The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  Dozens of species in at least six other families of tropical plants have evolved similar systems of chemical weaponry to defend themselves in the endless battle that is tropical existence. For centuries, the Indians had used the latex exuded by a variety of plants to make everything from unbreakable bottles to torches, shoes to soccer balls. But it was mainly Hevea brasiliensis that suited the white man’s needs. By the end of the nineteenth century, what had once been an obscure substance harvested by a handful of Indians had become one of the essential ingredients for the automotive and electrical power industries and one of the underpinnings of the accelerating industrial revolution. Eventually, a trillion dollars’ worth of rubber was extracted from the Amazon. It was rubber that created Xapuri and almost every other settlement in the far reaches of the basin. In the process, it created one of the strangest, most brutal forms of labor exploitation in modern history.

  The entire history of the rubber trade seemed to hang in the dusty air of Guilherme Zaire’s warehouse, which was on the waterfront in Chico Mendes’s hometown. The air smelled strongly of smoked latex, an aroma that initially had a pleasant, tarry pungency but after an hour or so tended to numb the nose. Zaire, who for forty years had been one of the leading rubber merchants in Acre, sat just inside the heavy wooden door that was swung wide open, allowing a few rays of the afternoon sun to penetrate deep into the dim interior. He smiled as he recounted his long involvement with this strange, wonderful substance with many uses and just as many names: borracha, seringa, caoutchouc.

  Zaire had also had a long career in local politics, including stints as state representative and mayor of Xapuri. He was born in Xapuri in 1921 to a Syrian father and an Italian mother. “My father was a regatão,” he said, a river peddler. (The word has its roots in the Portuguese word for “haggle” or “bargain,” regatear.) “He came rowing up the river in a canoe in 1903, right around the time Acre was conquered by Brazil.” Zaire sat behind his heavy wooden desk, which came up close to his armpits, and sketched the shape of Acre on his blotter. The skin on his hands was pale, almost transparent, but his nose suffered from an excess of tropical sun and was swollen and reddened and precancerous. His gray eyes, enlarged by thick bifocals, were the same shade as his silver hair, which he combed straight back and slicked down to his scalp.

  As he spoke, he kept an eye on the parade of laborers who made a steady circuit from the dimly lit depths of the building out into the bright sun, each balancing a 100-pound slab or ball of natural rubber on his head with his arms up at each side, centering the load. The stronger workers tended to carry the slabs, because they could stack them on their heads and heft two or even three at a time. Their neck muscles and blood vessels bulged. Under the strain, one man’s face puckered like Dizzy Gillespie hitting high C. Some of the men sweated profusely, while the dark skin of others had a dry, satiny sheen.

  They were loading a heavy flatbed truck with rubber that had been brought into town by riverboat from the rubber estates all around Xapuri. As each worker approached the truck, he stepped onto a plank that rested on a chunk of rubber. The rubber compressed a little, giving the man a bit of a springy boost as he grunted and heaved his load over the side of the truck and onto the growing pile in back. There was little small talk. The only sounds were the steady shuffle of thongs and callused feet on the worn, shiny cement floor, the creak of the springy plank, the grunt, and the dull thud as another chunk of rubber was sent on its way down the dusty highway to a factory in Rondônia, the rapidly developing state to the south where the forest was falling at a record pace. Thirty-three thousand pounds of rubber were to be loaded today, and no one was taking it slowly.

  Zaire drew what looked like a stretched-out W with a line across the top—something like the open wings of a butterfly. The strange shape of the state had been sculpted by the struggle for rubber. In the mid-1800s, Acre was Bolivian territory, with the straight line on the W being the border with Brazil. The border was simply drawn because much of the region at that time was still terra incognita. In fact, the western end of the line was only an approximation because no one had charted the headwaters of the Javari River, which separated Brazil and Bolivia from their common neighbor, Peru. It was unknown because no one had much of a reason to be there—at least until the rubber boom began.

