In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Stories of this type call on nature to reinforce belonging, and they anchor place, yet dispute its meaning. Another, the story of the remaking of nature in Igarapé Guariba, the story I introduced in Chapter 1, describes an originary moment in local history. And it involves, in radical form, the imprinting of locality on landscape.

  Raimundo and Rita Viega bought the area that included Igarapé Guariba in 1941. By this time, Raimundo was a well-known businessman who owned a large store in Macapá that sold hardware and the tools needed for settlement in the interior. He had three or four boats, a venture close to the port of Santana where he processed rice, and several landholdings on the islands that form the municipality of Afuá. When you look at him in photographs—smartly but casually dressed, taller and more powerfully built than his companions, his whiteness accentuated by his shiny bald skull—you meet a self-assured patrão who stares straight into the lens with the combative proprietorial eye of the man of action evoked by his son Nestor.

  Everyone who knew Igarapé Guariba in these early years agrees that its attractions were obvious. The woods were packed with valuable timber, and the river was teeming with fish and wildlife. When you set fire in the fields, “turtles ran from you like cockroaches,” one longtime resident told me. The chatter of scarlet macaws and the bellowing of howler monkeys were so intense you might not get to sleep. “You just had to lean down and dip a basket in the river to bring it up full of heavy, fat fish.”

  But at first this abundance was only potentiality. What dominates accounts of those days is wilderness, the menacing wild forest into which only the very brave would venture and into which strode Raimundo Viega, a patrão driven by a transformative vision.

  There was a long period during which he did little with the land. A guard was living at the mouth of the stream, and Viega’s boats sailing between Macapá and Afuá stopped off with supplies to keep him going. Viega took out timber now and again, and the guard tapped rubber and grew bananas. But the Old Man was just letting Guariba tick over. His real interest at the time was in the next river, the Rio Preto, purchased in the same deal, where he had a rice plantation employing 140 wageworkers.

  It was only when the project on the Rio Preto faltered that Viega turned his attention to Igarapé Guariba. He harvested just one crop of rice and then had his workers plant pasture for cattle. His men cut narrow trails through the forest and savanna and drove the animals to pasture, close to what was then the creek at Guariba. Then he began recruiting fregueses from his land on Afuá.

  It was 1958 when the Viegas finally arrived in Guariba. They built a tile-roofed house on a low bluff at the mouth of the river, and they brought in their son Chico, a man of imposing bulk, to uphold their law. They built a warehouse to receive forest and agricultural products, a store which, as somebody in this roadless world joked, sold “everything except cars,” and they assembled the single-blade sawmill. Their boats began stopping off with manufactured goods bought on credit from one of the Viegas’ own patrões in the city of Belém, up to seven days by sail across the bay. And after stocking the store, the boats would head off with the contents of the warehouse, making a circuit of the couple’s properties and trading in Macapá on their way back across the estuary.

  Four families moved at first from Viega’s properties on Afuá to Igarapé Guariba. They included Benedito and Nazaré Macedo and their eight children. They built a house near the store and cleared a garden. They planted their first year of bananas and watermelons. They mapped out new rubber trails, and they worked in the forest, hunting, collecting oilseeds, and cutting timber. It was not that different from Afuá. Igarapé Guariba, though, Benedito Macedo remembers, was farto, a land of plenty. There was more timber, as much fish and meat as you could want, and the soil was fertile. The Macedos settled once more into the type of clientelist arrangement that had spread through the Amazon during the nineteenth-century rubber boom and that is still a widespread form of social organization. As their fregueses arrived, the Viegas advanced them materials to build, hunt, and farm. In return, they would sell all the products of their labor only through the Viegas and their agents. Anything these clients needed to purchase, they could find in the store, available on terms of exchange that were monopolistic but not unusually punitive.

