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The last of three maps visualizing the progress of President-Elect Herbert Hoover around South America appears this week in TIME. The Hoover Odyssey is chronicled in National Affairs. Lands mapped pass in brief review below:
Brazil is the land of staggering vastitudes. Here grow more trees than in any other country in the world, and most of them are valuable hardwoods. Through illimitable forests flows the stupendous Amazon, largest and second longest river*on the Globe. The 20 United States of Brazil comprise an area greater than that of the 48 United States of North America. Here dwell nearly half the population of South America. To complete the breathtaking catalogue of records, Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking country in South America and the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world.
With these facts firmly in mind it is not difficult to understand why Brazil has demanded for herself a permanent seat on the Council of the League of Nations; and why she withdrew from the League when this legitimate aspiration was denied her (TIME, June 21, 1926). Shrewdly the statesmen of Brazil claim that the League of Nations will continue to be dominated by a selfish little gang of European states, so long as no American nation and no Asiatic nation except Japan is permanently seated on the Council.
Turning back to a page of Fifteenth Century history, one may read the famed Bull of Pope Alexander VI, whereby “The New World” of the Americas was pontifically divided between the most Catholic sovereigns of Spain and Portugal—the latter getting Brazil. Some three centuries later Napoleon drove John VI out of Portugal, and that monarch fled with his Court to Brazil. When things quieted down in Portugal, His Majesty returned to his beloved Lisbon; but he left behind in the “New World” as Regent, his eldest son, famed as “Dom Pedrc of Brazil.” When Brazilians and their Regent presently cast off the Portuguese yoke in 1822, President James Monroe of the U.S.A. was first to recognize Dom Pedro as “Constitutional Emperor and Perpetual Defender of Brazil.” Not until 1889 was the Imperial House deposed and a republic proclaimed —for the grotesque reason that Dom Pedro II had alienated the affections of his lazy subjects by freeing their slaves.
Since the collapse of the Empire, barely 40 years ago, the new United States of Brazil have been easily the most friendly of South American republics toward the United States of North America. Generally speaking Brazilians are proud and pleased that their Constitution, “States Rights,” Congress, Cabinet, Vice-Presidency, and Presidency are all cut and fitted to the mode of Washington. Only such trifling differences exist as that each Brazilian state is represented by three Senators instead of the Washingtonian two. All too few North American school children have been taught the historic words wherewith Brazil followed the U.S. into war with Germany. Cried President Wenceslao Braz to the Brazilian Congress: “With our elder brother the United States at war, it is impossible for Brazil to remain neutral!”
Exactly the opposite stand was taken by President Hipolito Irigoyen of Argentina. Though besought by Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany, and though beseeched by his own Senate and Chamber of Deputies to do so, stern Dr. Irigoyen kep Argentina out of war. Recently grateful Argentines re-elected him President, while Woodrow Wilson lies discredited and dead, and Wenceslao Braz has been thoroughly forgotten.
Commercially Brazil is a backward Colossus. The torpor of her tropic citizens and the very plenitude of projects at their disposal has made the land somewhat notorious as el pasado manana—”the country of tomorrow.” A succession of get-rich-quick booms—during which immense numbers of Brazilians have actually gotten rich quickly—has not stabilized the national character or promoted the development of a pioneer class, so needed to develop Brazil’s boundless resources. At first it was too easy to make a fortune out of sugar, then cacao, then cotton, gold, diamonds, rubber. When the rubber boom was raging up and down the Amazon (circa 1900) the rubber taxes collected by the states of Para and Amazonas (see Map) made their capitals, Belem, and Manaos, two of the richest cities of their size in the world.
Plantation rubber from the British and Dutch possessions in the Far East broke Brazil’s virtual rubber monopoly and burst her rubber boom in 1910. Only recently has Henry Ford stirred Brazilian hopes of reviving the good old rubber days, by leasing over 3,000,000 Amazonian acres on which Fordized rubber plantations are being started. Some wild rubber is still gathered on the upper tributaries of the Amazon. Notably a ferocious and somewhat mysterious Italian who calls himself “The King of the Xingu” has terrorized and virtually enslaved several tribes on the Xingu River who now meekly gather wild rubber for the Racketeer King. Curiously enough a majority of the simple, aboriginal Indians of Brazil were for centuries totally ignorant that a human can swim. Their remote, abysmal backwardness is significant.
