the Church's material stake in the exploitation they suffered must have been a factor also. In the early eighteenth century, while slaves convicted of crimes in British islands were crushed between cane-milling cylinders, and in French islands were burned alive or broken on the wheel, the Jesuit Antonil was offering Brazilian sugarmill owners kindly recommendations for the avoidance of excesses: "Administrators should under no circumstances be permitted to administer kicks in the belly to pregnant women nor beatings to the slaves, since anger may prevail over restraint and an efficient and valuable slave may be injured in the head and lost."18 In Cuba, overseers applied their thongs of hide or hemp to the backs of pregnant females who had erred, but not before stretching them out with their bellies over a hole to avoid damaging "the little creature"; priests, who received 5 percent of sugar production as a tithe, gave Christian absolution; the overseer administered punishment like Jesus Christ castigating sinners. The apostolic missionary Juan Perpina y Pibernat published his sermons to the blacks: "My poor little ones! Be not afraid because as slaves you have so many burdens to bear! Your body may be enslaved, but your soul remains free to fly one day to the happy mansions of the chosen." 19 (One Holy Thursday the Count of Casa Bayona decided to humiliate himself before his slaves. Inflamed with Christian fervor, he washed the feet of twelve blacks and invited them to dine with him at his table. It was in truth the last supper. Next day the slaves rebelled and set fire to the sugarmill.

  Their heads were stuck on 12 lances in the middle of the estate.) 85

  The god of the pariahs is not always the same as the god of the system that makes them pariahs. Although the Catholic religion officially embraces 94

  percent of the population of Brazil, black Brazilians today maintain their African traditions and keep alive their religious faith, often camouflaged behind Christian saints; cults of African origin are widely practiced by the oppressed, whatever their skin color. The same is true in the Antilles. The voodoo gods in Haiti, Cuba's bembe, and Brazil's umbanda and quimbanda are more or less the same, despite the greater or smaller transfiguration that rites and original gods have undergone through American naturalization. In the Caribbean and in Bahia the ceremonial chants are intoned in Nago, Yoruba, Congo, and other African languages. In the big city suburbs of southern Brazil, on the other hand, Portuguese predominates. But from the West African coast the gods of good and evil have endured throughout the centuries to become the avenging phantoms of the disinherited, the humiliated poor who chant in the slums of Rio de Janeiro:

  Power of Bahia,

  Power of Africa,

  Divine power,

  Come t
o us,

  Come and help us.

  PEASANTS FOR SALE

  Brazil abolished slavery in 1 888, but it did not abolish the latifundio, and in the same year an eyewitness wrote from Ceara, in the Northeast: "The human cattle market was open as long as there was hunger, and there was no lack of buyers. Rare was the steamer in which large numbers of Ceara people were not shipped out."20 Half a million Northeasterners emigrated to Amazonia, drawn by the rubber mirage, until the turn of the century; after that the exodus continued as periodic droughts devastated the sertao and "forest zone" sugar latifundios expanded in successive waves, In 1900, 40,000 drought victims left Ceara. They took

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  the road that everyone took at the time, north to the jungle. Later the direction changed: in our day Northeasterners emigrate to the center and south of Brazil.

  The drought of 1970 drove hungry multitudes into the cities of the Northeast.

  They plundered trains and stores, implored the saints to send rain, and clogged the roads. "Pernambuco state police," said a wire service cable in April 1970, "last Sunday arrested in the municipality of Belem do Sao Francisco 210

  peasants who were to be sold for $18 a head to rural landowners in Minas Gerais state."21(In 1938 the pilgrimage of a cowhand over the parched roads of the sertao inspired one of the best novels in Brazilian literature. On cattle ranches in the interior, subordinated to coastal sugarmills, there has been no let-up in the scourge of drought and the effects continue the same. The world of Graciliano Ramos's Barren Lives--in which the parrot imitates the dog's bark because his masters have almost stopped using the human voice--

  remains intact.) The peasants came from Paraiba and Rio Grande do Norte, the two states most punished by drought. In June, statements by the federal police chief came over the teletype: no effective means of ending the slave traffic were available to him, and although ten investigations had been launched in recent months, the sale of Northeastern workers to rich landowners in other areas continues.

  THE RUBBER CYCLE: CARUSO INAUGURATES A JUNGLE

  THEATER

  Some authors estimate that in the period of the rise of rubber no less than half a million Northeasterners succumbed to epidemics, malaria, tuberculosis, or beriberi. Says one: "This grim charnel house was the price of the rubber industry."22 Peasants with no nutritional reserves went from the dry lands to the swampy jungle, where fevers lay in wait for them. Packed into ships' holds for the long journey, many anticlpated their fate by dying en route. Others did not even reach the ships. In 1878, 120,000 of Ceara's 800,000 population headed for the Amazon and less than half got there; the rest collapsed from hunger or disease on the sertao trails or in the suburbs of Fortaleza. A year earlier one of the Northeast's seven greatest droughts of the past century had begun.

  Not only fevers awaited them in the jungle, but a work regime very similar to slavery. Guardias rurales posted along the riverbanks shot at fugitives. The pay was in kind--dried meat, manioc flour, lumps of 87

  unrefined sugar, aguardiente--until the rubber worker paid off his debts, a miracle that rarely occurred. Employers had an agreement among themselves not to give jobs to workers who were in debt to other employers. Debts piled on debts. To the cost of transport from the Northeast were added the debts for work tools, machetes, knives, and eating bowls; and since the worker consumed food--and above all liquor, never a scarce commodity in the rubber forests--the longer he worked the higher his accumulated debt. The illiterate Northeasterners were at the mercy of the administrators' conjuring tricks with the ledgers.

