In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Within a few years, Viega had lost control of most of the area upstream. Following Tomé’s success and the absence of violent repercussions, Benedito Macedo filed for title, multiplying his holdings by claiming in the names of his sons. The other families also petitioned, but for those who approached INCRA after the Macedos, pickings were slim.

  When I was first told about these events, I assumed they represented a radical shift of power in Igarapé Guariba. Yet things continued much as before. Although they now had land, the fregueses continued to treat the vila with its store and warehouse as their principal commercial entrepôt. Chico Viega continued to police the river, inhibiting all the outside trade he could. The families continued to live downstream on his father’s land. And the bonds between the patrão and his fregueses appeared to deepen. When this upstream land produced bumper crops of watermelon and bananas too large for his transport capacity, the Old Man brokered deals for his fregueses with other merchants. And he did something else: he advanced Tomé the money to buy the motor for a boat.

  As Martinho the Goat informed me when I expressed surprise, there was nothing so strange about enforcing indebtedness. It took Tomé twelve years to pay off the money, and, in the meantime, he continued to sell through his patrão. His boat, on which Viega was earning rent, became an addition to the landlord’s fleet at a time when he needed the extra volume. It was clear that transport in itself was not the key to political-economic authority. Although a transport monopoly—never entirely complete in any case, given the resourcefulness of the river trader—was a powerful technology, it could be surrendered with no immediate loss of hegemony. What was critical was the use to which a boat was put.

  Viega still had his eye on upstream timber. He had access, but he no longer had the land. The wood he wanted was a tall grove of andiroba on the Macedos’ new property. Raimundo and Benedito talked. They had an intimacy that came from thirty years of association. Viega bargained, Macedo balked. Viega offered a good price, Macedo rejected it. The patrão asked him what he wanted. Without hesitation, Benedito replied: a riverboat.

  Viega advanced the money at low interest. Benedito and his family cut the trees and carried the wood and boatload after boatload of bananas they had grown on those upstream bottomlands direct to Macapá. Within two months they had cleared the debt and started to buy produce from their neighbors. This, then, was the formal collapse of monopsony. I had to ask Nestor about it:

  Hugh: So what happened between you and the Macedos?

  Nestor: What happened was that they … well, today … they’re there. It’s their land, isn’t it?

  Hugh: So they buy from the community then?

  Nestor: That’s right. It looks to you like the community’s going nowhere, right? You think society doesn’t grow with this type of business? I know what you want to say: you think this is all just a vicious circle. Am I right?

  Hugh: No, not really. Look, so far as I can tell … it’s hard to explain…. It looks to me like the Macedo family has more or less occupied …

  Nestor: … the space the Viegas used to occupy! But that’s it exactly!

  They linger so raw, the wounds from this story of justice and betrayal, this tale of social transformation woven through narratives of the transformation of nature. The physical and imaginative remaking of nature has been central to the re-siting of locality in the context of the sociological and discursive reinvention of Igarapé Guariba. This new Igarapé Guariba that was brought into being through the machination of political intrigue and the rhetoric of resistance relied on a transformed nature both materially, by underwriting the struggle for political control with the cash crops that paid off debt, and discursively, as the battlefield on which was played out an historic drama of liberation. As Igarapé Guariba gradually re-emerged in the form of a juridically secured “community,” the web of translocal relationships within which it had traveled through the person of Raimundo Viega were largely thrown off by the family of Benedito and Nazaré Macedo. Instead of the middle-class social clubs mined by Viega, Igarapé Guariba circulates now through the offices of the Rural Workers’ Union and across the desks of land reform administrators at INCRA. Instead of residents carrying their forest products to exchange in Viega’s family store, the Macedo family distributes them along reconfigured clientelist networks in Macapá. Igarapé Guariba, then, has in certain ways become an entirely different place, requiring a different order of local self-consciousness, and, at the same time, another locality, situated in and constituted through a changed set of translocal cultural and political economies.

