Rubber, Rebels, and Rio Branco: The Contest for the Acre

Abstract

IN 1820 a windjammer sailed into Boston harbor a pair of rubber galoshes from Brazil in its cargo. A return order for five hundred pairs left by the next packet for Brazil, and the rubber boom was on. It would cost thousands of lives, erect a $10 million gilt opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle, reduce tens of thousands of men to slavery, build a railroad with each tie resting on a human skull, and cause the Republic of Bolivia to lose over a third of its national patrimony.' The rivalry between Bolivia and Brazil for control of the upper Amazon basini is a little-known side-effect of South American economic development in the nineteenth century. Under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 the entire rubber-producing region of the Amazon lay within the domains of the Kingdom of Castile. Despite legal title and a series of exploratory expeditions, Spain fought a losing battle in the Amazon against the steady westward push of the Luso-Brazilians, especially after the Portuguese gained control of the mouth of the river in 1580 through the union of the two crownis. During the eighteenth centuLry the two Iberian powers made two efforts to settle their differences and in 1777 finally delineated the frontiers betweenSpaniish and Portuguese America in the Treaty of San Ildefonso. In this treaty the Luso-Castilian boundary ran up the Paraguay River to the Lake of Xarayes, crossed that body to the mouth of the Jauru, then traversed the low marshy watershed between South America's two great river systems, the Amazoni and the La Plata, to intersect the south bank of the Guapore. Proceedilig down the