Wall Street, Rebels, and Rio Branco - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 151

with Bolivia and then with Peru. In the meantime Brazil had to devise a way to thwart
the Syndicate.
Members of the Bolivian Syndicate may have been the lords of finance, but the con-
cessions were worthless if they were inaccessible. Brazil had opened the Amazon to
free navigation, but its nineteenth-century proclamations were limited to the main chan-
nel and regular ports of call, such as Tabatinga and Manaus. Free navigation rights did
not apply to the tributaries of the Acre territory, such as the Purús and the Juruá. Open
navigation there was a courtesy enabled by Brazil, which now prohibited it for goods
moving to and from Bolivia. The river was shut down. The United States advanced a
mild protest about this state of affairs in January 1903, noting the hardship this caused
North American business in Bolivia, and urged rescinding this prohibition. Navigation
remained closed. England, France, and Germany protested vigorously, largely because
their commercial houses and agents were howling, as this embargodisrupted the flow of
rubber and their upriver trade. Despite the uproar,forthe time being the Purúsand all its
affluents were off limits. This was quite a dramatic step.
The presence of charter companies like the Bolivian Syndicate set a dangerous pre-
cedent; as Assis-Brasil had suggested, they might be American today but European to-
morrow. So the better strategy, from the Brazilian viewpoint, was to enforce the Mon-
roe Doctrine and let European imperialisms (and their charter companies) infest Asia
and Africa. These arguments were advanced by John Bassett Moore, who was advising
the Brazilians and a firm advocate of the application of the Monroe Doctrine whenever
new European claims appeared in the Western Hemisphere. 39 The Syndicate, after all,
includedEuropeans(theBritishand,covertly,theAnglo-Frenchillegitimateoffspringof
de Rothschild), 40 and though owned by Wall Street magnates, the concessions could be
sold, or controlling shares could shift to international agents. This form of economic im-
perialism could lead to the foreign partitioning of the interior of the continent, a possib-
ility that would cause anxiety in Washington as well as South American circles. Shifting
sovereignties over the malarial coasts and gold diggings might not have mattered much
in the Guyanas, but incursions into the heart of the vastly lucrative rubber economy was
a completely different set of politics.
Finally, the Bolivian Syndicate was basically a corporation elaborated by some of
Wall Street's most seasoned speculators. Given this, it should be possible to acquire its
concessions. After all, substantial areas of the United States—Louisiana and Alaska, for
example—had been bought from sovereign states. If Bolivia (or at least those in power
who stood to gain from the transaction) could be placated and the Wall Street speculat-
ors appeased, the Acre could end up in Brazilian hands without a costly war. With this
possibility in mind, and with Assis-Brasil discreetly hinting to Secretary Hay that this
might be the solution, Rio Branco authorized the House of Rothschild to negotiate on