While historically “Amazon” could refer to a river, a basin, and later a forest, it has been shaped into a coherent regional space by the development politics of governments, companies, and nongovernmental organizations throughout the 20th century, concealing a more complex cultural and ecological reality. Development discourses ignored the human technologies existing prior to the 16th century and drew on the imaginary of a “pristine” jungle, which actually resulted from the human depopulation that occurred in the Amazon during colonization. Colonialism (17th–19th centuries), nonetheless, connected the region to the global economy, indirectly leading to the “rubber boom” (1880–1920), when the Amazon became indispensable to the second industrial revolution. After state and business actors led different operations meant to “modernize” the region in the first half of the 20th century, “developing” the Amazon became a major target of the Brazilian government in the decades following World War II. The politics of the military regime that ruled from 1964 to 1984 in particular drove the expansion of roadways, cattle-ranching, mining, and dams. While statistically creating economic growth, this trend had disastrous consequences for nature, Indigenous livelihoods, and labor relations, which mobilized scientists, activists, and local communities against it. Yet, although by the 1990s the developmentalist model was highly contested, social and environmental movements did not manage to gather society behind a new consensus for the Amazon. Attempts to put development at the service of reducing inequalities and to reinforce environmental legislation achieved certain (mitigated) success in the early 21st century, but they did not prevent deforestation and land conflicts from trending upwards after 2015, threatening the Amazon’s very existence.
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Amazon Development
Antoine Acker
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César Moscoso Carrasco and Malaria Eradication in Bolivia
Nicole L. Pacino
César Moscoso Carrasco (1904–1966), a central figure in Bolivia’s mid-20th-century public health system, wanted to liberate Bolivia from malaria. In a career that spanned three decades, he came close to achieving this goal, but ultimately did not live to see successful eradication. Moscoso was one of the first Bolivian public health specialists in malariology, and was recognized by the World Health Organization for his contributions to the field in 1963. At all stages of his career, he fortuitously aligned himself with the individual or organization that could help him accomplish his professional ambitions and his mission of eradicating malaria in Bolivia. He was the founder and director of the National Anti-Malaria Service in 1929, where he made a name for himself working to halt the spread of malaria in Mizque, in the Cochabamba region. In the 1940s, he secured a position with the Rockefeller Foundation, where he had access to resources beyond the scope of the Bolivian government and an international network of public health specialists. Finally, in the 1950s, he headed the newly formed National Service for Malaria Eradication, which was a Bolivian government initiative supported by international organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau. In the 1950s and 1960s, he came the closest to achieving his goal. Unfortunately, he died the same way he lived: fighting a disease, possibly malaria, which he contracted on a visit to Ceylon as a malaria expert and consultant.
Moscoso’s life is a window into many aspects of Bolivia’s 20th-century history. First, his life story illustrates both the potential and limitations of the Bolivian healthcare system. Indeed, Moscoso often had to work with international or binational organizations to accomplish the work that he saw as necessary and important. Second, his career shows how political changes in Bolivia impacted healthcare. Since his career spans the Chaco War of 1932–1935, the politically tumultuous 1940s, and the 1952 National Revolution, it provides a personal account of how these events changed healthcare in Bolivia. His story demonstrates the hardships that Bolivian doctors faced as they worked to improve their healthcare system, including low pay, few resources, and little respect from their foreign colleagues.
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The History of Ethanol Production in Brazil with a Focus on Environmental Health
Jennifer Eaglin
As the hazards of man-made climate change increase, Brazil’s green energy matrix has become a model for energy policy around the world. Sugar-based ethanol, referred to as alcohol in Brazil, emits 90 percent less carbon than petroleum and is a crucial component in the country’s diversified energy system. However, attention on the noncarbon-based fuel seldom addresses the sugar-ethanol industry’s long history of environmental degradation that predated its low-carbon image. In fact, Brazilian ethanol production has a long connection to environmental health issues in the country. Large-scale ethanol production produced pervasive water and air pollution, which the industry still grapples with in the 21st century. Specifically, ethanol distillation produces a byproduct, vinasse, that producers regularly dumped in local waters to negative environmental effect. More broadly, ethanol pushed the expansion of monocultural sugarcane production, which ties to air pollution linked to land change and cane-cutting methods. Despite these environmental issues, Brazilian producers and government officials successfully shaped sugar-ethanol’s green image around the fuel’s lower carbon emissions compared to gasoline. In the early 21st century, this image pushed ethanol to the front of energy transition efforts. As one of the largest alternative fuel industries in the world, Brazilian ethanol’s historical connection to pollution complicates debates about the possibilities and limitations of large-scale energy transitions.
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The Pan American Highway
Eric Rutkow
The Pan American Highway, a successor project to the unfinished Pan American Railway, originated as an interwar initiative among member nations in the Pan American Union and is generally considered to comprise the longest road in the world. The highway network’s longitudinal through-route—complete save for the sixty-mile “Darien Gap” between Panama and Colombia—crosses eleven countries and, with the inclusion of its unofficial northernmost leg, covers more than 12,500 miles in total, from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay to South America’s Tierra del Fuego. Additional spur roads in the pan-American network radiate to the capitals of other South American nations, adding an additional four thousand miles to the system. While the nearly finished Pan American Highway never achieved the hoped-for goal of linking the Americas (and still faces constant maintenance challenges), it stands as a concrete symbol of pan-Americanism and a “trunk line” for the Western Hemisphere, an overland corridor for trade, tourism, cultural exchange, and migration throughout the region.
