Jungle Sabotage

Far up the valley of the Amazon, in the region of the Purus River, a colony of Japanese settled some 20 years ago with money from their government to start a jute industry. Jute proved a failure, so the settlers switched to rice. When rice did not pay off, they planted pepper, clearing large areas of the jungle. Suspicious minds thought they might be preparing airfields for an attack on the Panama Canal. The outbreak of World War II found some 20,000 Japanese scattered over some 2,700 square miles of the Amazon basin. In the course of the first roundups of alien enemies, thousands were taken to internment camps, but many more remained at large.

Last week Brazil was watching these Japanese settlers with more than usual suspicion. In recent weeks there had been an epidemic of fires in the Amazon rubber regions, enough to cause Governor Alvaro Maia of Amazonas State to make a trip to the Purus Valley district to investigate. The first fires were caused by settlers burning brush and seemed purely accidental; Brazilians and Japanese together put them out. But from then on the conflagrations grew in number and seriousness. Recently fires broke out in the highland regions of the western rivers, where some of Brazil's best rubber is grown and where Jap settlers have infiltrated. Thousands of hectares of trees were ruined for next year's tapping, perhaps for good; many miles of estradas, the jungle paths used by the rubber tappers, were damaged.

Local authorities pressed investigations, but their task was difficult: control of vast areas of sparsely populated jungle regions. Whether the Japs had had a hand in setting the blazes or not, if the fires kept up, many more Japanese would probably join those already in concentration camps.

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