Euclides and the Baron - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 174

more useless the more disciplined and tied they are to coordinated formations. The better, the more
impeccable their military organization, the worse their ability to adjust themselves to the theater of
operations: to face the terror of rapid clashes or to flee the treacherous ambushes. . . .
Besides, the necessary forces to repel an invasion are already there, agile and acclimated, in the ir-
regulartroopsofAcre,composedofthefearless sertanejos oftheNortheasternStates,whohavebeen
transforming Amazonia for the last twenty years. They make up the truly modern army. . . .
We can entrust ourselves to these diminutive titans, their galvanizing competence, toughened and
seasoned by broiling suns; they are accustomed to rapid and decisive deliberations and dazzling tac-
tics—they improvise in combat with the same spontaneity with which humorous rhymes leap from
their lips in the folguedo s. *4
This is hardly the da Cunha of “Nossa Vendéia” and the early pages of Os Sertões pre-
dicting the inevitable victory of history's merciless project of racial triumphalism and
a murderous modernism. His view has shifted to the spontaneous, quick-witted autoch-
thonous“organicintellectuals”who,farmorethanthestructuredcoastalarmy,nowcon-
stitute the most modern and most effective protection for the fatherland.
These “diminutive titans” are the subject of da Cunha's last essay on the Peruvian
conflict, “Between the Madeira and the Javari.” Central to his argument is the idea that
the divergence between the nurturing husbandry of the region's Brazilian northeastern
migrants and the callow pillage of the Peruvian caucheiros is a clash of “tropical civil-
izations.” The question of Brazil's manifest destiny is raised and compared with the US
history of western territorial expansion. The space between the Madeira and the Javari
was now the great zone of conflict, where both the Treaty of Madrid and the Treaty of
Idelfonso drew the territorial lines that Brazil was now about to defy. Rather than the
land of emptiness, da Cunha's Amazonia is an inhabited tropical realm. The essay out-
lines a history of Brazilian settlement that he will later embellish to justify the Brazilian
possession of western Amazonia.
There is no region in all of Brazil that has experienced the vertiginous progress of that most remote
stretch of Amazonia where neither the devotion of the Carmelites nor the engrossing semi-commer-
cial, semi-evangelistic activities of the Jesuits could prevail. A little more than thirty years ago the
place was desolation itself. What one knew of the place went little beyond the disheartening lines of
Father João Daniel in his imaginative Discovered Treasure : “Between the Javari and the Madeira, a
distance of more than 200 leagues, there are no settlements of whites, Tapuyas nor missions.” This
eighteenth-century adagewouldberepeatedinl866byTavaresBastos. 22 “Amazôniaisanaspiration:
leaving the suburbs of Pará you penetrate only wildness.”
Since then, nothing has explained the oblivion of that territory.
Da Cunha begins his comparison between Brazil and the United States by describing
the different approaches to their frontiers:
In the US it was the reckless wave of population finally breaking on the shores of the Far West, while
forBrazil,formostofitshistory,itwastheactionsofthe bandeirantes thatforsolongdefinedourre-
gionalclaims,travelingthemonsoonsuptherivers,conqueringthetorrents,anddefyingthetreacher-