In the year of the Amazon Synod, we wish to recover the memory and testimonial of Florentino Zabalza, Augustinian Recollect and Bishop of the Prelature of Lábrea (Amazon, Brazil) from 1971 to 1994, who left his memoirs that are now offered to all audiences, for the first time, through AgustinosRecoletos.org.
The rubber tappers, numerically and socially, form the most significant group of our people. Most of the inhabitants who live outside the four cities of the Mission and scattered along the hundreds of rivers in the region, are dedicated to the extraction of rubber. Behind the hard life that the job entails, there is a situation of loneliness, abandonment, poverty, misery and injustice experienced by all rubber workers that can hardly be told in its true reality.
The rubber tree is born by God’s good grace, in the jungle. There are no rubber forests like there are, for example, pine, oak or beech forests. Sometimes, from one tree to another there are 100 and more meters.
The rubber tapper’s day begins very early, around three in the morning. At that time he leaves home, carrying what he needs for his work: a special knife to cut, bleed, and make an incision in the tree; a bucket in which he will collect the liquid, the milk, the rubber; a shotgun with which he will defend himself from the tiger or other dangerous inhabitant of the thicket, or perhaps he will be able to kill some edible meat animal that will solve his food problem for a few days; and a bag with the essential flour and the equally essential coffee.
At three in the morning it is night, a double night in the thickness of the jungle. To get light and be able to walk and work, he carries an oil lamp that he assembles in a kind of vessel-helmet placed on the front part of his head; it can also be put on a wooden fork that he holds with his teeth. This lamp, with its oil fumes, causes enormous damage to the worker’s health.
The rubber tapper is always accompanied by the faithful dog that will either warn him of the danger that may threaten or help him to collect the coveted piece of meat.
Every day, the rubber tapper will cut the same trees, 100, 150, maybe more if they are relatively close together. The route, which he does twice every day, is called “the road”. He reaches the first tree, with that special knife he makes a deep incision in the bark, surrounding the trunk in a descending fashion; in the lower part of the incision, he places a small plastic, tin or other material container to collect the liquid latex or milk, which more or less abundantly begins to run through the incision made. The abundance of rubber depends on the age of the tree, the time it has been cut, the land where it grows, the technique used to tap it.
Every day the incision is made in a different place and when it has to be made very high, the rubber tapper climbs up a trunk in which he has made some notches and which is called a ladder. Sometimes this ladder is quite high and poses danger. With the water or simply with the night chill, it is slippery and dangerous. I know rubber tappers who have been battered for life by falling from these ladders.
He works in a circular way, so that the operation of tapping the trees ends very close to where it started. Since the path usually starts near his house, once the incisions are finished, he usually goes home for lunch.
After lunch, he exchanges the knife for the bucket and will follow the same route again, only this time collecting the liquid stored in the vessels. As it is easy to suppose, this tour is much easier and faster than the first one and, when it is finished, you return home with the content. Ten liters is a regular production, almost good. It could be three in the afternoon.
Near his house, in a rustic hut made of branches, he has an oven that he lights with firewood or materials that make a lot of smoke, and which they let out through a small hole. Over a column of smoke and on a stick that they are turning with one hand, they spill with the other the liquid contained in the bucket. Rubber solidifies on contact with smoke.
In four or five days, depending on the luck of the harvest, it will have formed a solid latex ball of 40 or 50 kilos, ready to be delivered. The eye disease that had already begun due to the smoke from the oil lamp that is used in the jungle, acquires alarming consequences in the task of smoking.
The day it rains you cannot work; just a drop of water that falls into those vessels that collect the sap, damages and spoils the entire content. If the rain arrives after the work began, the work, the product and the time will have been lost, and many illusions and plans that were thought out will have gone to the ground.
There is currently a product that, with a few drops inside the vessel, ensures that the water does not damage the rubber and that it solidifies as it falls, thus avoiding the heavy task of smoking. But many rubber tappers still do not use these methods.
In recent years, the government spends a lot of money trying to encourage the technical cultivation of the rubber tree; large tracts of jungle have been felled and trees have been planted there at a distance of seven meters from each other. Some of these plantations, made seven or eight years ago, have already begun to produce their first rubber.
