somanlu jul dez 2006.pmd - Eventos - Ufam

“Soldiers” and citizens in the rainforest: Brazilian rubber tappers...
accidents and disease in the Amazon, notwithstanding efforts to improve
conditions in the region. 15
To promote labor migration to the Amazon, the Brazilian and U.S.
governments endorsed a two-pronged approach: state intervention in the Amazonian
(and northeastern) economy and labor market; and massive propaganda to showcase
the economic potential and strategic importance of rubber tapping, which under
state supervision, would be purged of its notorious abuses. Since the days of the
boom, the rubber tappers’ burden of unpayable debt, conjoined with bosses’ use
of physical violence to punish workers and preclude their escape, had led outsiders
to brand the system as a form of slavery. In exchange for rubber, bosses typically
compensated tappers with goods or credit for goods. However, the exorbitant
mark-up on supplies and food staples levied by bosses often prevented tappers
from balancing their accounts. Bosses also whittled away tappers’ earnings by fixing
the scales used to weigh rubber or by charging tappers a commission on the cash or
goods received (approximately 20% on cash and 10% on goods), especially when
the patrão was a small merchant who did not receive rubber rents (WEINSTEIN,
1983, p. 18). These abuses led critics to denounce the debt-merchandising system in
the Brazilian Amazon as “nothing more than organized robbery on a huge and
particularly cruel scale” that converted the tapper into a slave or debt peon. 16 Charles
Wagley’s postwar ethnographic study identified the so-called “Rules of the Rubber
Fields” as a systematized pact among the seringalistas aimed at blocking unauthorized
trade or damage to trees by tappers; preventing debtor-collectors from escaping
their estates without liquidating accounts or paying fines; and ensuring the return of
fugitive workers through an ironclad surveillance system and the cooperation of the
police (WAGLEY, 1953, p. 94-95). Newspaper accounts in the 1940s continued to
portray rubber tappers as pariahs who remained at the mercy of their bosses (O
Acre, August, 21, 1942). Indeed, ACA denounced the unflattering reports published
by the journalist C. Nori Camelo which described the mistreatment of northeastern
immigrants to the Amazon. 17
To be sure, the rubber tappers’ lot was not easy. Tappers were typically
responsible for two trails (estradas) of rubber trees which connected between 100
and 200 hevea trees and were worked on alternate days. Early in the morning the
seringueiro set out along a trail, slashing each tree and inserting a small metal bowl to
gather the oozing latex. After completing the first round, the tapper returned in the
46 Somanlu, ano 6, n. 2, jul./dez. 2006