In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  For most families in Igarapé Guariba today, as in the time of Viega, a degree of indebtedness is a necessary part of life and an expression of a dependency that is likely to cease only with the social relationship of which it is part—with death or other disaster. Many people now spread their debt and proliferate their dependencies, building independent clientalist relations with merchants (and politicians) in Macapá in a way that was impossible while the monopoly on credit was held by Old Man Viega.

  The Macedos do the same, but their networks replicate the hierarchies forged by Raimundo Viega in a manner distinct from that of their own neighbor-fregueses in Igarapé Guariba. For the other families in this community, debt relations are a creative practice through which they can sustain economic and social alternatives outside the structures imposed by the Macedos. For the Macedos themselves, the resources captured through patronage relations are what enable them to maintain their local authority in Igarapé Guariba. It is all about rivers again. All about maneuver and negotiation in a space that is simultaneously compressed by the geographic logic of the riverine community and exploded by the expansiveness of fluvial travel.

  AÇAÍ

  The intimate, politics-saturated relations through which debt is realized in Igarapé Guariba are just part of a series, an extensive set of traveling iterations. Those boats on which I huddled in the early morning sunshine were most often making the four-hour trip along the Amazon to Macapá. And, for six months of the year, they’d be laden down with açaí, the most valuable forest commodity available. The açaí trade brings together those things I am trying to make sense of here: Amazon rivers, the politics of space, and the work of historical intimacies. I want to follow it to and from Igarapé Guariba, and back and forth between the Viegas and Macedos. But we should begin in Macapá.

  The streets close to the docks in Macapá are lined with small stores selling general goods to people from the interior. The shopowners who trade there generally act as patrões to a number of rural fregueses, advancing goods on monthly credit, “discounting” their merchandise against forest products brought in on the boats. Although the relationships are most commonly expressed in the vocabulary of clientalism (patrão and freguês), these are the persisting structures of aviamento, and the storekeepers act as minor aviadores, their clients as aviados. In turn, these patrões become fregueses in relation to the larger urban wholesalers who stock their stores, and, when they get back to the interior, the fregueses (such as José Macedo) who visit the stores in Macapá may become patrões to the local collectors who supply them with forest products such as açaí. Nestor Viega explained it for me:

  You have the guy who’s in charge down here. That’s how it starts. Then he has his patrão. Just as he’s the patrão here, he has another one over there, and the other one has another one still. It’s a scale, you understand? So, for example, he goes to his patrão … well, papai didn’t actually have to go to Belém, he’d send a letter: “Look, I need such-and-such goods, I’m going to send you such-and-such in return: bananas, rubber, etc. and I need such-and-such. I’m paying the bill, so you send me some more stuff.” What he meant was, “I’m going to use your goods. I’m going to supply my freguês. My freguês is going to pay me. I’ll pay you. The guy over here’s going to pay what’s-his-name over there, and so on.

  Of course, it requires a certain cultural capital to create effective clientalist relationships in the first place. Not just anyone can do it, and the ability to do so both marks and generates prestige. One afternoon in Guariba, I found myself in the middle of an argument. My friend Dora’s father in Macapá had just decorated their house for his youngest daughter’s quinze anos party with 800 balloons. Dora’s husband was scathing: “Tio Paulo’s a fool throwing away all his savings on this,” he was shouting as I walked in. But Dora had a stronger grasp of cultural economy: “It didn’t cost him one centavo,” she snapped back, quick as a whip. “He got it all on credit.”

  Tio Paulo, in fact, was well known in Macapá. Nowadays, he is more or less retired. But he had done many kinds of work over the years and for a while had even tried his hand as an açaí distributor. But that wasn’t the kind of work that suited him, getting up at all hours to hang round the docks and bully incoming traders into selling him their fruit. Instead, he would periodically supplement his pension by sailing off to stay with his two daughters in Igarapé Guariba, working on the boats, earning a pittance, but bringing back fish to sell to his relatives and açaí for the dockside buyer—“tirando o boi,” making ends meet, as Benedito Macedo, José’s father and Paulo’s longtime friend, put it.

  Distributing açaí could have been a lucrative line of work. Minor fortunes have been made since the industry took off in the past few years, and conversations with people in the trade suggest there are about 25,000 people in Macapá and the surrounding floodplain earning their living from it for at least part of the year.26

  Açaí is the fruit of the açaizeiro, a slender, graceful palm that can always be found growing around houses on the estuarine floodplain. Traveling on the rivers, you spot the distinctive trees first and then the wooden houses tucked away underneath. Farmers manage açaí in a complex and sophisticated manner, thinning its multiple clumps, removing senescent individuals, building up the soil to prevent waterlogging, manipulating the crown architecture, clearing around the base to remove competitors and make sure there are no hidden animals to surprise children and teenagers shimmying up to harvest the fruit.27 After three or four years, the palm begins producing heavy bunches of dark, grape-sized fruit with a thin pulp surrounding a fibrous seed. After about eight years it reaches a peak, continuing to bear fruit for a further ten.

  Rosiane and Braga strike a pose as they prepare the evening’s açaí.