  Longtime residents describe the Rio Guariba of the early 1960s as a besteira, a joke, a silly little thing. It was a short and narrow river, probably about 50 to 75 yards wide at its mouth, where it met the Amazon, and shallow and safe enough for children to wade or swim across at low tide. It ended in a waterfall—a feature usually described in the diminutive, a quedazinha, a cachoeirazinha. Hunters would haul their canoes over or around the rocks to arrive in the midst of an open grassy landscape of flooded savanna. Such areas are often dominated by the papyrus-like pirí, from which people in poorer families in Guariba make mats that sell in bundles of ten for R $1 (then U.S. $1) to the Macedos and other local boat owners. Above the waterfall, the pirí formed a dense barrier, a pirizal, in association with aninga, a woody aroid that can easily stand 6 or 7 feet high. The pirizal was near-stationary, shallow, and entirely dried out in summer, yet residents called it a lake, the lago.16

  Within a few years of the families’ arriving and the sawmill starting up, it became clear that the valuable resources at the mouth of the river—animal skins and timber particularly—would soon be exhausted. Moreover, the difficulty of communicating among expanding Igarapé Guariba, Viega’s upstream cattle post, and the property on the Rio Preto had become a source of considerable frustration for the landowner. Above the waterfall, beyond the the pirizal, hunters reported an upstream forest well-stocked with valuable hardwoods and animals. To get there, hunters would spend hours crossing the swampy lake, pushing and dragging their unladen canoes. On the way back several days later—if everything went according to plan—they would have salted meat strapped to their backs or be carting sacks of seeds or fruit. The forest, although productive and desired, was a largely non-functional source of value.

  Raimundo Viega was proactive and thoroughly instrumental in the face of this dilemma. He organized the men of Guariba into teams. He handed around cane-liquor, gave his orders, and, in the most elaborate accounts, climbed a large tree to supervise the work.

  Benedito Macedo and the other men broke through the waterfall. On the far side, they were faced with densely packed barriers of aninga and pirí. Slowly, with axes, hoes, and machetes, they dug out a narrow channel, maybe 4 to 6 feet wide, all the time enduring insects and the threat of larger animals. And, from his vantage point high above the flat landscape, Raimundo Viega kept them on track for the forest in the distance.

  For close to ten years, the digging in Igarapé Guariba continued during the lean, dry summer months. Once the headwaters had been breached and the lago had been opened, the huge volumes of water that enter the northern channel of the Amazon estuary with the twice-daily tides rapidly swept soil and vegetation out into the main river—into what people here, in poetic recognition of its vastness, call the rio-mar, the river-sea. Without a definable watershed and surrounded by land too flat for a drainage area, the Rio Guariba is a long, narrow inlet, repeatedly scoured by the erosive tidal action of the Amazon. With the barrier of the waterfall removed and a passage opened into the low-lying campo, the flood of the Amazon poured into the upstream basin, excavating and widening the main channel. Today, people recline on the wooden boards of their front porches and watch as fallen trees, big chunks of riverbank, and islands of grass flow evenly out to sea on the tide.

  Transport to the upstream forest soon became possible not only by canoe, but also by sail and motorboat. And it was then that the residents of Igarapé Guariba, independently of the Old Man, and often without his knowledge, began to cut their own routes. They formed communal work teams, and they maintained the openings by taking his buffalo and driving them repeatedly through the new gullies. Two of the Macedo brothers who had done much of the digging told me that this was the
only reason they consented to Viega’s punitive project in the first place. They had known where they wanted to go from the outset, they claimed. While women worked downstream—fishing, collecting forest products, managing children—men camped in the upstream forest, cleared fields on good-quality land, dug out more and more canals into the forest for themselves and their neighbors, and created the storied expeditionary spaces I am describing.17

  The landscape within which these activities took place was radically transformed. The narrow mouth of the river now gapes open more than a half mile across where it meets the Amazon, capsizing motorboats on a windy day. The swampy pirizal—unmistakably a lake now—is a sweeping expanse of water itself nearly a mile wide. The closed upstream forest is threaded with a dense tracery of creeks, streams, and broad channels.

