The Man Who Brought Down Manaus

by Leighton Gage

In the years before the First World War, Manaus was one of the richest places in the Americas – North or South. It was the first city in South America to install an electric grid; the first to have a telegraph link with Europe; the women wore French fashions; the children were sent to France to be educated; the per-capita consumption of champagne was higher than anywhere else in South America.

The opera house (above) was built with marble from Carrara and hand-painted tiles from Portugal. It featured chandeliers of Baccarat crystal and huge decorative vases from Sèvres. The rafters rang with the great voices of the age, Sarah Bernhardt and Jenny Lind among many others. All of which is pretty surprising when you consider where Manaus is located. It’s nine hundred miles from the sea, smack in the middle of the Amazon jungle.  Even today, there are no roads that will take you there from Brasilia, or Rio de Janeiro, orSão Paulo. You have to fly, or you have to take a boat.

So how come Manaus was so rich?

Rubber.

Back in those days Brazil had a monopoly on all the rubber in the world.

Rubber trees were native to the Amazon rainforest - and existed nowhere else. Naturally, the Brazilians wanted to keep it that way, To that end, they made it illegal to export the seeds or the seedlings of the rubber tree, and made it clear they’d classify anyone who did it as a thief.

Enter this man, Henry Wickham:

Wickam, in defiance of Brazilian law, stole 70,000 seeds and bore them off to the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew. They were planted the day after their arrival. Over two thousand of them germinated. 

The descendants of those seedlings were sent to Sri Lanka, to Singapore and to India. With them, the English established their own rubber trade, a trade that ended up being far more successful and lucrative than the Brazilian one.

And that for one reason: every other place in the world the trees could be planted in groves; but not in Brazil. The Amazon rainforest, you see, harbors a blight that exists nowhere else in the world, a blight that attacks rubber trees. If one tree is infected, the blight kills all the other trees in the neighborhood. The Brazilian trees, therefore, are always spaced throughout the jungle. The harvest of their latex is an expensive proposition, too expensive to compete with the plantations, and low labor costs, of the East.

Brazil’s loss.

England’s gain.

Henry Wickham got a knighthood.

Manaus got shafted. These days, it's no more than a backwater.

And is known for little more than the “meeting of the waters”, the place where muddy brown of the Rio Solimões meets the black of the Rio Negro and forms the beginning of the Rio Amazonas, the true Amazon.

And yet...and yet...there's a very good reason to go there: to see the place where most of the action takes place in my book Dying Gasp, the third in the Chief Inspector Mario Silva series.

The Amazon

By Leighton Gage

Father Gaspar de Carvajal was a Catholic priest who visited the coast of South America in the middle years of the sixteenth century and wrote a book about it.

The book begins in a perfectly believable fashion. They were, he said, following the coast, keeping it on their starboard (right-hand) side.
One day, the coastline veered from south to west. The water around their ship went from blue to brown and a current began to push against the bow, both signs seeming to indicate they’d entered an estuary.

Five days of steady sailing ensued, still with no sign of an opposing shore. The sailors began to have doubts. If they were on a river, it was huge, larger than any in Europe.

Then, on the morning of the sixth day, their ships were suddenly and viciously attacked. The assailants were a host of natives in canoes, natives who (according to Gaspar ) were all women, set on capturing our men for the purpose of procreation.

 

Mind you, the crew had been at sea, without women, for many months by then. They might have welcomed some feminine company, had not Gaspar, wise man that he was, claimed to have been in possession of superior knowledge, i.e. that the ladies weren’t after a lifetime of connubial bliss. They were after a date and dinner – with the seamen as the dinner.

Fear of cannibalism strengthened the crew’s resolve. The attack was beaten off. The women disappeared into the jungle, never to be seen again. And not one member of the crew accused Father Gaspar of being a mean-spirited Baron Munchausen of sexual angst for inventing the story. (Okay, I made that last part up.)

But Gasper made up more than the story. He also invented a name for the place where it all happened,
He called it the Great River of the Amazons, later (shortened and Anglicized) to become the Amazon River.
He was, of course, inspired by the legend of a similar tribe of warlike women in the mythology of the Greeks.
But who needs tall tales, and myths, when it comes to the Amazon? I sure as hell don’t. For me, the truth is impressive enough.

The Amazon is the oldest river in the world. Ten of its branches are larger than the Mississippi. Its length, from source to mouth, is almost equal to the distance between New York and Berlin. The total volume of the main river, and its tributaries, far exceeds that of the next five largest rivers on earth. The amount of water that it dumps into the sea could fill Lake Ontario in three hours. That amount of water exceeds, daily, the total volume of what flows out of the mouth of the Thames in an entire year. Almost one-fifth of all the river water in the world flows past the Amazon’s banks. As it pours into the ocean, fresh water pushes salt water back a hundred miles into the open sea. A thousand kilometers upriver, the depths in mid-channel continue to exceed 115 meters (350 feet), more than enough to completely submerge the Statue of Liberty. If every person alive in the world today were to dump a four-hundred pound bag of dirt into the ocean, the total would not add-up to the amount of silt the Amazon carries into the South Atlantic each year. When the river rises, the resulting flood inundates an area twice the size of Austria.