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Protected Environmental Areas across Brazil
Frederico Freitas
Brazil, the fifth-largest country on earth, has almost a third of its territory classified as protected areas. They include nature reserves with the strictest level of protection and areas reserved for sustainable use. They comprise, in their majority, public lands, but contain a percentage of privately owned estates. They are regulated by a centralized national system of protected areas, but their management is fragmented at all levels of government—federal, state, and municipal. They are located in the sparsely inhabited Brazilian hinterland but can also be found close to the country’s large and densely populated cities. And throughout the years, they have appealed to a diversity of values and policy goals to justify their existence: protection of natural features, development of frontiers, preservation of endangered species and their inhabitants, conservation of biodiversity, sustainability, social justice. All in all, the protected areas of Brazil represent one of the most extensive and ambitious forms of territorial intervention ever implemented in the country.
It was not always like that. With a few exceptions, protected areas controlled by the state for the sake of conserving natural landscapes and resources were mostly absent before the 20th century. It was only in the 1930s that the Vargas regime established the first national parks in Brazil. They were followed by a dozen other parks in the 1950s and 1960s, but up until the 1970s, the establishment of protected areas in Brazil lacked proper planning, institutional support, and policy goals. This situation changed in the mid-1970s, during the height of the military dictatorship, when an alliance of Brazilian and foreign conservationists began pushing for the inclusion of protected areas in Amazonian development programs. The adoption of the language and methods of dictatorship-era territorial planning by the proponents of conservation set the basis for the development of a national system of protected areas. The system took twenty years to be passed into law, a period that coincided with the end of twenty-one years of military dictatorship and the return to democracy in Brazil. One of the novelties of this period was the appearance of groups, such as Amazonian rubber tappers, with a stake in defining conservation policy. They introduced ideas of social justice in the conservation debate, in what came to be known as socio-environmentalism. It was also during the post-dictatorship period that Brazilian conservationism adopted global standards of conservation, for example protection of biodiversity and sustainable development, as justifiable policy goals. In the early 21st century Brazil counts over 2,300 distinct protected areas distributed throughout all of its twenty-six states. They are part of a single, but diverse, national system of protected areas.
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Public and Private in Everyday Spaces of Water Use in Jalisco during the 19th and 20th Centuries
Lourdes Sofía Mendoza Bohne
Water use in everyday life occurs and is reproduced in specific spaces designed for the supply, conservation, and use of water. The objectives of this article are: (a) to document the places in which water is supplied, used, and replenished in Guadalajara City from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century; (b) to analyze these practices from the perspective of social spaces as axes of interaction between the city and its experience through the use of water in daily life; (c) to use the concept of public and private to understand and analyze these spaces as they relate to the analytical axes of shared habits for public spaces and survival strategies for private spaces; (d) to explore the ways in which people transit between public and private spheres and change their notions and practices with regard to space, and how these are metabolized in public and in private.
Public contexts are understood in terms of shared behaviors at local springs, swimming pools, public baths, streams, public laundries, watering troughs, and public fountains; these include locations with religious significance such Chapala Lake, considered sacred by both Catholics and the Wirrarika, an indigenous community in northern Jalisco. Private contexts are related to survival behaviors such as cooking, daily showers, domestic cleaning, cleaning one’s body, self-image, personal hygiene, and using the toilet. In this sense, the places in which Guadalajaran society interacts with water become daily spaces where the presence of water offers cultural meanings as points of reference for the city in that period and the spaces of water are metabolized as points of reference for life. In the early 20th century, new tools, infrastructure, and uses of water bring about the transformation and the re-signification of a new Culture of Water.
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The Putumayo Atrocities
Angus Mitchell
The Putumayo atrocities allude to an outrage that made international headlines between 1909 and 1913. The evolving press story drew public attention to the extreme exploitation of people and environment by a British-owned extractive rubber company in a contested region of the northwest/Upper Amazon bordering Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. The scandal contributed to the demise of the “boom” in the extractive rubber industry in the Amazon. Claims of atrocities were brought initially to the attention of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society (ASAPS) in London. Humanitarian pressure triggered a series of official investigations undertaken by the governments of Britain, Peru, the United States, and the Vatican. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, dispatched the consul general in Brazil, Roger Casement, to investigate. Casement made two separate journeys into the region in 1910 and 1911. In 1912, a British government Blue Book was published containing his reports and oral testimony gathered from British-Caribbean subjects recruited by the company to act as overseers. This was followed by a parliamentary select committee inquiry held in London that ran from October 1912 to April 1913. The US government organized their own commission of inquiry and published their own report. Despite the acreage of text produced, the efforts to help the rainforest communities proved too little too late. By the time the investigations had been undertaken, and the reports published, the main Indigenous communities living across the territory had been largely worked to death, displaced, or hunted down. In July 1914, an amendment to the Slavery Bill was passed in the British Houses of Parliament requiring transnational companies to assume humane responsibility and care for their workforce in whatever territories they operated. However, as Europe collapsed toward war, the legislation was never enshrined into international law, and this remains one of the unrealized goals of international labor relations to this day. Nevertheless, the Putumayo atrocities endure as the most closely documented and described incidents of the last years of the Amazon rubber boom and allow for consideration of the unfathomable human cost in a particularly vicious moment of untrammeled international colonial capitalism in South America.
