The Brazilianist Online Magazine - Letter To the Editor

This article was submited by a reader as a contrasting point of view to last issue's "The Internationlization of Amazonia".
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Put reason aside, for a moment, and imagine this: American students are taught that the Amazon should be taken away from Brazil and made into an "international reserve" under United Nations administration. United States Army special forces are training in Florida to seize control of that zone once it is established. And, to accelerate the process, Harvard University advocates the immediate dismemberment of Brazil.

All of this, of course, is pure imagination. The Brazilian imagination.

From birth, Brazilians are taught that "the Amazon is ours." But their government has never been able to exercise effective sovereignty over the region, which in any case remains an exotic mystery to most Brazilians. The result is a national paranoia: a conviction that outsiders — especially the United States, with its checkered history in Latin America — envy Brazil's ownership of the world's largest tropical forest and want it for themselves.

Since late last year, suspicions have been running unusually high because of a spurious map that appeared on Internet sites here and was quickly accepted as real by newspapers and radio talk show hosts. Taken from what was said to be a junior high school textbook used in the United States, the map claims that Americans have a "special mission" to wrest the Amazon from the eight "unintelligent and primitive" South American nations that control it.

Though the text is clearly a forgery (it is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors that no native English speaker would make), the controversy continues. Some Brazilians say the C.I.A. fabricated the map to discredit those who would defend the Amazon from foreign interlopers. Others don't care whether the map is authentic.

"The map may be a falsification, but that the United States covets the Amazon and wants to eliminate Brazil's sovereignty is beyond dispute," said Rubim Aquino, a high school history teacher here. He said he emphasizes that message to his students "whenever the opportunity arises."

The area the Brazilian government defines as "Amazonia Legal" occupies 60 percent of the country's territory. But it is home to fewer than 10 percent of its 175 million people. And most of the population lives south of the river, along the coast, and has never visited the region.

"The southerner doesn't know the Amazon and disdains the region and its people," said Lucio Flavio Pinto, a native of the Amazon state of Pará who is editor of "Amazon Agenda," the leading newsletter about the region. "There is a tendency to transfer responsibility for problems to foreigners, so as to placate a guilty conscience and shift blame away from a national state" that has long treated the area as a stepchild.

Seen from the south, the Amazon seems a cornucopia of easily extracted oil, minerals, timber, medicinal plants and other riches. The harsh reality, though, is that the few projects foreigners have undertaken in the region, from the Ford Company's Fordlandia rubber plantation to Volkswagen's cattle ranch, have all failed because operating costs in the Amazon are so high and infrastructure so weak.

ONE of the great villains of Brazilian history is Henry Wickham, a British naturalist who is accused of having stolen rubber seeds a century ago and spirited them off to Malaysia. That led to the collapse of an Amazon rubber boom that had financed the building of an opera house in Manaus and allowed a few Brazilian tycoons to send their laundry to be cleaned in Europe, but had also enslaved thousands of rubber tappers.

What Brazilians still cannot bring themselves to admit is that Wickham had obtained legal permits to export the seeds. As Roberto Santos's "Economic History of the Amazon" and other books acknowledge, British and American companies sought to shift rubber production elsewhere because the Brazilian system of production was inefficient and had roused the ire of antislavery campaigners.

Today, the focus of Brazilian suspicions has shifted from rubber to biotechnology. To cite just one example, the country is rife with rumors that the National Cancer Institute in Washington has clandestinely sent bio-prospectors to steal medicinal plants. (The institute dismisses such tales.)

Such mythmaking helps explain the widespread acceptance given to the notorious map. It appears to have originated on a Web site operated by a right-wing nationalist military group, but Brazil's left has also shown a penchant for Amazonian fantasy.

At the moment, one favorite theory has to do with "Plan Colombia," the American effort to bolster Colombia's fight against drug traffickers and Marxist guerrillas. Leftist groups here say the real objective is to give the United States a foothold that would allow it to seize the Brazilian Amazon and thus command the southern flank of Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez.

Then there is Sivam, a $1.5 billion Amazon radar system being installed by an American company. Though the project will enhance Brazil's sovereignty over the region by allowing it to track and intercept planes smuggling drugs, arms and gold, many here are certain that its actual purpose is to allow the United States to gather information by satellite about oil and mineral resources it wants to exploit.

Some of these accusations are undoubtedly spreading because Brazil is in the throes of a presidential election campaigns, in which calls to defend the Amazon always please the crowds.

Unfortunately for Americans, there is probably little that can be done to convince Brazilians that such accounts are simply not true. As Mr. Pinto noted, the Amazon has the name it does because of a delusion: the first Europeans to visit thought they saw one-breasted woman warriors, like those in Greek mythology, on horseback along the bank of the river. "The Amazon has always been fertile ground for fables, which gives it a prominent place in the collective unconscious of this country," he said. "People create phantoms, and it does no good to refute them."