  People in the interior soak and mash the fruit, and mix it with river water to make a purple liquid. This used to be an afternoon task for women and girls, who worked it through sieves by hand. Now, many households have a wooden, hand-powered juicer, and men and teenage boys take turns working the soaked fruit. When it comes time to eat, everyone thickens their bowl with manioc meal or—if more middle-class and living in the city—often with tapioca, eating the result either with or without sugar.28

  Açaí is a definitively rural food and, while in season, an indispensable part of the day’s largest meal, served alongside fresh fried fish, salty boiled shrimp, or forest game. Yet, it has been the estuarine cities of Belém and Macapá that have driven the recent market. As people have left the often chaotic countryside for the service-deficient, violent, but alluring peri-urban slums that ring the more affluent centers, they have brought their taste for açaí with them and they’ve sparked shifts in the diet of an urban middle-class prone to ruralist nostalgia.29 By midday on almost every streetcorner in Macapá, you see a 5-foot pole with a 6-inch rectangular red metal flag—the sign that the açaí seller is ready to begin the lunchtime trade.

  I never met a retailer in Macapá reluctant to tell the hard-luck story of declining profits and intensifying competition. Just a couple of years ago, it seems, you might go three or four blocks before finding a stall, but now they’re everywhere. Back then, a seller might juice four sacks of fruit a day.30 Now he or she has to settle for one and a half. At the same time, high demand and the marketing stranglehold of the big suppliers have pushed up the price, and low-income urban workers might drink açaí only every few days at best.

  To capture local trade the retailers sell to their customers on credit, but then they have to deal with lack of cash and the headaches at the end of the month when the time to call in debts comes round. The competition is killing them. In Macapá they all agreed that this was a function of the combination of two factors: the sudden deep freeze into which the job market had been plunged by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s 1994 Plano Real currency stabilization, and the rapid influx of work-hungry people from the interior and the northeast of Brazil in response to the empty promise of Macapá’s zona f
ranca, the free-trade area legislated in the early 1990s.31

  Most açaí businesses are set up through suppliers, capitalized entrepreneurs who arrange contracts with both urban retailers and rural transporters, and who exercise considerable control over the market. The suppliers collect fruit from the boats as it comes in from the interior, and they distribute it in town. They could be called atravessadores, those who pass something on, middlemen, but they balk at the term, reserving it for the smaller operators they see scavenging the docks and disrupting business through gangster tactics—pressuring the boatmen and showing no concern for long-term trading conditions. These larger-scale suppliers see themselves rather differently and prefer the more polished term fornecedores. They are the açaí elite who foster paternalist relations with rural suppliers and urban retailers—helping them through difficult times, disciplining them by manipulating pricing and restricting supply, maneuvering to marginalize their atravessador rivals.

  The supplier who takes most of the Macedo brothers’ açaí is Jacaré, an easy-going, unaffected man in his mid-50s, who never touches açaí himself: “It’s a drug,” he says, only half-joking. “Look at my son, he’s addicted!” Jacaré has bought açaí from José Macedo for nine years now, and it was José who gave me his phone number and told me to look him up next time I was in Macapá.

  Jacaré’s strongly vertically integrated operation accounts for 10 percent of the thousand sacks of açaí that enter the city daily from the interior of Amapá, and he distributes to fregueses beyond Macapá in towns all around the state. He sets people up as retailers on either a profit-sharing or a rental basis. And any agreement with him includes a commitment to buy his fruit.

  Despite the small margins and the discourse of dissatisfaction, it is clear why so many people are entering the retail end of the trade.32 With the national minimum wage set at R $112 a month for those able to find work, açaí is a compellingly dynamic and relatively accessible sector of the regional economy. Yet, access always depends on some form of capital: a potential retailer needs both cash and the cultural capital earned through participation in networks of patronage and alliance, the type of business that Nestor Viega acutely calls “a family thing.”

  Açaí is both seasonal and perishable. In Igarapé Guariba and along the Amapá floodplain, the harvest lasts from January to June. At other times, the Macapá retailers are supplied from Belém. Despite this, there is still a between-harvest period when demand is high and supply low. In these few weeks at either end of the season, dockside prices in Macapá can reach extravagant heights.33 This is the moment when rural suppliers like the Macedos stand to make a significant profit. But they have to weigh this temptation against the potential losses in the middle of the season when atravessadores can beat them down as far as they like, and prices drop so low that boat owners throw sacks of fruit overboard rather than waste fuel carrying it back to the rivers. The existing solution to this dilemma is for the rural supplier to contract with the fornecedores—an arrangement, like that between contractor and retailer, that draws on and may create enduring social networks and cultural ties.

  To guarantee delivery to his urban retailers, Jacaré sets quotas with the Macedo brothers and his other rural suppliers through a rolling-over, two-month, fixed-price contract. José Macedo and the other boat owners accept that the price at the beginning of the harvest, when fruit is in short supply and dockside prices are high, will be lower than if they sell independently to the atravessadores. But they also know that later on, when the market is glutted, they will have a guaranteed buyer at a subsidized price.