  In 1770 J.B. Priestley had observed that rubber would erase pencil marks on paper, and seventy years later Charles Goodyear and the Englishman Thomas Hancock simultaneously discovered the process of vulcanizing rubber, making it flexible and impervious to temperature changes. By 1850 the wheels of vehicles were being sheathed in rubber. At the end of the century the automobile industry was born in the United States and Europe, and with it the consumption of great quantities of pneumatic tires. World demand for rubber soared. The rubber-tree was bringing Brazil a tenth of its export income in 1890, and by 1910 this had risen to 40 percent, making rubber sales almost equal to those of coffee, although coffee was then at the height of its prosperity.

  Most of the rubber production came from the Acre area, which Brazil had wrested from Bolivia after a lightning military campaign.( Some 75,000 square miles were lopped off Bolivia. In 1902 it got a PS2 million indemnity and a railway line giving it access to the Madeira and Amazon rivers.)

  With Acre in its possession, Brazil had almost all of the world's rubber reserves. Prices were at their peak on the international market and it seemed that good times had come to stay. The rubber workers, of course, did not share in this, although it was they who went out from their huts each dawn, receptacles strapped on their backs, to bleed the giant Hevea brasiliensis trees.

  They made incisions in the trunks and in thick branches and the whitish, sticky latex dripped from the wounds, filling the cups in a couple of hours. At night the flat slabs of rubber which had accumulated in the administration center were cooked. The sour and revolting smell of rubber impregnated the city of Manaus, world capital of the rubber business. Manaus had 5,000 inhabitants in 1849; it had 70,000 in little more than half a century. There rubber magnates 88

  built their extravagantly designed and sumptuously decorated mansions with precious Oriental woods, Portuguese majolicas, columns of Carrara marble, and furniture by French master cabinetmakers. The nouveau riche of the jungle had the most costly foods brought from Rio de Janeiro; Europe's top couturiers cut their dresses and outfits; they sent their sons to study at British schools. The Amazonas theater, a baroque monument in triumphantly poor taste, is the chief symbol of that vertigo of wealth at the beginning of our century. Caruso navigated the river through the jungle to sing to Manaus's inhabitants for a kingly fee on opening night; Pavlova, who was supposed to dance there, could not get beyond Belem but sent her apologies.

  In 1913 sudden disaster hit Brazilian rubber. The world price fell to a quarter of the two shillings it had been three years earlier. The Far East had only exported four tons of rubber in 1900; in 1914 Ceylonese and Malay plantations poured over 70,000 tons onto the world market, and within five years their exports approached the 400,000-ton mark. By 1919 Brazil, which had had a virtual monopoly, was supplying only one-eighth of world consumption. A half-century later Brazil is buying more than half its rubber from abroad,

  What happened? Back in 1873 Henry Wickham, an Englishman who owned rubber forests on the Rio Tapajoz and was known for his botanical manias, had sent sketches and leaves of the rubber tree to the director of Kew Gardens in London. He got an order for a quantity of seeds from the yellow fruit of Hevea brasiliensis. Since Brazil severely punished any leakage of seeds, he had to smuggle them out, which was not easy: ships were meticulously searched by the authorities. Then, as if under a magic spell, an Inman Line ship penetrated 1,200 miles further than usual into the interior of Brazil. On its return, Henry Wickham was aboard as a member of the crew. He had selected the best seeds after putting the fruit out to dry in a native village, and had put them in a locked cabin, wrapped in banana leaves and suspended on strings so that the ship's rats could not get at them. The rest of the ship was empty. In the port of Belem, at the river's mouth, Wickham invited the authorities to a grand banquet. The Englishman's eccentricities were notorious--all Amazonia knew that he collected orchids--and he explained that on order from the English king he was carrying a collection of rare orchid bulbs to Kew Gardens. As the plants were very delicate

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  he had them in a hermetically sealed cabin at a special temperature: if it was opened the flowers would be ruined. Thus the seeds reached the Liverpool docks unscathed. Forty years later the British invaded the world market with Malayan rubber. The Asian plantations, skillfully developed from shoots grown at Kew Gardens, easily supplanted Brazilian production.

  Amazonia
n prosperity vanished in a puff of smoke. The jungle closed back upon itself. Fortune hunters left for other parts and the luxurious camp disintegrated. The only people remaining, surviving as best they could, were the workers who had been brought from afar to make fortunes for others--and not even for Brazilians. For Brazil had merely responded to the siren song of world demand for raw materials, without itself participating in the real business of rubber--finance, trade, industrialization, and distribution. The siren fell mute until World War II gave a new but fleeting push to Amazonian rubber. The Allied powers desperately searched for supplies when the Japanese occupied Malaya: the Peruvian jungle was ransacked and the so-called Battle of Rubber once again mobilized Brazil's Northeastern peasants.( Early in our century, rubber-forested mountains in Peru had held out the promise of a new El Dorado. In 1908 Francisco Garcia Calderon wrote in El Peru contempordneo that rubber was the great wealth of the future.

  In his novel The Green House, Mario Vargas Llosa reconstructs the feverish atmosphere in Iquitos and in the jungle, where adventurers robbed the Indians and each other. Nature had leprosy and other weapons with which to take its vengeance.) This time, according to an accusation made in the Congress when the "battle" ended, the victims of disease and hunger, whose bodies remained to rot among the rubber trees, numbered some 50,000.

  The rubber boom and the rise of coffee growing involved big levies of Northeastern workers. But the government also uses its bottomless reserve of cheap labor for public works. The naked men who built the city of Brasilia almost overnight were Northeasterners transported like cattle to the wilderness site. Today this most modern of the world's cities is surrounded by a great belt of poverty: when they finished their work, these people--known as candangos--