Illusions and Oblivion - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 383

World rivalries into warfare in the Amazon, all forgotten and glossed with a knowing
glance backward: how silly the boom had been, with the estate owners' pathetic ambi-
tions for opera in the tropics, how profligate the arriviste extravagance of sending laun-
dry to be washed by nuns in Lisbon while bathing one's mistress in champagne. Really,
what could one expect from such short-sighted economic actors?
But the “boom,” the latex industry, lasted a century. Few other enterprises were so
lucrative, and given the capitalisms of the time, few boasted of social relations that were
much better anywhere in the world. The collapse brought down tropical tycoons and
banking houses of many stripes. Da Cunha's dream of a defiant new Amazonian Civil-
ization was over. The inhabitants would not be the vanguard of novel tropical society,
at least not just then. It would take another seventy years, and the rubber tapper move-
ments would have to be imbued with a completely different logic, for that part of the
Amazon to reemerge as a symbol of a global trajectory, this time in the arc of populist
andenvironmentalistpolitics.Thelatetwentiethcenturywouldseetheregion'sinvisible
inhabitantswritinganewhistoryinthelastdaysofthemilitaryrepublicssetintomotion
by da Cunha and his cohorts a hundred years before.
Da Cunha's dreams of empires in the tropics were restless ones. Amazonian dwellers
and developers would again clash over the “lost paradise” for the last half of the twenti-
ethcentury,andwellintothetwenty-first.TheScrambleneverreallyendedbutreflected
the profound changes in the nation and the state of nature, and new forms of globaliza-
tion. But da Cunha had foretold this:
Such is the River, such is its history: always turbulent, always insurgent . . .