The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon, Updated Edition

404 Pages·2011·24.04 MB·English

by  Susanna B. Hecht

Praise for The Fate of the Forest
"This is a powerful book, elegantly written and well informed ...
excellent analysis ... an important, timely and moving analysis of the
fate of the Amazon rainforests, one of the vital issues of our times."
-JOHN HEMMING, London Times Literary Supplement
"Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn provide a comprehensive
and scholarly. .. political and economic history of tropical South
America .... They offer, at last, an overview of the situation .. .in the
context of a South American history few Norte Americanos, including
conservationists, know anything about."
-DAVID GRABER, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Hecht and Cockburn interpret the Amazon struggle as those of
peoples under threat and they see social injustice with unerring
vision."
-HOLMES ROLSTON III, Newsday
"This book will surely become seminal to the literature concerned
with the fight for the survival of the Indians."
-Geographical Magazine
"A work that challenges the standard assumptions of the pro
development forces-and even of many environmentalists."
Detroit Metro Times
-DAVID FINKEL,
"By putting into SOCIal context for North Americans the previously
murky motives of Brazilian generals, seringuerios and cattle ranch
ers, Fate of the Forest locates the Amazon struggle for the first time
within a recognizable history"
-ANDY FEENEY, The Guardian
"The Fate of the Forest is this year's most important environmental
book. By cutting through the myths that obscure the political real
ities, Hecht and Cockburn show how our fate is tied to the fate of
the forest."
-JERRY D. MOORE, Pioneer Press Dispatch
ii PREFACE
EUCLIDES DA CUNHA, 1907
Preface to Alfredo Rangel, Inferno Verde
Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders
of the Amazon
susanna hecht
and
alexander cockburn
Updated Edition
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
To Ilse Wagner Hecht, who raised me in exile and who encouraged,
cajoled, and financially supported some of the research herein described;
also to my grandfather Hans Hecht, who wrote paeans to coffee
and monkeys on an Amazon he never saw.
SH
To the memory of my mother, Patricia Cockburn, who traveled
through the Ituri rainforest of the eastern Congo in 1937, making a
language map for the Royal Geographical Society, and to her sister
Joan Arbuthnot, who was a garimpeira and would-be aviadora
on the Barima River in Amazônia in 1931.
AC
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
Copyright © 1990 by Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn
All rights reserved.
University of Chicago Press edition 2010
Printed in the United States of America
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 978-0-226-32272-8 (paper)
ISBN: 0-226-32272-6 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hecht, Susanna B.
The fate of the forest : developers, destroyers, and defenders of the Amazon /
Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn. — Updated ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-32272-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-32272-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Deforestation—Amazon River
Region. 2. Forest conservation—Amazon River Region. 3. Rain forest ecology—
Amazon River Region. 4. Amazon River Region. I. Cockburn, Alexander. II. Title.
SD418.3.A53H43 2010
333.750981’1—dc22
2010020415
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Preface to the 2010 Edition vii
Acknowledgements xi
281
319
Afterword, 2010 345
Index 375
xvi
Indian sketched by Midship-
man Gibbon, who accompanied
Lieutenant Herndon on a voy-
age of exploration down the
Amazon, under orders from the
US government to determine
the navigability of the Ama-
zon basin and the “character
and extent of its undeveloped
commercial resources, whether
of the field, the forest, the river
or the mine.” By the time of
Herndon’s trip the Indian pop-
ulation had already been deci-
mated. Three centuries earlier
Orellana’s party had marveled
at the extensive indigenous
population established along
the rivers.
Preface to the 2010 Edition
The Fate of the Forest has engaged readers for the past twenty
years, and over those two decades it has become one of the
landmark narratives of Amazonian social history. The story
we told in 1990 arose after Amazônia’s first great pulse of
globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, the “scramble for the Amazon” whereby European and
American rivals vied for tropical New World colonies. Most
coveted were the lands of the western Amazon where the
largest and finest rubber forests flourished. The transfer of
Hevea seeds to Asia collapsed the rubber monopoly, and with
it the Amazon economy. Amazônia had been a clamorous
and cosmopolitan zone perennially visited with wars, revo-
lutions, and speculative manias. But when the dust settled,
most of Amazônia was definitively Brazilian. The state had