  Nevertheless, what I—and the Viega and Macedo families—consider to be the new Igarapé Guariba is no less differentiated than the old version. And, what is more, it is a place in which, retaining an affective link with the former patrão, the dominant emotional register for more than a few is not progressivism, but nostalgia.

  PROLIFERATING LOCALITY

  Place-making in Igarapé Guariba still relies on the hard work of nature-making. This is partly because nature, in its biophysicality, is never in stasis, and forces a constant reinvestment and reinvention of labor, debate, and knowledge.25 But it is also, in a fuller sense, because nature is both a dynamic actor and a decisive ground in the contemporary politics of place-making and the ongoing struggle over everyday life. As different claims on nature proliferate, so different Igarapé Guaribas come into view. As individuals travel, narrating this placed nature and its associated histories, so these proliferations spread, becoming mobilized simultaneously in different contexts and with disparate meanings. Let me return briefly to Raimundo Viega.

  I described Viega as a well-known businessman from Macapá. But that doesn’t tell us much. Before he purchased Guariba, Viega, then a young man, had set up a rice-processing plant at Fortaleza, close to the port of Santana. He had some luck because, just as the business was failing, huge manganese deposits were discovered inland and the state stepped in, expropriated his parcel, and paid compensation. He spent part of the money buying the estuarine no-man’s-land that included Igarapé Guariba, provisioning his store, and setting up the sawmill. He used part to build a three-story house on the main street of Macapá. He inserted himself in an emergent local society that sensed the winds of opportunity blowing through the region as the military government intensified its campaign to open up the Amazon, and foreign capital, through companies like BRUMASA, once more began reaching into the interior. He sent his sons away to college to come back as doctors and lawyers and to run for political office. And he found a place for himself among a sympathetic group of nonconforming, hard-drinking, self-consciously Amazonian middle-class men, a group who has since started a social club they call the Brotherhood of the Marauni, after the once powerful indigenous occupants of the area. Aside from drinking and collegiality, their energies go into the recovery and promotion of what they identify as local culture and folklore.

  Nestor Viega socializes with the Brotherhood and so does Edinaldo Gomes, the journalist who took Viega out of the forest and into his newspaper column. Apart from a short stint as a political aide to the conservative Governor Annibal Barcellos in the early 1980s, Gomes has based his career on writing rural life. He enchants the countryside for his urban readers through a rhetoric of stunning immediacy and authenticity. He treats his audience to firsthand accounts of his adventures in the interior, stealing across borders with clandestine migrants, hunting crocodiles and jaguar by flashlight—etching finely drawn encounters with ribeirinhos that emphasize their cautious wisdom and wily quirkiness.

  When Gomes talks about Igarapé Guariba, he vividly recalls the day sometime in the early 1970s when he traveled there with a different governor to inaugurate the new school Viega had built. Residents of Guariba still remember the unexpected sight of the politicians’ plane touching down at the mouth of the river. Gomes describes a thriving community grateful to its patrão, and a table groaning under the weight of rural delicacies—paca, tracajá, açaí, tambaquí, m
aniçoba, tacacá, bolo de macaxeira—delicious foods that signify a plentiful Amazonian Arcadia.26 Through Gomes’ tales of Raimundo Viega and the evocative black-and-white photos he ferrets out to show me, I enter an Igarapé Guariba thoroughly located in regional political and social networks, an affluent, modern community, a center in the area, with electric light flowing from an oil-fired generator, a medical post, a new school, and the largest and best-stocked store on any of the proximate rivers.

  For Gomes, as for the surviving members of Viega’s family, such moments stand at the pivot of a history of subsequent decline, of the unmaking of locality. Indeed, the same can be said for those residents of Igarapé Guariba who now find themselves hemmed in by the new (albeit leakier) Macedo monopsony—a regime made even more irksome by the absence of glamour in a leadership possessing none of the aura that comes from ownership of a big house in Macapá and children in the professional class.27

  The old-time Igarapé Guariba evoked by Edinaldo Gomes, the surviving family of Raimundo Viega, and these dissident residents felt secure as a place and as an embedded locality. It had traveled through the mobile bodies of the Viega family to the highest offices in the territorial administration, and it was tied into the types of social patronage networks that form the only guarantee of public-sector credit in the region, and that can gain the ribeirinho a not-too-hostile hearing behind the doors of a government ministry. While still not written into the formal cartography of Amapá, it figured, albeit peripherally, on the cognitive maps that mattered.

