The American Historical Association has been in the forefront of professional academic organizations that have seen the potential of the Internet for fomenting the production and circulation of academic scholarship and for contributing to the teaching of history. This has been no more apparent than in the AHA Workshop, “Entering the Second Stage of Online History Scholarship,” carried out in the days before the 118th annual meeting of the American Historical Association and under its auspices. In the AHA Workshop, the topic was electronic scholarly publishing: maintaining its quality, mediating its use and access, and assessing its impact on the changing shape of the profession. It took into account the perspectives of all those involved in scholarly production: authors, journal editors, department chairs, university press publishers and editors, and, at the same time, those involved in mediating its use and access at the technical level, that is, the librarians and technicians.

When the Portuguese Inquisition officially began in the year 1536, Brazil inhabited only the extreme margins of the Portuguese Empire and elicited little concern from the Inquisitors in Lisbon. Royal authority only became permanently established in 1549 in the person of Tomé de Sousa as governor-general of Brazil. The establishment of ecclesiastical authority over Brazil occurred about the same time through the padroado real, or royal patronage. The Order of Christ (whose grand master was the king himself) and the Mesa da Consciência e Ordens administered the royal patronage in the colony. The Church in Brazil remained directly subordinate to the archbishopric of Funchal on Madeira until the first diocese was established in Bahia in 1551. Pernambuco did not become a diocese until 1676 when Bahia became an archbishopric. Throughout the entire colonial period Bahia remained the only archbishopric in Brazil, although six bishoprics were eventually established. For Pernambuco, this meant that until 1676 the highest local ecclesiastical officials were the vicars general, the rectors of the Jesuit College, and the priors of the Benedictine, Franciscan, and Carmelite convents.

Starting in the early twentieth century, Latin American physicians organized expeditions to study remote rural populations living in their own countries. These expeditions usually aimed to solve scientific mysteries, spread western medicine, protect urban populations from epidemic diseases coming from the countryside and increase the productivity of new areas of economic exploitation. They also produced fascinating knowledge, images and stereotypes on individuals and diseases considered rare in Latin American cities.

In this paper I will analyze a similar case: the medical dimension of an effort to “colonize” or modernize the Peruvian Amazon during the 1940s. This region, an expanse of more than 500 square kilometers, was—according to a prominent Peruvian economist—“territorio inculto” scarcely populated by primitive tribes. Economic, nationalistic and political motivations coincided in the term Colonización de la Amazonía used by governmental and international agencies. Its meaning included diverse proposals such as: to encourage the migration of Andean peasants, the implementation of scientific agriculture, the creation of rural schools and military posts, the “civilization” of local natives—a process developed by religious orders in the nineteenth century—and the construction of roads to facilitate access to urban markets.

“Peru lives in a psychological moment of singular confusion,” Argentine Ambassador Hugo Oderigo wrote in 1947, suggesting that “the United States and Argentina are its two great realities. It is attracted to our country by the community of historical origin, lives our reality, and recognizes the greatness” of General Juan Domingo Perón. On the other hand, the hegemonic United States, with its vast wealth and modern industrial order, offered promise for the future. In the years following the Second World War, both Perón and the Harry S. Truman administration forced two Peruvian presidents to choose between what one Lima journalist called “short-term Argentine imperialism” and the “exclusive domination which the Great Democracy of the North today exercises.” Perón's road promised rapid industrialization and liberation from foreign exploitation through statist corporatism and membership in a “southern bloc” of economically-integrated South American states, while Washington stood as the guardian of a new global order based on liberal capitalism and multilateral commerce. This conflict represents an important international aspect of what has heretofore been considered a domestic struggle within Peru from 1945-1949.