marked its boundaries and claimed its territories once and
for all. What went on within those boundary tracings was
another question.
Brazil’s Amazon scramble was a nineteenth-century form
of nation building replete with explorers, freebooters, specu-
lators, fraudulent maps, spies, plenipotentiaries, competing
and contradictory court judgments, and romantic revolu-
tionaries. Once the final maps were drawn and the rubber
monopoly broken, the world—previously transfixed by the
Amazonian drama—turned its gaze elsewhere, leaving the
basin as a torpid backwater, with dilapidated opera houses
and Eiffel ironworks the signage of a failed enterprise, and
in some ways, a national embarrassment.
Brazil’s midwives into twentieth-century modernity were
its dictatorships. The Republic began in 1889 with a military
coup and was periodically roiled by other coups for most
of the next century. Getulio Vargas, who ruled on and off
viii PREFACE
from the 1930s until 1954, equated industrialization with the
national project and cast a yearning eye to the north, to the
Amazon, which reminded the country of its larger territorial
destiny in the great tropical forests. Vargas inspired a gen-
eration of military men who, if they could not invade other
countries, could at least occupy their own national terrains.
The Authoritarian Period, from 1964 to 1985, evolved into
a new kind of modernist nation building. From the very
first days of the first military strongman, Castello Branco,
Amazônia had been on the agenda. Brazil at the time was
still largely inward looking, but the new geopolitics of the
cold war imbued domestic politics with the fear of sedition,
and inspired a new manifest destiny, necessary because
Amazônia was seen as empty, and easily annexed economi-
cally, ideologically, and perhaps even territorially. In this
context, massive state-sponsored programs were launched:
the roads, the Grand Projects with their dams and develop-
ment poles, large-scale ranches, enormous mineral parastatal
schemes (all lubricated with highly subsidized state capital),
and the colonization programs targeting hapless peasants
from the impoverished northeast, south, and center west.
All were mustered to integrate what was imagined as an
empty vastness into the dynamic hub of Brazilian identity
and economy. This was the new authoritarian statecraft, the
remaking of what was viewed as a pathetic extractive econo-
my into an extension of Brazil’s modernist nationalism. Thus
was unleashed enormous environmental destruction and a
low-intensity civil war that shaped Amazônia’s competing
political ecologies. What opened up—along with the roads,
the rapidly degrading pastures, and the large mineral digs—
were, much to the surprise of all, the spaces of insurgent
citizenship.
The Fate of the Forest is about the ecology of justice. It is
about the rise and the role of these very humble inhabitants:
indios, seringueiros, caboclos, quilombolas (beautiful Portuguese
words for natives, tappers, peasants, and descendents of fu-
gitive slaves—traditional peoples of all kinds) and their al-
lies: anthropologists, geographers, scientists, and other Bra-
zilians exhausted by the destruction they were observing in
PREFACE ix
Amazônia. They all joined together to form that amorphous
thing called civil society, in creating a democratic alterna-
tive to the jackbooted authoritarian capitalism that actively
destroyed forests, forest livelihoods, and forest futures. Their
concerns were echoed in the industrial heart of Brazil, as
metal workers and labor organizers like Ignacio “Lula” da
Silva—who would later become Brazil’s president—consol-
idated a network that stretched from the iron cauldrons and
robotic factories of São Paulo to the most remote seringal of
the Purús River. In some cases, this relation would reflect
mere realpolitik, a convenient political moment, but more
often the ideas of the Forest Peoples’ Alliance have had re-
markable sway in Amazonian, and indeed Brazilian, nation-
al development.
The Fate of the Forest describes a new type of social poli-
tics that arose from the most unlikely sources, from a lost
and invisible populace, into a politics of citizenship that has
sought to protect political rights and, amazingly, Nature
herself. Even more remarkable, this vast political enterprise
was successful. Forest people’s movements are profoundly
revolutionary because they take the questions of Nature
and social justice as ineluctably tied together, not as a con-
sumerist green “add-on” to another agenda, but as the deep
heart of the story. In fact, the modern map of Amazônia in-
scribes this position, perhaps as durably as Brazil’s territo-
rial boundaries. Today more than 40 percent of Amazônia
is in some kind of conservation designation, and of these,
some 80 million hectares (60 percent) are protected as in-
habited landscapes and are the framework for reimagining
tropical development in the context of both neoliberal and
neo-environmental frontiers. Our final chapter outlines this
story into the present.