Lost Army

In World War II, Brazil transported two armies. One sailed to Italy and fought, returned to a heroes' acclaim. Another, an 18,000-strong labor army, went north to the Amazon to gather rubber for a needy Ally--and never came back. By last week, its disappearance was a major national scandal.

The story began in 1942, when the U.S., shut off from the East Indies, wanted natural rubber at any cost.*Brazil was a possible source. Contracts were signed with the Brazilian Government, which, for $100 a head, agreed to round up and carry workers to the Amazon. Glowing advertisements brought in many a drought-ridden farmer of Brazil's Northeast. Others were shanghaied.

Banded together in springless trucks and dusty cattle cars, the rubber troops began their trek. Some turned out to be vagrants and rogues who brawled and thieved. Foreign-Legion-like, these seldom asked each others' names, got along with boondock handles like Negrao (Big Nigger), Bexiginha (Pock Face), and Bichhv ho (Little Bug). When Brazilian rubber officials let them go unfed, the men broke away and foraged for themselves. Soon they were met at stopping-places by town police, who threw them into stockades until the journey continued.

At Belem, mouth of the Amazon, the trekkers were treated to pep talks on the romance of the jungle, shown how to cut the bark of the hevea (rubber tree), and then pushed into the jungle. Disillusion came fast. The hevea did not grow in stands; sometimes the trees were miles apart. Dwellings were mostly mud huts which the men built themselves in tall forests through which the sunlight never entered. Flesh-eating piranha fish kept them from river baths. Snakes bit them. The atabrine that the U.S. sent down to combat malaria was stolen by middlemen.

Death & Slavery. Of the 18,000 men who went to Amazonia, only a few were ever seen again. Most of these, ragged derelicts, now beg in the streets of Manaus and Belem. Others have staggered home to tell bitter stories of slavery and death. Said one: "The thieving rubber buyers and the mosquitoes were our worst enemies. Those of us who tried to escape were captured and beaten senseless. Those who really escaped were imprisoned in the mysteries of the jungle."

On the floor of Brazil's Constituent Assembly, deputies last week demanded that the Government make a full report on the scandal of the lost army. In the dry Northeast, families still clamored for their men. On the jungle floor, far below the noise of the birds and the monkeys, was everlasting silence.

*Final tally: $300 million for a small but vital 53,362 tons.

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