The last and continuing Brazilian boom crop is coffee. Some 15,000,000 132-lb. bags are exported yearly, over 7,000,000 to the U. S., and a mere 20,000 to the tea-addicted British Isles. Seventy per cent of Brazilian exports consist of coffee. So long as the bean is crushed and drunk, the ideal-for-coffee-growing southern states of Brazil will remain rich—if overproduction is avoided. During the overproduction crisis of 1906 the Government of Brazil bought and held 8,500,000 bags of coffee, lest the market be gutted. Unlike most such desperate measures, this one succeeded. Since then the increasing U.S. taste for coffee has spelled P-R-0-S-P-E-R-I-T-Y.
Venezuela is becoming suddenly famed as an oil boom country. Though in 1920 she exported less than half-a-million barrels, she is shipping this year just over 85 millions. Seldom indeed does a country’s principal boom 17000% in less than a decade! Still more interesting, if possible, is the fact, that Venezuela’s stupendous oil tax revenues all pour into the Treasury of one man, an absolute dictator of 20 years’ standing, the stern and venerable President Juan Vicente Gomez.
Just as General Gomez came before Venezuela’s oil boom so he came after General Cipriano Castro. General Castro’s name is the key that unlocks the cipher of President Gomez’s enigmatic Power.
Neither Theodore Roosevelt nor Kaiser Wilhelm II seemed to have much success in taming Dictator Castro. Also a series of British, French, and Dutch naval blockades of the Venezuelan coast, or parts of it, did not bring Dictator-President Cipriano Castro perceptibly to reason. He started out in 1900 by springing a successful coup d’etat, and grandiloquently announcing to the world that he proposed to unite Venezuela with Colombia and Ecuador in a league “against encroachment by Yankees or Europeans.” Eight years later the catalog of his unparalleled audacities included: 1) repudiating Venezuelan bonded debts to European investors; 2) seizing British and Dutch ships on the ground that “personal enemies of myself are being nurtured in British and French Guiana;” and 3) grossly insulting the French Government by refusing to allow their Minister to Venezuela to land, “because I suspect that the fellow has yellow fever!”—an impish charge unsubstantiated by any fact.
So disturbed and even terrified did Venezuelans become at the dangerous caprices of President Castro, that they welcomed with frenzied enthusiasm a coup d’etat by the then Vice President, General Juan Vicente Gomez. Ever since that day —Dec. 19, 1908—General Gomez has been perfecting his Dictatorship and directing what he calls “Venezuela’s era of national rehabilitation.” Though his methods have been harsh, they have seemed justified by the widespread Venezuelan prosperity directly attributable to President Gomez’s driving, kinetic leadership. Dictator Castro had utterly scared off all foreign investors. But under Dictator Gomez investments exceeding $162,000,000 have been made by U.S. capitalists alone.
Superficially the 20 United States of Venezuela possess a Government and Constitution modeled—like Brazil’s—on that of the 48 United States of North America; but decades of practice have enabled shrewd General Gomez to circumvent or pervert almost all these scrap-of-paper safeguards of Democracy.
Guianas. Between the high Tumac-Humac mountains and the Atlantic lies Guiana, storied and fabled since first sighted by Christopher Columbus. Properly speaking there are three Guianas—British, Dutch, French. Nothing so conduces to a realization of the positively alarming size of the South American Continent as to peer at a map and reflect that deceptively small British Guiana is really larger than England, plus Scotland, plus Wales. Dutch Guiana is four times larger than the Netherlands; French Guiana is one sixth as large as France.
The significant and smiting fact about all the Guianas is their stunted and negligible development under supposedly enlightened European aegis. During the present year a shocked House of Commons has been scandalized by the discovery that forgotten British Guiana has never had a British constitution and has hastily provided one. Since the colony possesses diamond fields, these have been exploited by absentee-owned syndicates; but it is fair and just to say that Great Britain has lamentably failed to turn her famed colonizing talents to the development of British Guiana. Equally deplorable is the Dutch failure to make anything but a dumping ground for wretched immigrants from Dutch East Indies out of Dutch Guiana. Most notorious of all are the uses to which French Guiana has been put. In the penal settlements along the coast and on the famed lies du Salut, (“Devil’s Island”) between eight and nine thousand of the most hardened French criminals are left to rot; in fertile and promising French Guiana proper are less than 45,000 sleazy colonists and appallingly diseased natives.
Upon the bright, alluring map of South America, the Europe-neglected Guianas are a disgraceful little smudge.
*3900 mi. the Nile, 4000 mi., is longest.
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Publish date : 2022-05-04 04:45:00
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Author : theamericannews
Publish date : 2025-01-04 01:51:45
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