  As the demand for rubber crested in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Brazilian rubber tappers swarmed into the region. Word had spread that the valleys of Acre’s two main rivers, the Purus and Juruá, were the best places in all Amazonia for rubber trees. Toward the end of the century, Bolivia made plans to exert more control over this far-flung territory. The tappers resisted and booted out the Bolivian tax collectors; in 1903, the territory was turned over to Brazil in return for a cash payment and a promise to build a railroad bypassing rapids that denied Bolivia convenient access to the Amazon River system.

  Another part of Acre’s anatomy was also shaped by this struggle. One of the rivers forming the border with Peru—the lower edge of the left butterfly wing—is something of a natural boundary between the species of rubber tree tapped by Brazilian seringueiros and a different type of rubber tree that was harvested by caucheros, Spanish-speaking rubber harvesters. South of the Breu River, the caucheros harvested latex from caucho trees by ringing the bark completely or even chopping the tree down, draining 100 pounds of latex in one operation—but killing the tree in the process. (Breu, meaning tar, is the Brazilian term for this different type of rubber tree.) The caucheros were aggressive itinerants, who left their families behind and scoured the forests. North of the river, Brazilian seringueiros settled in one place and tapped latex in a way that allowed a tree to live a long, healthy life. The tappers thus established strong ties to the land. In this way, the Breu became a battle line, defended staunchly by the seringueiros.

  The legacy of this history is that in Acre, unlike in any other state in Brazil, the mainstay of the economy has always been rubber. The whole state is occupied by tappers. Flying over the forest, you see a scattering of small clearings, each the home of a tapper.

  As the parade of rubber through the warehouse continued, Zaire talked and sketched, adding to his map the courses of the Juruá and the Purus. The Juruá and its many tributaries drain the western wing of the state, flowing north to join the main trunk of the Amazon. The Purus leaves the state at its midsection, but all its tributaries, including the Acre, drain the eastern wing. Before a highway to Rondônia was cut through the forest, these two rivers were the only two ways to get to Acre, Zaire explained.

  His father headed up the Purus and settled for a time in Bôca do Acre (Mouth of the Acre), then pushed on to Xapuri. “My father came to the Amazon because, in Syria, they said it was El Dorado.” He set up shop and began buying rubber from the surrounding rubber estates and selling dry goods and other imported supplies that were brought upriver from Manaus and Belém. “There were lots of traders, mostly Syrian, Portuguese, and a few Japanese. At that time, an English company controlled the whole network of rivers. The big, wood-burning steamships would come up the river every January,” Zaire said. That was when the rivers rose 30 or 40 feet above their average depth, swollen by the deluges of the rainy season. “In March, they’d make a second trip. We would get supplies for the whole year because soon the river would drop.” If a pilot miscalculated the season or there was an unexpected change in the depth, a ship would become stranded for an entire season. “Sometimes, six or seven ships would get stuck in the mud.”

  Zaire was the only one of three sons who followed his father into the river trade. One brother became a lawyer, the other a rancher. Zaire had received a degree in accounting in Belém and was also studying medicine, but when his father had a stroke in 1943, he took over the business. One of the rubber estates he controlled was Cachoeira, where Chico Mendes had grown up and come of age. Zaire had known Mendes since he was a child, and when Mendes moved out of the forest and into Xapuri in 1971, it was Zaire who gave him his fi
rst job—as a salesman in his shop. Seeing that Mendes was keenly interested in politics, Zaire played a key role in launching Mendes’s political career as well. In 1977 he sponsored Mendes, along with two other employees, as a candidate for the town council. It is an indication of Zaire’s power in the town that they all were elected.