  Such contracts discipline the rural suppliers at the same time as they squeeze the atravessadores who normally operate without contracts, taking from the boats on consignment, and selling on the quayside to independent retailers. At either end of the harvest, when supplies are low and prices high, and in an echo of Old Man Viega’s attempt to establish monopsony on the river, Jacaré works to intimidate a rural supplier like José from dealing with the atravessadores. José is always under pressure from his own fregueses back in Igarapé Guariba to achieve the highest dockside prices available. But he knows that if he shortchanges Jacaré at this time of year by selling outside the contract and only providing a portion of the promised sacks, the supplier will quickly find out—and that he’s liable to respond by refusing to renew the contract for the following season. In the mid-season glut, however, when the boats are laden and the quayside atravessadores are aggressively beating down the price until the rural collectors are close to despair, Jacaré, in a move characteristic of the Amazonian patrão will at times buy the worthless excess fruit from his contractees and absorb the loss.

  The post-harvest quietus marks a period of considerable uncertainty for José and the other boat owners of Igarapé Guariba. This is when they search for the contracts that will protect them from the free market at the dockside for another season. A deal with Jacaré on its own will neither keep them in business nor satisfy their fregueses, and they scramble to compete for other arrangements. Not counting the Colonel’s vessel, there are three motorized boats in Guariba: two, the Star of Guariba and the United We Conquer belong to José and his brothers. The other is Sônia’s Immaculate Conception.

  SOCIAL WORK

  José Macedo and his brothers fret unceasingly about their ability to lead the community. Their work is development and modernization, the work of place-making. And here, right now, açaí is king—even though it brings to the fore some painful contradictions.

  During the açaí season, each boat makes at least two trips a week to Macapá. They leave with the tide to save fuel, but they start off by making a tour of the river to collect fruit. The Macedo brothers pick up sacks according to a controversial quota they allocate at the start of the season. The quota fixed in Igarapé Guariba is directly derived from that set by Jacaré. Indeed, the brothers calculate it from their contracts—the winning of which is the mark of their commitment to community progress and the justification of their leadership. It is, they make clear to me, a terrible responsibility.

  José and his brothers allocate quotas by family size: the larger the family the more sacks they allow per voyage. But it is a system with ample room for arbitrariness and patronage, and the quota is a constant source of friction. A persistent theme of conversation in Guariba is how much better things could be if the Macedo brothers would “liberate the quota.” Instead of the two, or sometimes three, sacks allowed, collectors say they could harvest eight or even ten. This may be true, but it is also just talk.34 Everybody here understands the political economy of açaí and the rationale of the contract. Everyone knows how the market crashes in the middle of the season and that the quota is only part of the problem.

  For one thing, there are strategies for circumventing it. Some people who live near the mouth of the river strike deals with traders who cast anchor out in the rio-mar toward the end of the season. They load their canoes with sacks and paddle out into the Amazon to complete the sale. Others use kin networks to pass fruit to boat-owning relatives on neighboring rivers. Such tactics are keenly reminiscent of the old-time traders who used to travel the river at night to escape Old Man Viega’s policing. For the Macedo brothers—even as they were for Viega—such activities are destructive of community cohesion. After all, it is through the distributed profits of the açaí trade that modernity is arriving in Igarapé Guariba. But many of their fregûes-comrades dismiss such rhetoric. The real issue for them is not how much the Macedos can sell, but how much and at what price they buy. Implicit is a critique of the contradiction between the egalitarian discourse of community and the conspicuous improvements in the material life of the Macedos themselves since the boom began and they started accumulating gas-fired fridges, oil-powered chainsaws, and the big, soft couches from which to watch their new battery-operated TV sets.

  It was a long time before I found out that no matter what Jacaré or the atravessadores are paying in Macapá, the Macedo broth
ers buy açaí in Igarapé Guariba for 40 percent less. When I first heard this, wrapped up as I was in the heroics of the exodus from the other bank and the expulsion of the old regime, I was stunned. But I confirmed it straightaway with José. If Jacaré is giving them R $20 a sack, they pay the fregûes R $12. If Jacaré is offering R $16, they buy for R $9.35 But what about this unified community I heard so much about, marching forward together, out from the dark days of Old Man Viega’s slavery?

  José is a sincere man, someone who fought long and hard in church organizations and rural workers’ unions for the rights and dignities of rural Amazonians, not only for the removal of the one Old Man from this river. He doesn’t need me to point out the contradictions. Any defensiveness he might feel talking about these prices soon dissipates in the enumeration of the responsibilities and expenses of running a boat and in the conviction that boats are the indispensable vehicles of community progress, that a riverine community must support the boats that hold it in the world and the boat owners who take this charge upon themselves. The stresses of cultivating and maintaining the social networks that enable the contracts and create other future possibilities are near-overwhelming. There’s no time to stand still. And he continues by pointing to the daily solidarities of his regime: we rarely refuse to carry people upstream on expeditions to hunt, fish, farm, and harvest açaí. Nor do we charge freight when we take their produce into Macapá and bring their shopping home. And neither—like Gordão in Carapanatuba and all those guys in Bailique—are we making people pay R $5 or R $10 for the trip into town, even though sometimes the boat is so overloaded you think it will never make it (and who knows how much gasoline is being wasted).