Chapter 5 War in the Amazon

D uring World War II, a multinational, cross-class set of actors battled to remake the Amazon.Although formally allied against the Axis, their common mission was fractured by subjectivities of class, gender, profession, and nationality.A forest coveted by U.S. wartime policymakers for its rubber trees loomed for Brazilian statesmen as a vast hinterland clamoring for national integration.Migrants and tappers contemplating varied patterns of land use and market insertion clashed with merchants and bosses angling to profiteer.Progressives in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres championing rural uplift sparred with conservatives who decried redistributionist policies.And the immediacy of the forest in sustaining livelihoods cleaved locals from geographic outsiders.These competing wartime visions engendered disparate productive and ideological spaces in the Amazon.This chapter analyzes the interlinked struggles over resources, representation, and power in the Amazon.Each of its four sections examines a discrete set of mediators-U.S. policymakers, Brazilian officials, rubber bosses, and migrants and tappers-whose regional designs left varied imprints on lives and landscapes.In spotlighting transnational processes, I contend that although Amazonian history cannot be shoehorned into the mold of dependency theory-which attributed Latin American underdevelopment to the predatory demands of wealthier nations for primary products-neither was the regional impact of U.S. wartime poli

Amazon rainforest · Biology · Geography · Political science · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Ecology