The Environment of Wartime Migration: Labor Transfers from the Brazilian Northeast to the Amazon During World war Ii (Report‪)‬

A brouhaha erupted during the Brazilian Constituent Assembly of 1946, convened after the fall of Getulio Vargas's Estado Novo regime (1937-45). Congressmen from Ceara and other Northeastern states alleged that of the estimated 52,000 nordestinos who had been transported by the Brazilian government to tap rubber in the Amazon during World War II (comprised of an estimated 32,000 male workers and their dependents), 23,000 migrants were "dead or lost." Under a bilateral agreement of March 1942, Brazil had agreed to export its surplus raw rubber to the United States, which lost over ninety percent of its traditional supplies following the Japanese invasion of the Malayan peninsula. The U.S. government subsidized mass labor transfers to the forest to maximize production in the absence of a compliant local work force. In the 1946 congressional debates, Northeastern delegates charged that the Vargas dictatorship had lured desperate drought evacuees and gullible peasants to the Amazon with the promise of quick riches and state assistance, only to abandon them to malaria, malnutrition, and price-gouging bosses. The ensuing controversy culminated in a special parliamentary inquest of the Brazilian Congress between July and September 1946 that aimed to uncover the migrants' wartime fate. (1) Postwar scholarship overwhelmingly has sided with the Northeasterners. (2) As Marco Antonio Villa argues, the Estado Novo, preying upon drought victims, had its "hands' free to lead the workers as it wished to Amazonia." (3) In 2006, a New York Times article alleged that wartime migrants to the Amazon had been "dragooned" by Brazilian government officials. (4) In testimony to journalists, documentary filmmakers, and on websites, the migrants have also told tales of deception and victimization. (5)