  Take a look at the images on pages 60 and 61. The first is the infrared aerial photograph made by CPRM that starts this book. It was taken as part of a mineral survey of the eastern Amazon at a moment when the region was in the grip of unrestrained speculative development. This was late summer 1976, well after work had first begun in Guariba, and it shows the Rio Guariba with the Rio Preto below, and just a glimpse of the mass of the Amazon flowing by.

  CPRM first mapped this part of the region in the late 1950s, but for some reason their splendid archives in Rio de Janeiro presented only a gap where I had hoped to find the Igarapé Guariba of that time, with its four families at the river-mouth, its waterfall, its obdurate pirizal, and what must have been the skinnier, shorter stream then flowing through the forest. The image on page 60 is from 1976 and is therefore the first, a commanding view of the scene some fifteen years after the digging began. It is a classic landscape picture in the terms of Raymond Williams’ famous observation that the genre is underwritten by the erasure of the labor through which nature is made—not to mention the effacement of landscape’s own work of nature-making.18 Actually, this image goes even further, offering a land without social relations or history, a land of potentiality. In this sense, its abstraction makes it a classic Amazonian landscape, one in which the implied view is both entrepreneurial and extractive.

  Yet even here, it is the broader blackness of the Rio Preto that draws the eye. The Rio Guariba is quite narrow, and the upstream area where it fragments into smaller channels is tentative and anemic. But look at this next image, taken in 1991, another fifteen years on, a Landsat TM composite satellite image to the same scale.

  Same scale, same time of year, same point in the tidal cycle.19 But when tied to its predecessor, this image creates a disruptive juxtaposition, proposing a radical shift in narrative. Not only is the expansion of the river quite clearly apparent, but it has come alive, no anemia here. Instead, its channels proliferate, enveloping the forest like capillaries of the alveoli, at once engulfing and absorbing the terra anfíbia of which it is a part.

  There is a simple point here. Places and what passes for nature have a consuming materiality. And so do place-making and nature-making, makings that make no sense without attention to practice. So, again, how did this place come into existence?

  In the midst of attention to discursive practice, we have to resist eliding the materiality of those concrete transformations that people actively undertake and remember to pay attention to fathoming events at the juncture of ideas and practices. Discourses of place and nature in Igarapé Guariba are grounded, literally. People here actually did these things: place, nature, and locality were transformed—remade, invented even—through physical, corporeal action.

  Yet, in recovering practice, we need to recognize that despite its brute tactility, the digging of channels was not narrowly material. It rested on old understandings of what nature is, and it created new ones. It drew energy from political-economic and cultural projects that tied Igarapé Guariba into temporarily coherent transnational commodity circuits—the timber trade of the 1970s, for example—and it reinvigorated embedded networks of short-distance trade, such as those in palm-fruits and other forest products. The cutting of channels relied on a shared story of a nature in Igarapé Guariba that began impossibly wild but could be made to surrender its abundance. And, in enabling a present that relies for legitimation on constructions of the past and projections of the future, a discursively and physically plastic local nature became subject to co-optation and incorporation into the mobile practices of contemporary politics.

  THE CABOCLO

  During the course of twenty-five careful years, Benedito and Nazaré Macedo and their family succeeded in displacing the Viegas, strategizing to exploit the spaces implicit in their personalist regime, discovering pathways between subjection and subversion.

  That densely ramified upstream area in the Landsat image is where we’re headed now. It was this part—known as o centro20—that was to become the focus of the engineering activity I am describing. This is what it looks like at low tide today. The two tall stakes to the left are fishing markers, barely visible when the river rises. Behind us and in the far distance is forest. We’re looking out from Tomé’s retreat, a location of some significance in the unfolding of this story.

