Wall Street, Rebels, and Rio Branco - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 152

Brazil's behalf with the Syndicate. If the financiers were justly compensated, there was
no reason for the United States to intervene in Acre. Bolivia was too poor to pay off
the Syndicate, but Brazil could guarantee loans that would, and also paid two million
pounds to Bolivia. 41 Whitridge began negotiating in February 1903, and by March, an
initial payment of 550,000 pounds flew into the Syndicate bank account. 42 The satis-
fied financiers, who never actually did anything but get a buyout and whose field direct-
ors never got closer than Manaus, cheerily counted their cash. Once the transaction was
completed,BrazilimmediatelyopenedthePurústointernationaltrade.Thedetailsofthe
treaty needed to be worked out, though, and Peru was becoming less tractable.
After much negotiation, the Treaty of Petrópolis required that Brazil pay two million
poundstoBoliviaandtheBolivianSyndicateinexchangefor191,000squarekilometers
of Acre territory. This boundary along the Rio Verde would be surveyed by a member
of the British Royal Geographical Society, in this case the always self-promoting Percy
Fawcett. 43 Bolivia received in exchange 3,000 square kilometers—a sliver of Brazilian
territory between the Abunã and Madeira Rivers—and the commitment to build a rail
that would bypass the more than 200 kilometers of Madeira rapids. This was the in-
famous Madeira Railway, whose virtues were described by Church and where he had
such interminable (and bankrupting) difficulties. The new rail enterprise would hew to
Church's trajectory, including catastrophic levels of disease, worker unrest, and the ru-
in of another financial empire, that of American magnate and infrastructure developer
Percival Farquar. 44 Farquar finished the railroad just as the rubber industry breathed its
last, making rail transport irrelevant in the western Amazon. Bolivia and its boundary
werestillincontest,however.WiththeTreatyofPetrópolisinNovember1903,amodus
vivendi and demilitarized zone were put into place while the boundary was surveyed.
The treaty took the Brazil-Bolivia conflict out of play, but the pact was powerless
over the northerly battles raging on the upper Purús between Peruvian caucheiros and
Brazilian tappers. Peru moved into place, asserting its Idelfonso rights, which included
all the claims of Bolivia and terrains from the Andean flanks almost to the mouth of the
Madeira on the Amazon. This was da Cunha's litigious zone.