In the Realm of Rubber - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 217

ized system. It was the social ecologies—or, one might say today, the political ecolo-
gies—that became da Cunha's subject. 63
Figure 14.3. Curing latex.
Latexes and Labor
The rubber economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with its brutal-
ized Indians and miserable debt peons incarnated a severe disjuncture in globalized eco-
nomies between the mass demand for seemingly innocuous products—bicycle tires or
waterproof garden boots—and a tropical resource produced under the most oppressive
of coercions. There were regions, such as the Putumayo, that were unquestionably hor-
rific, but to conflate all production systems over a huge area and over more than a cen-
turywiththis“devil'ssnare”isamistake.Thelatexindustrywaswidespreadanddidnot
requireanysinglemodeofextraction.Rather,localconditionsstructuredtherelationsof
production throughout Amazonia's “rubber century”: distance to cities, river geograph-
ies, social histories, and forms of coercion and violence varied a great deal.
Systems of latex extraction changed over space and time: they were “softer” early in
the export period and were less violent closer to the main urban areas and in the eastern
Amazon; they became increasingly repressive later in the boom and farther up into the
headwater and tributary forests, especially where access to a river could be controlled.
Asnoted,therewerealso,asageneralrule,differencesbetweendominantlaborregimes
depending on whether caucho or Hevea was exploited. The extraction of rubber over
this long period took on many modalities that are most usefully understood through the
characteristics of their labor regimes. 64 These included “affinal forms,” with collection
carried out byfamily orclan, and tribute systems such as those associated with tribal so-
cieties. There was slavery, including chattel slavery, “terror slavery,” and debt peonage.
There were also some forms of modern labor organization: tappers could be paid wages,
there were some contract systems, and there were even cooperative systems within the
quilombos . 65 Rubberextraction couldbepartofaportfolio ofsmall-scale collecting and
farming based on family labor, a pattern that still exists widely through the Amazon, or
rubber could be the single product in a vast empire of brutal labor extortion. Small-scale