There are more species of fish in the Amazon River than there are in the Atlantic Ocean...

...bigger fish than can be found in any other river, fifteen times as many species as can be found in all the rivers of Europe. Twice a year, between the months of February and March, the Atlantic Ocean waters roll up the Amazon in a great tidal bore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_bore) that the Brazilians call the Pororoca. It generates the longest waves on earth, sweeping along everything from piranhas to tree trunks. One Brazilian surfer, Picuruta Salazar, managed to ride one of those waves for 37 minutes. It carried him for 12 kilometers.

Most of the river is lined by jungle, a primeval rainforest hardly changed from Father Gaspar’s day. Within it are to be found more varieties of butterflies than anywhere else...

...half the world’s bird species, one-third of all the types of living creatures on earth. And almost three hundred varieties of mosquitoes.

One word of advice: Should you add The Amazon to your bucket list, center your visit around Santarem, not Manaus.

Santarem is a rather pleasant place as far as isolated jungle cities go. Manaus…isn’t.

Want to know why? Read my book, Dying Gasp.

Crime Reporting Brazilian Style

by Leighton Gage

In his home (and very lawless) town of Manaus, Wallace Souza made a name for himself as a crusading crime reporter. He became so popular that a network affiliate gave him his very own television show.

The structure of Souza’s program was simple: he’d spend the first half-hour in the studio, holding a policeman’s baton in one hand and waving it around as if he’d prefer to be swinging it against a felon’s head. While he was doing it, he’d rail against criminality and criminals, call them every name in the book, demand the harshest penalties for lawbreakers, advocate a return of the death penalty, and so on and so forth.

Then, in the second half of his show, Souza would take to the streets. He’d visit homes, police interrogation rooms and crime scenes. In the homes, he’d wring tears from the victims. In the interrogation rooms he’d heap abuse on newly-arrested (and perhaps innocent) suspects. The crime scenes, he’d cover in graphic detail and without a modicum of good taste or restraint.

In one classic example the camera shows Souza standing over an incinerated corpse, holding his shirt tail against his nose and breathing through his mouth. His comment? “Smells like barbecue”.

The simple folks of Manaus ate it up. (No pun intended.)

Until Souza came along, much of what went on in Manaus hadn’t been a matter for public debate. Now, at last, they had a champion, a man who told it like it was, a man who was willing to put the authorities on the spot. Souza became a folk hero, a super star, not only in Manaus, but throughout the whole State of Amazonas.

Souza spotted his chance and took it. He ran for the state legislature and was elected with a plurality never before achieved by any candidate.

Now for the unfortunate truth: criminality, in that benighted state, is not always an affair of the cops vs. the criminals. In fact, the cops in Amazonas often are the criminals. And so are the judges. And so are the legislators, which is why the state government is seldom prepared to do anything about it. But the federal bureaucrats in Brasilia, when pushed, sometimes are.

So, yielding to pressure that Souza helped create, a team from the Brazilian Federal Police descended upon the city of Manaus. The investigation bore fruit within a fortnight. Tens of cops were arrested. By the time the dust cleared there were more than a hundred of them charged with crimes ranging from extortion to murder. Then the federal prosecutors moved-in. First one witness caved-in to a plea deal, then another. Within a month there was finger-pointing all around – and some of the fingers were pointing at Wallace Souza.

How, the prosecutors wanted to know, had it been possible for Souza and his crew to arrive first at a number of murder scenes? It wasn’t just that they arrived before the other reporters, no: they had an uncanny ability to get there before the cops. The boys in gray (that’s the color of the uniforms of Manaus’s municipal police) would pull up to find Souza engaged in a tirade about the despicable violence afflicting his beloved city while his cameraman zoomed-in on one gory detail after another. Might Souza himself have had something to do with those murders?

Turns out that more than a few people think he did. Souza was charged with ordering the killing of at least five people, which is surprising enough in itself. What’s even more surprising is the alleged motive: to boost ratings for his TV show.

Not only that. The prosecutors are saying he was involved in another endeavor - drug trafficking, and there has been speculation that the five victims, traffickers themselves, might have been Souza’s rivals.

Souza said no. He didn’t traffic in drugs, and he wouldn’t kill anyone just to get ratings. The prosecutors say he did. But the charges couldn’t be tried in a federal court. They were within the State’s jurisdiction. And guess who was the vice-mayor of Manaus?

Carlos Souza, Wallace’s brother, that's who.

And for some strange reason, Wallace was never brought to trial. 

And never will be.

On the 27^th of July, 2010, he died of a heart attack at the age of 51.

I don't put this kind of stuff in my novels about crime in Brazil.

No one would believe me if I did.