Fordlandia (17 page)

IDE, OR OZ as he was called (O. Z. was his complete first name), worked in Ford’s legal division, a branch of the company loyal to Edsel and considered a bastion of professionalism. Taciturn where Blakeley was brazen, the lawyer at first didn’t pick up on why his partner was acting so strange on the dock when he introduced him to Consul Minter and the Ford dealer Pickerell. But then he realized it was because Blakeley was trying to hide from them the fact that Ide also worked for Ford. “They thought I was just someone he had met on the boat,” remembered an irritated Ide. He didn’t make much of it until later that night, when he learned that Blakeley had kept him from being invited to a reception at the consul’s house. Villares, too, was a mystery. Ide had never heard mention of Blakeley’s elegant friend, who, since meeting them on their arrival, was always around, offering his services as interpreter and general liaison and seeming to know more about the mission than Ide himself did.

Ide, of course, was unaware of the role Schurz and Villares had played, with an assist from LaRue, in pushing the idea that a specific strip of land along the right bank of the Tapajós River was the best place to grow rubber, though he quickly identified Villares as an “opportunist” who had managed to obtain an option on that land. Whatever his opinion, Ide had little choice but to cooperate with his colleagues. He could try to work around them by enlisting Consul Minter, but Henry Ford didn’t want the US government to know of his affairs, much less participate in them. He could try to negotiate an agreement with the governor on his own, but having spent his time on the
Cuthbert
playing bridge instead of learning Portuguese, Ide was lost in the local language. That left the ubiquitous Villares, whom Ide eventually came to like. He even later defended the Brazilian, believing that the money he and his partners would make was simply the price of doing business. “Between them,” he recalled, “they had to pay off the Governor and the other political boys who had something coming to them.”

Despite these machinations or, as Ide soon realized, because of them, discussions went smoothly with Brazilian officials. Villares, Blakeley, and Ide met with Governor Dionysio Bentes—the man who granted to Villares, Schurz, and Greite the option to the land in question—to begin negotiations. There wasn’t much to negotiate. Bowing, nodding, and smiling to bridge the language gap, Bentes told the men they could have anything Ford wanted. The concession required approval by the state legislature, but that, he assured them, was a formality. He then sent the delegation off, as Ide remembered, to “prepare a bill to be presented to the legislature, setting forth in this petition exactly what we wanted.”
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One of the first things they needed to do was draw up a legal description of the designated property. For this, they went to the mayor of Belém, António Castro, who Ide thought looked “kind of like a monkey.” Castro was already promised some money by Villares, but he was happy to offer his services as a civil engineer for an additional fee.

Ide had not been to the property—it was a six-day boat ride from Belém. But in his meeting with Castro he unfolded a map of the Tapajós valley and with a heavy black pencil traced out a seventy-five-mile line up the river, then inland seventy-five miles, then another line parallel to the first, and then finally back to the starting point. A total of 5,625 square miles.

