Wall Street, Rebels, and Rio Branco - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 146

as they had been registered according to Bolivian laws. Since there was some question
aboutsovereignty,manyconcessionshadbeenconferredbyBrazilianratherthanBolivi-
an authorities, and most were not registered at all since people had simply squatted on
enormous territories in these remote outposts. The usual means of enforcement of prop-
ertyrightsandotherlegalnicetiesintheAcrewasthelawofthe.44(Winchester),which
typically carried little documentation. This meant that the majority of Brazilian holdings
would be technically invalid and their owners dispossessed.
The charter's second concession, the Caupolicán district, was to be exempt from all
taxes for fifty years. The syndicate could tax and place tolls on the river and had ex-
clusive title to all the lands once they were surveyed. The Caupolicán was perhaps as
compellingtosomeofthesyndicatemembersaswastheBlackGoldofrubber.TheCau-
policán would, then, become a charter colony at the intersection of Bolivia, Brazil, and
Peru.
The Bolivians caviled about the nature of the charter, but Syndicate lands were to be-
come an American colony, in fact if not in name. When President Pando advanced the
proposal for a vote within his government, he was explicit about the “diplomatic help”
that would accrue from the neighbor to the north. General Pando understood that occu-
pation of Amazon forests and swamps was a questionable military option for Bolivia,
but he hoped that US resolve in defending the “interests” of its citizens—as it had in
various filibusters and when it sided with Venezuela (and its US agents) against Great
Britain over occupation of the mouth of the Orinoco—would provide a useful precedent
for intervention in the upper Amazon. Pando himself would later lead a doomed expedi-
tion to the Amazon, abandoning his presidency while he personally led battalions to the
jungles.
Secretary of State Hays even wrote to his consul, George Bridgman, in La Paz with
the list of American Syndicate members and, in a completely “unofficial manner,” ex-
pressedhishopeforBridgman'senthusiasticassistanceandsupportintheirenterprise. 27
Hays'informalimprimaturandthelistofthe“lionsofWallStreet”seemedtoensureUS
government commitments to its powerful citizens. At the same time that the Bolivian
Syndicate was under discussion in the Chamber of Deputies in La Paz, a Belgian charter
under the name L'Africaine formed to develop ports on the Paraguay and railway con-
cessions from Santa Cruz to Potosí was also approved. Bolivia was giving away a great
many sovereign rights.
Assis-Brasil met with Secretary Hay and began to form a line of argument that would
hold special power in the Acrean case. In consultation with John Bassett Moore, whose
diplomacy hewed closely to the Monroe Doctrine, 28 Assis-Brasil argued that “while
today it might be an Anglo-American colony under the pretext of a charter company,
next year it might be a purely British, purely Belgian or French colony, or who knows