  As he reminisced and watched his workers load the rubber, he could not help but smile, displaying a Cheshire cat grin that exposed small, even teeth. Zaire had had a good run of it. When rubber was bad, Brazil nuts were good. There was always something to be traded, some way to make money. He had a daughter living in Santa Barbara, California, a place he had visited twice—“such a beautiful city,” he said. He had also been to New York and Las Vegas, and he traveled frequently to Rio de Janeiro. He wore a Rolex watch. Along with the stacks of rubber, his warehouse bulged with canned goods and dry goods bound for the rubber estates. Zaire also had a coffee exporting business as well as several other investments in Rio Branco. In general, rubber merchants are both hated and tolerated by tappers. They are seen as exploitative plunderers but also as the only link to distant markets. In Xapuri, Zaire somehow avoided being reviled. Everyone considered him to be a fair man.

  For three hours straight, the laborers made their mesmerizing circuit in and out of the warehouse. As Zaire talked, the piles of rubber in the back room shrank and the mountain on the truck blocked the sun. The pile of rubber quivered slightly as each new ball tumbled into place.

  The look, feel, and smell of the hunks of smoked latex seemed antiquated, anachronistic. It was a material from another time, but in the Amazon all times overlap. Here, rubber tappers still live as they did in the nineteenth century while ranchers hop to their properties in sleek, twin-engine planes and watch television via satellite. The different eras not only overlap but are tightly linked. This latex, collected from trees dotting the world’s least trammeled forest—collected in the same way for a hundred and twenty years —was going into automobiles and surgical gloves, even into the tires of the space shuttle.

  Zaire was tiring of the rubber trade. “The risk is very high, and you’re not guaranteed anything,” he said. “It’s not like it used to be.” He hoped to have his seringal disappropriated by the government and turned into an extractive reserve. “To me, the land is worthless. I can’t sell it to a rancher, because it only has value to a rancher if it’s deforested. And no rancher wants to buy land that has tappers on it because there will be a fight to get them out. My money is made by selling the product, not the land itself.” This was exactly the point that Chico Mendes had tried to make—the point that got him killed. “All this trouble, just over rubber,” Zaire said.

  The workers were done now, and in the back room they splashed themselves down with buckets of water drawn from a cistern. After the accounts were tallied, the heavy Mercedes diesel fired up, and the truck rumbled on its way up the rough, cobbled lane toward the road to Rondônia, the dark, resinous load jiggling back and forth.

  The unlikely transformation of a tree’s natural insect repellent into the white gold of the rubber boom began nearly five hundred years ago. European explorers in the New World began making sporadic anecdotal references to the Indians’ use of a bouncy, resilient material derived from juices bled from trees. But the first scientific appraisal of the material did not occur until 1736. As with many scientific discoveries, the first study of rubber was a serendipitous digression from an assigned mission. An expedition had been sent to South America by the French Royal Academy of Sciences to resolve a debate about the shape of the earth: Newton’s law of gravitation predicted that the planet should not be a perfect sphere, but rather somewhat flattened at the poles and fat at the equator. The idea was to make precise celestial measurements along the equator and then compare them with measurements taken by a team of scientists at the Arctic Circle, deep in Lapland.

  Charles Marie de La Condamine, a thirty-five-year-old geographer and naturalist, and Pierre Bouguer, a thirty-eight-year-old astronomer, mathematician, and hydrographer, planned to head inland from the Peruvian coast to accomplish the equatorial end of the task. The two men stayed for several weeks at a village at the river mouth, waiting for their guides to arrive. They remarked on the means used to light their rooms at night: a 2-foot-long torch that produced a bright, steady light, did not run like a candle, and was only half burned after twelve hours. It was a stick of a black, resinous material, wrapped in a banana leaf. On their subsequent trip inland to the city of Quito (later the capital of Ecuador), they found the material used for many purposes. On June 24, 1736, La Condamine sent samples of the material back to Paris along with a note. As translated by Austin Coates in The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years, the note said:

  In the forests of Esmeraldas province a tree grows which the natives of the country call Hhévé (the Spaniards write it Jévé); simply by an incision it lets flow a white resin like milk; it is collected at the foot of the tree on leaves specially spread out for it; it is then exposed to the sun, whereupon it hardens and turns brown, first outside, and then inside. Since my arrival at Quito I have learned that the tree which discharges this substance grows also along the banks of the Amazon river, and that the Maïnas Indians call it Caoutchouc; moulds of earth in the shape of a bottle are covered with it; they break the mould when the resin has hardened; these bottles are lighter than if they were of glass, and are in nowise subject to breakage.