That’s an “awful lot of land,” exclaimed the surprised mayor. “That’s not your problem,” Ide shot back. “I just want you to give us a description.”
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Next on the agenda was to sit down with Samuel McDowell, the local Ford dealership’s lawyer, to hash out the terms of the contract. On a “yellow tablet” Ide, Blakeley, and Villares wrote “just what we wanted in the bill that was going to the legislature.” They had only vague instructions from Dearborn, so they asked for everything they could think of: the right to exploit the land’s lumber and mineral reserves, the right to build railroads and airfields, to erect any kind of building without government supervision, establish banks, organize a private police force, run schools, draw power from waterfalls, and “dam up the river in any way we needed to.” They exempted the company from export taxes, not just on rubber and latex but on any products and resources the plantation would want to ship abroad: “skins and hides, oil, seeds, timbers, and other products and articles of any nature.” “We thought of a lot of things there that we had never heard of before,” said Ide, and “as we got into it, we’d think of these things and put them in.”
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In return for Bentes’s generosity, Ford’s negotiators obligated the company only to plant a thousand acres of the grant with rubber within a year. They did this to preserve the “symmetry and equilibrium” of the contract and to provide a show of good faith that Ford really did intend to cultivate rubber and not just mine the land for gold or drill for oil. Blakeley assumed that he would be named manager of the estate and that he could easily clear and plant as much as three thousand acres within a few months. McDowell then “dressed the contract up in the proper language” and had it translated into Portuguese. When the team passed it along to Governor Bentes, they expected him to balk at some of the requests. But the governor presented the bill to the legislature with nary a comment, complete with everything asked for by the Ford team. “Much more,” wrote Ide, “than we hoped to get.”
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All told, the state of Pará ceded Ford just under 2.5 million acres, a bit less than what the Dearborn lawyer sketched out on the map but, at close to the size of Connecticut, still a vast dispensation. Half of this was from the Villares claim, for which Ford was to pay $125,000, a pittance considering the company’s enormous wealth. Public land covered the other half, which Ford received for free.
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As they waited for the legislature to ratify the deal, Ide took care of unfinished business. He and McDowell incorporated the Companhia Ford Industrial do Brasil as the legal owner of what quickly came to be called Fordlândia—the Portuguese word for Fordville. Then he and Blakeley sailed to Rio to work out the terms of the tariffs the company would pay to import material and machinery. At the time, Brazil’s constitution was a model of “extreme federalism” that invested in state governors the power to grant the kind of generous concessions Bentes gave to Ford. Import duties, however, fell within the national government’s jurisdiction. But before Ide had a chance to conclude his negotiations with federal officials, he was called back to Belém. So he left Blakeley to wrap things up. When Blakeley returned to the Amazon, he claimed to have obtained from the federal government a deal that “everyone said impossible”—that is, the right to import all machinery and goods completely free of customs duties. As it turned out, “everyone” was right. He received nothing of the kind.
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But the problems caused by Blakeley’s overconfidence lay in the future. Back in Belém, things were moving along nicely. Bentes was as good as his word, and the state legislature, on September 30, 1927, ratified the concession exactly as the Ford men composed it. It took under three months to negotiate and finalize the deal, a far cry from the fruitless years wasted on trying to get the US Congress to approve Ford’s Muscle Shoals project.

With his work finished, Ide made arrangements to return home. He wired his wife, who, not having fared well in Belém’s heat, had left for the United States a few weeks earlier: “Everything jake sailing on Hubert tonight love Oz.”

He also telegrammed Dearborn, urging the home office to compensate Villares: “I am thoroughly sold on Villares, both as to his professional knowledge of tropical horticulture and ability and also as to his reliability and honesty.”

For his part, Villares, eager to pay off Greite, Schurz, Bentes, and the other “political boys” who made the deal possible, followed up with his own cable.

“Great joy enthusiasm among people,” he wrote. “Send funds.”
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CHAPTER 8

WHEN FORD COMES

O. Z. IDE RETURNED TO DEARBORN TO DEBRIEF COMPANY OFFIcials. He tried to warn Edsel and Henry Ford about Harry Bennett’s protégé, complaining of Reeves Blakeley’s exhibitionism and other rough behavior while in Belém. Yet Henry Ford, with the same leniency and perhaps fondness he had for Bennett—who just then was increasing his cruelty on the factory floor as well as solidifying his influence over his boss—nonetheless decided to tap Blakeley to head the plantation. Along with a number of other Ford employees, including John R. Rogge, a lumberjack from the Upper Peninsula, and Curtis Pringle, the former sheriff of Kalamazoo, Blakeley returned to the Amazon in early 1928 to begin work and prepare for the arrival of two Ford-owned cargo ships containing heavy equipment and other material needed to establish a small city.

In Belém, the advance team was joined by Jorge Villares, who for a few months after the concession was ratified enjoyed a good reputation in Dearborn. Blakeley and Villares formed an unlikely partnership. The Ford man was arrogant and filled with purposeful energy, the Brazilian fretfully effete. Yet their shared sense of confidence papered over these differences in style. Blakeley bought a launch and the expedition set out up the Amazon, stopping in the town of Santarém, at the mouth of the Tapajós. After purchasing provisions and hiring a work crew of twenty-five laborers, the group pushed off from the town’s pier, towing a thatch-roofed barge that served as a makeshift kitchen for Tong, a Chinese cook, and his assistant, Ego, and headed up the Tapajós River, to found Fordlandia.

