Euclides and the Baron - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 171

a novel way it breathed further life into the pillage of the caucheiros , who, in their devastation of the
great forests, reanimate a long, ancient apprenticeship in calamity.
This essay sets the context for his continuing themes and future arguments: Peruvian
society is balanced between a glorious past, a febrile, increasingly militaristic and pre-
carious present, with an economy based on roving plunder, and perhaps an illustrious
future in Amazonia, where a harmonious interaction between human beings and nature
mightemergeifnotinfectedwiththe(national)parasitictasteforpillage.DaCunhapos-
its a rupture between people and place as the defining characteristic of modern Peruvian
civilization.
In “Inevitable Conflict,” da Cunha elaborated his ideas that “nomadism” inhibits in-
teraction with environment, 17 positing a kind of taming by places that produces an in-
tegration of races and productive political ecology. He expands the idea that the larger
economic and historical imperatives of Peru are fundamentally Amazonian and sets the
stagefortheepicconflictbetweenPeruvianandBrazilianempiresthatheseesunfolding
in the Purús:
The Peruvian incursions (into Amazônia) do not merely assert the greed of a few adventurers
maddened by the ambition those extremely rich rubber forests arouse in them. It is graver: they are
the material expression of a historical impulse bursting with irresistible purpose. These forays are not
merely determined by the unstable and dispersive social energies of that South American republic,
one most despoiled by caudillo politics, but by inviolable physical laws”. . . .
Really, to contemplate Peru through the prodigious vision of a von Humboldt or the limpid intel-
ligence of C. Weiner 18 is to understand immediately that the destiny of Peru, with its constrained
swathoflandstretchingfromAricatoTrujillo,immuredbetweenthePacificandtheAndes,oscillates
between two inflexible extremes: either the complete extinction of their nationality as it becomes
overrun by an enormous immigrant population, one that embraces every modality of temperament
from the industrious German to the half-enslaved coolie, or a heroic unfolding toward the future, a
daring engagement with Amazonia, a national salvation embodied in the rush to the headwaters of
the Purús, achieving in one glorious venture both access to the Atlantic and a more fecund setting for
expressing Peru's national energies. . . . There is no escaping this dilemma.
Like Brazil, Amazonia could hold for Peru its national destiny and identity. Euclides
emphasizes culture—in this case a predatory one—more than race per se as the molding
force of national character, an idea he will revisit elsewhere in his writing. As in his first
essay, da Cunha reviewed the devastation of various types of economy based on mining
everything from silver to guano to graves. “And yet in this febrile and parasitic activity,
Peruvians are not alone in their predilections for plunder,” he says: “any street in Lima
displays the most varied ethnographic gallery on earth.” He reviews these racial types
and mixtures:
Among these four principal types (blacks whites, Asians and natives) are uncountable forms of
mestizos:fromthemulattosofallbloods, zambos and cafusos ,totheIndianhalf-breeds,tothe cholos
who remind us of our own caboclos , and those fascinating Chinese-cholos in whose faces are found