  Yet, to Octávio da Gama, the ex-logger who locates himself transregionally, never captured by the interior and having somehow transcended Amazonian society, such networks were never more than chronically provincial. To Octávio, Raimundo Viega was never more than an índio. And, by pointing to what he sees as the corrupting parochialism of Amazonian society, Octávio reminds us that the logic of locality is a hierarchy of retreating communities: Igarapé Guariba, (the backwoods of) Amapá, (which is a byword for backwardness in) Brazil, (which is in a Third World part of) the world. From the local to the global, each representation is more abstract than the one before. Individuals within any one of them emerge through a mobile emplacement—at once self-determined and over-determined—at particular points in what is commonly both a chain and a series of ever-widening concentric circles.

  The making of place and nature in Igarapé Guariba, then, must also be understood as a production of modernity—at a time when Amazonia’s status in the national imagination was of a fearfully backward region destined only to be dragged (kicking and screaming, índios and all) into the time-space of the modern world and in which the key to modernity was integration in the nation-state. Amazonia’s backwardness was signified by the indistinguishable wildness of its nature and of its Indians. And, as Octávio points out, anybody who lived there was an índio.

  For Octávio, Igarapé Guariba never approached either modernity or effective locality. For the survivors of Raimundo Viega, for Edinaldo Gomes, and for a number of its residents, Igarapé Guariba passed through a sparkling moment of possibility, only to revert temporally and spatially to a shadow of a remote hinterland.28 For these people, the nature brought into being during this brief experience of modernity is even today highly problematic. Gomes, the urban journalist, for example, ascribes the changes in the landscape to a series of violent tidal episodes that, he insists, nearly wiped out the community, but which no one living in Guariba at the time now considers of any significance. Dona Rita, Raimundo’s widow—elderly, dressed permanently in nightclothes, hesitant behind thick, dark eyeglasses, living upstairs in her bedroom in Macapá as if in final exile—also downplays the importance of human intervention in the changes to the land. Protective of her husband’s memory, sensitive to international environmental discourse, she imagines a foreigner’s reading of landscape reorganization on such a scale as brutally destructive of the wonder that is Amazonian nature.29 When her daughter Lene tells me that “most of that destruction in Guariba wasn’t done by people, it was done by nature itself,” Dona Rita agrees. “It was only pirizal there,” she says, “no one cut any trees down.” Her son Nestor, flirting good-naturedly over drinks with the weary prostitutes in the town square, has a slightly different explanation: there was only one channel cut on his father’s orders, the one that links Igarapé Guariba to the Rio Preto. The others were the work of those “tremendously destructive” buffalo. Orlando, another son—in an interview a few days after he lost his job as the resident doctor at the land reform agency—concurs: “If it did happen, it was those caboclos who did it,” he complains, going on to remind me of the hundred head of buffalo mysteriously spirited off his ranch alongside the lago.

  To today’s disgruntled residents of Igarapé Guariba who work to circumvent the Macedo family’s economic reach through tying themselves to new patrões in Macapá, who remember the Old Man’s community as a bustling, vibrant center, and who now characterize the place as a “cemetery,”30 nature is unappeasable. The chain of ecological effects set in motion in the name of progress is causing houses to fall in the river, fields to turn to swamps, fruit trees to sink into muddy banks, and fish to pick up and move to other rivers.31 Nature is complicit in an ongoing tale of decline, and its recalcitrance is grist to the millstone of political intrigue.

