An Alliance for Rubber: Legacies of the “Battle for Rubber” of World War II

After Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia in 1942 cut off rubber supplies to the Allies, Brazil and the United States forged a broad wartime alliance, including a partnership to increase wild rubber production in the Amazon.  Although the alliance for rubber lasted only five years, the direct participation of the United States government in the Amazonian rubber economy, in partnership with Brazil's Estado Novo, influenced the region's development.  This paper will make the case that the wartime activism of the United States government in the Amazon stimulated post-war Brazilian governments to accelerate programs to occupy, settle and develop the region. 

Financed by the United States, Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas agreed to recruit thousands of rural workers, mainly from the arid northeast, to work as rubber tappers throughout the Amazon. The migration of over 30,000 "rubber soldiers" supported the Estado Novo's "March to the West" program to populate the Amazon frontier with poor landless rural workers from the Northeast.  Despite Brazil's concerns about protecting the Amazon from foreign intervention, Vargas accepted United States financing and North American technical advisers penetrated the Amazon to assess conditions on rubber estates, establish a Rubber Development Bank, organize a public health service, and improve the region?s transportation infrastructure.     The transfer of over 30,000 rural workers to the Amazon injected new life into dwindling communities of rubber tappers who had remained in the rainforests after the collapse in 1912 of the Amazon rubber boom.  Abandoned by the state, thousands of "rubber soldiers" died, but survivors started families with Amazonian women and formed mestizo communities that would organize decades later to fight for their rights as sustainable forest producers, confronting developers subsidized by Brazil's military government.  Public health service posts established throughout the Amazon facilitated state-led frontier expansion and nation-building, threatening dwindling indigenous groups with another onslaught of "civilization."