Westward Brazil

Along the streams of the Amazon system that cut through the green, matted jungle, more than 14,000 Brazilians from drought-stricken areas were seeking a new world last week. Like the old pioneers of North America, they were the first of a great army marching westward to open an untouched land. The treasure they were seeking was one of World War II's most precious--rubber.

The search for rubber was the immediate stimulus of Brazil's great migration, but there was more behind it. The ultimate goal was to open and develop Brazil's western territories for future generations, possibly for thousands of impoverished emigrants from Europe when the war is over. The men and women threading their way up the river by boat, by pack mule, and afoot had pioneers' jobs: to lay the foundations for the development of rubber plantations, to build airports and highways to link the reclaimed land with the sea.

Stories of Brazil's fight to open up the West were typical pioneer stories. Rio de Janeiro papers told how bad white men were stirring up the Indians to attack the settlers. Seven members of the Service of Protection to Indians (an old organization devoted to the preservation and protection of Brazilian tribes) were reported killed in Indian raids. Men sent to build landing fields and develop sanitation stations were in constant danger of being killed by natives or disease.

But the battle of the jungle was being waged with modern weapons. Health stations had been set up far inland. More than 1,500 men were working in the Special Public Health Service, the Government organization set up to protect the workers' health. Two million tablets of atabrin had already been distributed to combat malaria. Notices telling how to guard against the jungle's dangers were being tacked on trees in the farthest jungle land by men who took small supply boats up the inland waterways. The Health Service last week reported that it was prepared to take care of 3,000 men and women monthly, many of whom would go more than a thousand miles upriver.

The long-range plan for the development of Brazil's Far West was being worked out jointly by the Brazilian Government, U.S. Rubber Reserve Co. and Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. To speed the rubber output, broad-shouldered, lion-faced Joao Alberto Lins de Barros was recruiting 78,000 workers to go up the Amazon trail to the rubber grounds. Joao Alberto knew that country: back in the '20s he had marched a column of revolutionists against Dictator Arthur da Silva Bernardes through nearly 950 miles of jungle and mountain to the Bolivian border, covering over 30 miles a day. Now he was thinking in terms of a rubber army. With the land of Brazil's Far West opened by modern transportation, developed by modern methods, Brazilians hoped to step the rubber output up to 50,000 tons by 1944, almost triple the pre-war figure.

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