Brazil today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

Everything that has been done to bring Brazil into the race of nations is the work of the last hundred years; the most intense period of rapid building since the establishment of the republic has lasted less than thirty years, for in that time has taken place the great acquisition of private fortunes in the industrial regions of Brazil. Much of the civic building, creation of public utilities, establishment of transportation lines, has been due to foreign capital and technical skill, but Brazil herself has contributed no small share of enterprise during the last fifty years; descendants of Portuguese fidalgos have taken up engineering, agriculture, commerce and city-making with energy and intelligence which is not always given a due share of recognition by those onlookers who think that all development of Latin America must come from without. In Brazil much progress, much creation, has come from within, and will come to an even larger degree in the future with improvement in technical education; but the country is enormous, the centres of population have always lain on or near the sea-border, and interior Brazil, the virgin heart of South America, remains practically untouched.

The two great interior states of Matto Grosso and Goyaz cover an area of more than two million square kilometres; they make up one-fourth of the whole Brazilian territory, and Brazil covers half of South America: but this huge heart-shaped wedge in the centre of the continent has no more than half a million population. This is not because the country is tropical or worthless, but because it is unopened and unknown.

Within her wide area Brazil encloses a great variety of soils and climates: she has no snow line, because she has no great mountain heights; a peak less than three thousand metres high, Itatiaya, in the Mantiqueiras, is the point of greatest altitude. But she has almost every other climatic gift that can be included within the fifth degree of North and thirty-third of South Latitude; between the eighth degree East and thirtieth West Longitude of the meridian of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil is a vast plateau with a steep descent to the sea along half her coast, and a flat hot sea margin of varying widths; this plateau, scored by great rivers, sweeps away in undulating prairies, sloping in two principal directions—inland, in the centre and south, to the great Paraná valley; and in the upper regions, northward to the immense Amazon basin. This is not a basin so much as a wide plate, for not only is the course of the huge rio-mar almost flat for the last thousand miles of its journey to the sea (Manáos is only 85 feet above sea-level) but this practically level ground extends northward all the way to the confines of Venezuela and the three Guianas, and southward until the Cordilheiras of Matto Grosso are encountered. Great expanses of this plate are filled with the sweltering forests of tropical tradition, forests containing a thousand kinds of strange orchids, immense and curious trees, insects, reptiles and animals; from Orellana and Lopez de Aguirre to Humboldt, Bates, Wallace and Agassiz, from the Lord de la Ravardière to Nicolas Hortsman the practical Dutchman who announced that El Dorado did not exist, to Charles Marie de la Condamine, Martius, Spix, Admiral Smith, Lister Maw, Schomburgk and Wickham, every traveller upon the Amazon has tried to describe the indescribable Amazonian forest. Deep, monotonous, silent, dark and changeless, the forest unconquerable walls in the uncountable rivers traversing it from the snows of Peru and the interior plateau of Brazil, closing in upon the little cities where man has settled himself in a puny attempt to steal treasures out of its mighty heart.

There is a remarkable contrast between this humid forestal area of the north and the cool high cattle lands of the centre, the pine and matte woods and wheat lands of the south and the hot coastal belt of the great promontory with its deep fringe of coconuts, its sugar country, tobacco fields and cacao plantations; between the coffee country of São Paulo and the regions of the carnauba palm and the babassú. No physical contrast could be more acute than that of the flat tropic swamps of Pará and the austere, fantastic and beautiful granite peaks of the Serra do Mar near Rio—the slender Finger of God in the Orgão Mountains, the curved up-rearing of the Corcovado, the cloud-wreathed head of Tijuca.

Nor is there less contrast in the different industries resulting from the different products of the widely diversified regions, and the population inhabiting them. The extreme north exists largely upon the rubber business, where independent individuals extract gum from wild trees in regions that are sometimes scarcely charted; in the south an imported Italian population performs routine tasks on the highly organized coffee plantations.

Entrance of Rio de Janeiro Harbour (Bahia de Guanabara).
Showing the farther shore, the forts, the Pão d’Assucar, and the loop of Botafogo Bay.

In between these two sharply marked divisions there are many industries and many grades of labour, from the caboclo half-Indian of the north to the negro of the centre and the Japanese, Syrian and Pole of the southerly colonies, as well as the descendant of the Portuguese. There is in some parts of Brazil such a mixture of races and tongues that it seems as if the Jesuits were needed again to invent a new lingua geral. Contrasts in personality, as well as in soil and climate in Brazil, and the difference in accessibility between an open seaboard and a deep and roadless interior, have all aided to bring about the marked diversity of interests which have more than once proved the salvation of the country. Publicists in Brazil sometimes sound a note of warning against the decentralization that has grown more emphatic since the erection of the Republican system gave autonomous powers to the States; there have been suggestions of separation of north from south on account of their distinct interests; but it is impossible to doubt that a country with a score of industries and of products to offer to world markets is in a better economic position than lands depending upon two or three main sources of income.

In the Argentine the city of Buenos Aires is the centre and fount of business; every great house has its headquarters there, its railway links and commercial arms reach out into all productive parts of the country. To Buenos Aires everything comes to be marketed whether from the interior or from abroad: it is the city, the head and heart of the Argentine. It is not possible to point to any one city in Brazil and to say the same. Not even lovely and splendid Rio, federal capital and gay vortex as she is, can claim to represent the commercial interest of the country; she is the spending-place of much of Brazil’s income, but she is not the greatest earner. This honour falls to São Paulo, with Santos as the biggest exporter of values; no one denies the commercial palm to the Paulistas, but it is not heresy to say that the elimination of the coffee industry would not destroy the life of Brazil as, for example, the disappearance of the cereal or cattle industry would threaten the Argentine. She would still retain her herva matte, her cattle, her mines; her rubber, wax, fruit, cotton, sugar, and tobacco; her hardwoods and forestal drugs and dyes, her cacao and fibres and nuts.

A whole world of interests divides São Paulo from Bahia, Bahia from Pará, Pará from Pernambuco, Maranhão from Victoria, Maceió from Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro from Manáos, Ilhéos from Paranaguá, Mossoró from São Francisco, Fortaleza from Florianopolis; some of these ports are great economically, alive with shipping, while others are little developing points which have not yet achieved international fame; but each has its distinct raison d’être and has a divergent social and economic impulse from that of many of her sisters. It is true that certain states seem to produce almost everything tropical or sub-tropical as well as being endowed with minerals, as Minas Geraes, growing coffee, cotton, raising cattle, mining precious stones, gold and iron ore, weaving her cotton and running a great dairy business with interstate shipments of her famous cheese and butter; or Pernambuco and the other states of the great promontory, with a host of different products; or São Paulo, where an energetic Brazilian fazendeiro, to show what his state can grow besides coffee, cotton, rice and sugar, has gardens containing “every known fruit” of temperate and tropical zones. But the distinct local industries of the widely varying Brazilian soil and climate are the most striking and promising elements of her economic life.