  Yet, for those people I have identified as contemporary leaders, the transforming of the land is a foundational epic. As if viewing their critics’ history in negative, for them Igarapé Guariba is even now emerging from the darkness of “slavery” to make a place in the light of a modern future. The project of these leaders is to transform past structures of locality through the wrestling of this place onto alternative routes among the networks that tie the retreating circles of intersecting localities one to another. They want to position Igarapé Guariba in a forward-looking Amapá, and move through the resources of Amapá to Brazil the nation-state. They intend to connect via Brazil to the world. From the union office in Macapá, they can jump scale and link by e-mail directly to NGO and academic contacts in the United States and Europe. Through alternative political patrons they can negotiate to reconstruct the electricity grid and health post that collapsed after Viega’s departure. Through union-brokered talks in Santana they can strike deals with the new palm-fruit cooperative that is large enough to take all the produce they can ship from Guariba, and promises to send their fruit to Rio, São Paulo, even Japan, side-stepping the seasonal bottlenecks and sharp practice at the quayside in Macapá.

  So, while for some of its interlocutors Igarapé Guariba is a place that has fallen out of locality, for others, it is, for the first time, beginning to locate itself. Whereas for some, Igarapé Guariba surrendered its ties to the modern world when it broke with Viega, for others, it is only through self-location that it can enter within the compass of modernity. While at first blush the material contours of modernity may appear strikingly similar in both narratives—health, education, transport, electricity, TV, refrigerators—for the Macedo family there is also this existential component: modernity and locality (both) are embodied self-determination, underwritten and secured by the transformation of wild nature.

  As I have suggested, though, the locality of Igarapé Guariba is both too shared and too contested to be so easily appropriated. The complication for the Macedo family is that the new, remade nature of Igarapé Guariba, although dramatic, inspirational, and, arguably, utilitarian, was fundamentally vitiated at the moment of its coming-into-being. And it seems impossible for its inheritors to construct the foundational story of its transformation as one of renewal. Even when Benedito Macedo tells me that he didn’t take “one centavo” in payment from old Raimundo Viega for the work of digging canals, he says it with the uncertain vehemence of one who knows the power in blind Dona Rita’s bitter charge of sacanagem, of betrayal, of getting fucked over by these comrades, these peasants. Such are the wages of slaveholding, Seu Benedito might well say. But even this would not disguise the
fact of collaboration and the problem of authorship: the pervasive sense that even now, fifteen years after he died, this landscape and the locality it embodies belong as much to Viega, the pioneer, as they ever will to Macedo; that in the very acts of their making, place and nature were marked by collaboration, dissent, and deceit.

  THE MAJESTIC AMAZON

  These thoughts have grown slowly out of my troubling meeting with Octávio da Gama that summer afternoon in Macapá. Even though he did not know about the remaking of nature in Igarapé Guariba, Octávio would not have cared much anyway. He saw Guariba as already on a one-way slide into the estuary mudflats. It was the cynicism in Octávio’s erasure of people and place that pushed me to think about the fullness of the existence into which this place came, about what that state of “being Igarapé Guariba” might mean.

  As places take shape in the world, not only multiple places, but multiple natures come into view and become implicated in the claims and counterclaims of contemporary politics. Octávio’s tale of BRUMASA, for example, describes the production of locality as the technology of extraction passes through the estuary and Igarapé Guariba is pulled and pulls itself into the re-emerging networks of timber transnationalism. Yet, pursuing coherence, Octávio denies both the possible pre-existence and the persistence of rural society. Indeed, such a recognition would require an admission of ribeirinho agency. Nature is subject only to the Company in his telling. Successful intervention both defines and is predicated on a certain level of personhood that he expresses in strict racial-hierarchical terms.

  Is this an assumption shared by Edinaldo Gomes—advocate for the legitimacy and integrity of rural culture and connoisseur of all things caboclo—who studies the map of Amapá on the wall of his study in Macapá, shakes his head, and points to where the pororoca attacks the coastline and causes rivers to change course? My suggestion of local interventions produces agitation, irritability, and a lecture on the power of the Amazon—“O Amazonas majestoso,” the majestic Amazon, as a friend of mine murmurs with awe and pride every time we turn the corner at the top of the hill in Macapá and see its sluggish brown mass filling the view to the horizon. For Edinaldo, at least, there is a thoroughgoing autonomy inhering in nature, far greater than the petty determinations of race and class.