Janus incarnated in the rubber boom

In the contemporary bibliography on the early twentieth-century Amazonian rubber boom, the rubber baron is a mystifying character. He is usually portrayed as a generous godfather, who is rich, strict, smart, but also indifferent, immoral, hypocritical, and, above all, dangerous. Some authors think of him as a sophisticated gentleman, others as a cold-blooded killer. Whichever characterization of the rubber baron one may encounter, none is more appropriate to understanding his modus operandi than that of the man who is always above the law. In fact, an authentic rubber baron was expected to write his own ‘laws’. To comprehend his psyche and behavior is to explore the depth of the soul and culture of the social environment that engendered him. My intention in this essay is thus to explore a set of cultural traits that are recurrent in descriptions of this figure.

We owe one the most enduring descriptions of the rubber baron to Euclides da Cunha, who early recognized the perverse Janus-like duplicity in the rubber baron: “The savagery is a mask that he puts on and takes off at will”. His characterization of this ethical type is extraordinarily precise. Not content with an abstract description, Euclides looks back in history to find someone who could embody the contradictory attributes of the archetypical rubber baron he scrutinizes in his essay “The caucheros”. And that person had to be Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, the Peruvian rubber baron who exploited rubber along the Madre de Dios River around 1892 (Figure 4).

Euclides's portrait of this rubber baron serves to confirm patterns of refinement, cynicism, duplicity, and brutality, all combined in Fitzcarrald. According to the Brazilian writer, in a brief encounter between Fitzcarrald and some members of the Mashco tribe, who the Peruvian rubber baron was attempting to capture, he made their chieftain see