THE GUIDE - The Rough Guide to Bolivia - page 410

revealed hundreds of geoglyphs of similar magnitude, while excavations of terra preta , or
ultra-fertile soil cultivated by humans, seem to coincide with the locations of the riverside
cities described by Carvajal.
These discoveries have enormous implications for both conservation and development in
the Amazon. They suggest that, far from being a fragile natural environment, large areas of
the Amazon are in fact anthropogenic , or man-made, ecosystems, modified by centuries
of human activity and even now capable of supporting far larger populations than is cur-
rently the case.
The Jesuit missions
Failing to find the fabled El Dorado , the Spanish turned the region over to the religious or-
ders, above all the Jesuits, in the hope that they might have more success in subjugating the
forest tribes and securing the northeastern border with Brazil. In the late seventeenth century
a handful of Jesuit missionaries did just that, accomplishing in 25 years what the civil and
military authorities had been unable to do in over a century. In a precursor of the theocratic
society they were later to establish in Chiquitos , the Jesuits founded a series of mission com-
munities where the various indigenous tribes adopted Christianity and a settled, agricultural
existence, raising cattle and growing crops. These missions flourished, and by the mid-eight-
eenth century were home to over 31,000 converts, supervised by just 45 European priests.
But with the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish Empire in 1767, the mission inhabit-
ants were left at the mercy of Spanish landowners, with many being forced into slavery.
The rubber boom
Worse was to come in the nineteenth century as a result of the growing international demand
for rubber, a material derived from trees which were particularly abundant in the Bolivian
Amazon. An unprecedented economic boom ensued, and the industry was quickly domin-
ated by a small group of ruthless rubber barons who made overnight fortunes and subjected
the indigenous population to a brutal regime of forced labour. The most famous of these was
Nicolás Suaréz , who ruled over a vast rainforest empire and remains a legendary figure in
the Beni.
The richest rubber-producing area, the Acre, was largely settled by rubber collectors from
Brazil. When the Bolivian government sought to tax rubber exports, these Brazilians rebelled
and declared independence. A short conflict - the Acre War - ensued, ending with Bolivian
defeat, and in 1903 the Acre was annexed by Brazil. In the early twentieth century, the rubber
boom collapsed after the English smuggled rubber seedlings out of the Amazon and estab-
lished plantations in Asia, rendering wild rubber collection uncompetitive.
The twentieth century
By the middle of the twentieth century the economy began to recover as large landowners
began exporting cattle , transporting them by river to the growing markets in Brazil and in