  It later turned out that La Condamine had confused two different types of rubber trees: the Peruvian caoutchouc was a different tree from the one in the Amazon, which was Hevea. Even so, the word caoutchouc, which meant “weeping wood” to the Indians, traveled with his samples to Europe and was thenceforth applied to this odd new material. La Condamine quickly took advantage of one of the local uses of the substance, coating some cloth with latex to make a waterproof cover for his delicate instruments.

  Not until 1743 was the French team able to complete its original mission. (As it turned out, the world was indeed flatter at the poles and fatter at the equator; Newton and gravity had stood up to the test.) Afterward, La Condamine chose to return to France by way of a trip down the Amazon; he provided the first scientific survey of the river. As he traveled on the river, he found that the Portuguese—who had gained control of most of the region that is now Brazil—had already established a widespread trading system for cocoa, which had become a popular drink in Europe. Along with the cocoa grown on plantations around Belém, beans were also being gathered in upriver villages for shipment 2,000 miles downstream to the town, where cocoa was the accepted currency. A century later, the same links became the basis of the blossoming rubber trade.

  When he reached Belem in September of 1743, La Condamine saw that the Portuguese colonists there had already picked up a few uses of latex from a local Indian tribe, the Omagua. Liquid latex was poured into molds or over forms, then cured over a smoky fire. As each successive layer was added and smoked, a thick, resilient wall was built up. One of the articles produced this way was a flexible squirting bottle, something like a modern baster. A pear-shape rubber reservoir was fitted onto the end of a hollow wood stem. These “syringes” (xiringa in old Portuguese) were used to serve drinking water. It was this association that led to the Portuguese names for rubber, the rubber tree, and rubber tappers—seringa, seringueira, and seringueiro, respectively.

  The English word “rubber” was derived from one of its first uses in Great Britain—to rub off unwanted pencil marks from a sheet of paper. (By a circuitous linguistic trade route, this use also produced a synonym for seringa in Portugal and back in Brazil—borracha, which means “rubber” and also “eraser.”) By the late 1700s, many types of rubber articles were finding their way to Europe and the United States. One of the first was rubberized fabric. The most dramatic use of this material was in the hot-air and hydrogen balloons that began to soar over Paris in 1783. The Montgolfier brothers and a scientist named Jacques Charles had a bit of a competition. Charl
es did far better with his hydrogen balloon, constructed of silk coated with a thin varnish of rubber.

  By the early 1800s, syringes, bottles, and rubber boots by the thousands were being exported to New England and Europe. Almost all of the articles were manufactured in the Amazon, mostly in and around Belém (then called Belém do Pará). There was one significant drawback to this otherwise miraculous material: it grew brittle and stiff in winter’s cold, sticky and soft in the heat of summer. That posed a problem for some customers, such as the fishermen of Massachusetts, who needed their boots year-round.

  Because of the limitations of the unmodified material, rubber goods remained something of a curiosity until a trio of tinkerers— a Scot, an Englishman, and a New Englander—put their minds to making durable goods from the substance. Two of them would live in perpetuity, for their names became synonymous with their products. The Scot, Charles Macintosh, devised a system for laminating rubber between two pieces of fabric, leading to the macintosh raincoat. Charles Goodyear, the struggling son of a Connecticut inventor, stumbled onto the chemical process for giving rubber durability; his name is still embossed on millions of automobile tires each year. Goodyear, who lived in Philadelphia in the 1830s, was in and out of bankruptcy constantly as he tried to market various products, including his father’s inventions. He became preoccupied with the possibilities of improving rubber, even as the young American rubber industry crashed in 1837 when investors pulled out because of the persistent problems with brittleness and gooiness.