In the Times of Scrambles in the Land of the Amazons - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 83

through the interior by Brazilian bandeirantes , residents of religious settlements, and
runawayslaves,alongwithanactivecolonization policy,hadpushedPortuguesebound-
aries almost to the Andes. The cattle, peasants, adventurers, and fugitives pressed west-
ward with their own expansive epics in the sertões and selvas . These were then capital-
ized upon by the Brazilian state. 32 Rio Branco knew how to make the most of popular
history, while the Spanish republics remained wedded to royal and colonial legalisms
based on de jure possession of essentially unknown areas.
Travel histories, constellations, and old treaties notwithstanding, it was warm bodies
rather than arid arguments that increasingly prevailed when it came to negotiations. The
shift to the Roman legal concept of uti possedetis in the mid-eighteenth century became
more critical after the expulsion of Catholic religious orders in 1767, because they left a
vacuumintheirwake,akindof terra nullius inthemiddleofthecontinentthatstretched
from Paraguay to the Orinoco, exactly between the least known and most contested ter-
rains of Brazil and the former Spanish colonies. Also, Roman law carried with it the ap-
propriate luster of empire.
Another element of Rio Branco's arsenal was bilateral negotiation. His observations
of the African Scramble had revealed how very quickly things could degrade once mul-
tiple alliances or disagreements occurred on small points. The Brazilian experience with
the triple alliance with Argentina and Uruguay after the Paraguayan War was in itself
a cautionary tale. 33 Rio Branco admired the clarity of the relatively simple binational
agreements worked out in the US imperial pattern.
Varyingculturalidiomsabouttheplaceswerealsoinvokedalongwithmapsandtreat-
ies. Thus the ways that “territorial rights” could be woven together involved physical,
juridical, and cartographic assessment but also deployed ideas about localities, people,
and place that infused these exercises with narratives of “merit,” “nationalness,” folk-
lore, “taming,” and other idioms of nationalist sentimentality designed to show adjudic-
ators why such places truly belonged culturally to one country rather than another: “to
speak our language and have our customs.” 34 These kinds of materials were central to
Rio Branco's style of statecraft and much preferred over battles in remote places where
fighting conditions were awful.
There were two final practical elements to Rio Branco's Scramble strategy as the ad-
judications moved forward. The first was not to let “demilitarized” or modus vivendi
status linger too long, since the neutralized territory rapidly became a realm of open ac-
cess for any variety of territorial schemes, as was the case in Amapá (which languished
in this status for almost fifty years), and the second was to move demarcation teams to
the regions as quickly as possible, rapidly funneling their results into the mediation and
treaty language. With deployment of these tools, the relatively nonconflictual Brazilian