Euclides and the Baron - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 173

melding of race and cultures into a “national civilization.” The essential conflict for da
Cunha is between the effect of plunder versus that of production on national character,
histories, and ecologies. These become moral landscapes as he assesses the two nations'
Amazon ambitions, a theme he developed in more detail after he traveled on the Purús.
Both Brazil and Peru, he suggests, would have their destinies inscribed in Amazonia.
The real question was whether nomadic plunder or an emergent civilization would pre-
vail.
There was another subtext. Da Cunha was arguing against the Brazilian policies of
“whitening,” which proposed European immigration as the key to Brazil's development,
as highly miscegenated populations were viewed as obstacles to progress. 21 Da Cunha's
statements reflected his post-Canudos thinking about the nature of race, national iden-
tity, and the virtue of racial complexity—the “bedrock” of his Brazilian “race.”
“ Against the Caucheiros ,” his next article, considers whether Brazil should send
troops to the western border to prevent possible incursions into Brazil's territory by
Peru in spite of the modus vivendi. The essay is a treatise on guerrilla warfare and
presents it as the most effective, modern form of combat. Da Cunha's experience at Ca-
nudos,whereguerrillaforceshadheldoffmuchlarger,betterarmedforces,hadchanged
his understanding of tropical campaigns. The obvious effectiveness of Acre's trans-
planted sertanejos against the regular forces of Bolivia were evidence for the efficacy of
homegrown,locallyadaptedmilitias.CitingtheBoerWarasanotherexample,heargues
that the South African campaign owed its triumph to informal militaries on the modern
battlefield: “The speed and violence of gunfire impose a dispersion completely oppos-
ite to the contrivances of halts and formal maneuvers . . . soldiers without the habit of
thinking for themselves become befuddled, disjointed, and useless, because the greater
theirformaladherencetoranks,thelesstheirindividualabilitytoact.”Clearlydistressed
by Brazil's dispatch of formal battalions to Manaus, he describes the new battlefield in
Amazonia:
Those who await us are not organized troops but the caucheiros —alert and furtive: barely organ-
ized in their small boats, dispersed about in their light canoes, maneuvering quickly, alone, in the
shadows and in wakes of the floating logs, attacking suddenly from the flowery borders of the ig-
após , *2 disappearing, imperceptibly swallowed up in the endless bayous [ parana-mirims ], *3 where
theyconcealthemselves inafretworkoffrondsandbranches,vanishingintheinfinitecurvesandun-
countable channels that characterize the fascinating hydrology of the southwestern tributaries of the
Amazon.
The material image of a campaign there would be that of thrashing around in labyrinthine backwa-
ters. Our strategists will not have the relatively simple task of fighting the enemy: the real problem,
perhaps the impossible one, will be to locate him. Politicians delude themselves if they imagine that
the mere appearance of a few regiments in the enormous tract of lands between the Purús and Juruá
is enough to protect the locals and to impede trespass through an undetermined, unmarked frontier.
Compact battalions, trapped as much by preconceptions and the habits of rectilinear combat will be