  Who knows why Old Man Viega really wanted to cut these streams? There seems no doubt he was aiming to tie this rich landscape to Macapá and Belém, via both the downstream Igarapé Guariba community and the Rio Preto. Nestor Viega says that all this activity was driven by his father’s need to get buffalo to the slaughterhouses in Macapá in good condition. Raimundo’s widow and daughter are less instrumental: it was his “curiosity to see what was there” that drove him on, they insist.21 It was to get bananas to Macapá, says his grandson Miguelinho. Old Dona Terezinha, gripping my arm, by herself now that her husband has run off again, standing there in rags by the hand-dug igarapé that links the centro with the Rio Preto, remembers something else: he did it to carry his family in style by motorboat from the sawmill to the road they were building from Macapá that passed by the Rio Preto. No, states Benedito Macedo matter-of-factly, he did it to get the timber.

  Viega knew the commercial potential of this good-quality land for bananas, corn, watermelon, and the marrow-like maxixe, and he understood the value of the forest resources that visiting hunters had reported. His fregueses were similarly informed and participated in the same project, recognizing the same potential. Yet, many of them denied the legitimacy of his claims to governance, and they used these upstream lands to generate the income that enabled them to free themselves of the burden of debt and as a basis for their subsequent land claim that pushed the patrão off the river.

  Viega should have been prepared. José Macedo, Seu Benedito’s son, had accumulated formidable expertise in years as a traveling representative of the Comunidades de Base, the Catholic base communities that preceded the rural workers’ unions in Amapá.22 And he was not alone. Igarapé Guariba had produced a generation of sophisticated political operators, including Martinho the Goat, the union leader, who had learned the mechanics of the Viegas’ operation from the inside—as the teenage clerk in the store and receiver at the warehouse—before studying populist Marxism and refashioning himself as feudal landlordism’s relentless nemesis.

  The Macedos dug channels. While Viega mapped out a route for the Rio Preto, they headed for the centro, pushing their way toward the shiny crops they envisioned growing in the mata virgem.

  There was no inherent conflict in these coinciding projects. One hand was still washing the other, and, for a while at least, both were washing the same face. Better land effectively meant higher rents, as more produce entered the warehouse and more goods left the store. But the Macedos knew something Viega did not know they knew, and may perhaps not even have known himself. Through their political contacts in Macapá, José Macedo and Martinho the Goat had accessed the landlord’s files in the Macapá offices of the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (INCRA), the federal land reform agency, investigated his holdings, and confirmed their suspicion that he was exaggerating his claim. The títul
o definitivo, the outright title he had bought in the deal that gave him the Rio Preto and Igarapé Guariba, extended only 2,200 yards from the confluence of the Rio Guariba and the Amazon, nowhere near the land upstream toward which the canal-diggers were steadily heading. What was more, in an affirmation of the concrete significance of abstract argument about invisibility and anthropogenesis, this upstream land had the legal status of unoccupied land, open to petition from the state as terra requerida, that is, petitioned or petitionable land.23

  It seems that for some time no one in Igarapé Guariba breathed a word to the patrão. In June 1969, one of the original fregueses, Seu Tomé, announced that he was petitioning INCRA for a large parcel of land, a forest island upstream on which he had built a simple work-post. Viega reacted angrily, dismissing Tomé, asserting his own right to land that he had legally and honorably purchased, whether he had written title or not. Tomé went straight to Macapá and stayed until he had extracted the requisite documents from INCRA. He returned to Igarapé Guariba. Raimundo again dismissed him, this time giving him written notice to remove himself and his pigs from the property within sixty days. Tomé left again, but soon returned with INCRA officials in tow. Viega backed down. Miguelinho, Raimundos’ grandson, ended this dramatic narrative on a sour note: “This is our land, this land of [Tomé’s]. It was land that we bought. There was nothing requerida about it.” Nestor Viega, in a commentary on the long unraveling that begins with Tomé and that reads like a threat, but which was delivered with a resigned bitterness, told me—and I am sure he is right—that in the south of Pará they would have settled this business by killing the whole lot of them: “But the Viega family are not that kind of people.”24