Blakeley and Villares had already selected the site for the new settlement, a village named Boa Vista, which means pleasant view in Portuguese, based on their reconnaissance of the area during Blakeley’s previous trip to the Amazon. It sat 650 miles from Belém and about 100 from Santarém, at a point where the river stayed deep right to the shore, which would save on dredging expenses and allow the unloading of heavy equipment. The bank quickly rose fifty feet within a hundred yards of the river, continuing to climb another two hundred feet over the course of the next mile.

It was a providential location high enough to afford protection from mosquitoes and other insects, Blakeley insisted in his report to Dearborn, though he consulted no entomologist to support his claim. And it was rich in trees and resources. One could find about twenty exportable trees on any given acre, he said, including the redwood massaranduba, a dark reddish brown heartwood called angelim, and Spanish cedar, in addition to old-growth wild rubber trees. There was, Blakeley believed, a strong possibility that they would find oil, along with gold, silver, platinum, ores, and possibly diamonds. The Cupary River, a tributary of the Tapajós that ran twenty miles into the estate, would be, Blakeley said, a perfect spot for a hydroelectric dam. And until the planted rubber matured to produce sap—which takes about five years—a number of company outposts could easily be established at key points to buy wild rubber. Blakeley told Ford that the Tapajós valley produced fifteen hundred tons of latex a year and it would be relatively easy to “capture all of that.” With fair treatment and higher prices, the river’s tappers would happily abandon their “Syrian patrons” and sell their rubber to Ford’s agents.
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But before Blakeley, Villares, and their crew could start work in Boa Vista, they needed to sort out competing claims to the land along the riverbank where they wanted to base their operation. When O. Z. Ide was researching the Amazon’s property registry during the concession’s negotiation, he noticed that there existed a few hundred deeded lots within the boundaries of the land granted to Ford. About seventy-five or so families lived along the bank of the Tapajós River, another fifty up the Cupary River, and more scattered throughout the estate, mostly rubber tappers who worked a trail or two. Some had title to their land, but many paid rent to local merchants who held the deed, like the Franco family, who lived just across the Tapajós, or the Cohen family, just downriver in the small town of Boim. Most were descendants of boom-time migrants who settled in the area during the height of the rubber trade. They were generally known as
caboclos
, or “copper-colored,” the term used to refer to the rural poor of mixed ancestry, a blend of Portuguese, Native American, and African. Also scattered throughout Ford’s two and a half million acres were a number of small communities of Tupi-speaking people, who hunted and gathered, farmed and fished, living on cassava and other jungle fruits. “I met Indians there,” John Rogge, the lumberjack on Blakeley’s advance team, wrote home to the Upper Peninsula, “and ate everything but monkey meat.”
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Ide wasn’t too concerned. They were “just squatters,” he thought, who lived in little shacks on “very, very small patches of land along the river. If anybody had any property right where we were going to clear,” their land would just be purchased and they would be moved somewhere else. Back in Dearborn, Ernest Liebold agreed, thinking they were just “some native tribes” that didn’t “stay in one place very long.” Ide decided the best thing to do was to “forget about those fellows” until operations were under way, and he wrote into the Bentes contract a clause that would allow Ford to buy title to any property within the boundaries of the concession.
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It was hard, though, to “forget about” the Franco family, since they owned the entire village of Boa Vista. They were descendants of Alberto José da Silva Franco, a Portuguese migrant who a century earlier had been one of the region’s most prosperous rubber traders. How Franco came to the Tapajós is bound up in one of the most brutal chapters in Amazonian history.

ALBERTO FRANCO ARRIVED in the Amazon from Lisbon in the early nineteenth century, wealthy but not enough to enter into Belém’s
elite lusitana
—the prosperous Portuguese class that controlled the city during the colonial period. So he settled in provincial Santarém, establishing himself as a slave-owning merchant. But he was soon on the move again, in flight from the Cabanagem Revolt, or the War of the Cabanas, Brazil’s bloodiest uprising.
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