When this system becomes general, production will be much greater, with much less work; but each man will be able to work many more trees and that will mean that many men will be left without work. One problem will have been solved, but another of a social nature will have been created.
Not infrequently, once the smoking task is finished, he will have to take the canoe and throw himself into the river to fish for dinner for the night and certainly tomorrow’s food for him and his family. When will he come back? Not infrequently, with few hours to sleep, he will return shortly before starting work and going out to the road to mow.
All rubber tappers work for others. All this immense jungle has an owner or someone who calls himself an owner. The properties are very large and, depending on their size, 10, 20, 50 or more families work on them.
But they do not have a salary in money, but rather work on the condition that they sell all the product of their work to the owner of the land. From time to time, the owner passes by his properties and the rubber tappers come with their product. They weigh it and the owner pays the established price, generally by himself. And he pays in a curious way, never with money, always with merchandise that he brings to sell to his workers.
This merchandise exchange operation, of rubber balls in exchange for basic necessities, is called doing the fortnight. The situation of tremendous oppression, of true slavery, of poverty, of misery, of a subhuman life of injustice, begins, continues and strengthens like this, fortnightly, and never ends for our poor rubber tappers.
The boss sets the price for which he is going to pay the rubber: he quotes it as first, second or third, according to his opinion. And with his merchandise he does the same. If they started stealing from what they bought, they end up stealing from what they sell.
Everything is very well written down in the owner’s notebooks: so many kilos of rubber for so much, gives so much; so much merchandise for so much, gives so much. The result of the operation is always unfavorable to the poor worker who remains in debt to the employer. Generally, no matter how much he tries, sweats and works, the worker will never manage to level the credit and debt columns; much less will he get his credit to be greater than his debit.
Many times, rubber tappers convinced that theirs cannot be like that, have presented their accounts to us; and many times we have found them wrong, always in favor of the boss. Do not forget that many do not know how to read or write, much less know how to add and subtract.
This system of work and remuneration goes back a long way, it has deep roots and it is not easy to change. The government puts a price on rubber, but not on the merchandise of first necessity; it sells these goods cheaper to the owners with the aim of making them cheaper for their workers; but in their desire for profit they neglect the government’s request and continue to sell at the same high price to the rubber tappers, recording the profits.
On the other hand, the rubber of the one who lives near the trees has the same price as the rubber of the one who lives far away. The merchandise, on the other hand, increases in price as the distance to where the workers live increases because, they say, the cost of transportation increases. Lastly, the bosses don’t always respect the rubber prices that the government has established and here justice limps so much that it never arrives.
For some time now, the National Radio of Brasilia has been heard very well; through it our people find out about many existing governmental laws; and the bosses are taking more care in their crooked dealings. The workers are encouraged by feeling more protected by authority and something is achieved. But… so much is still missing!
Injustice and theft are not always only on the side of the owners. Some rubber tappers, to obtain some profit, to be able to dress and feed the family a little more and better, or because they feel robbed, or simply out of lack of conscience, place another layer of lesser quality under a layer of good rubber with dirt; and then they try to enlarge and make heavier the balls of the fortnight. But they will rarely go unidentified and must face the consequences of having tried to deceive employers.
There are laws according to which the rubber tappers, with 10% or 20% of their product, would fulfill their obligations with respect to the bosses and could sell the rest in the free market to the best payer. But the owners do not agree and use a thousand tricks to keep everything. The laws come from Brasilia, but nobody comes to see if they are fulfilled.
The Church, the Prelature of Lábrea, has fully entered the matter, confronting the situation, trying to ensure that the rights of the rubber tappers are respected. We have earned many enmities; some rich people have withdrawn from the Church because the priests meddle in matters that do not concern them. Well, they have not yet crucified us like the one who preached justice and punished the unjust.
One of our achievements, which we consider important, has been the founding of the Workers’ Union. It is working very well, despite the difficulties that the environment imposes; much has been achieved and we hope to achieve much more.
We have hundreds of rubber tappers who worked in the rubber industry their entire lives, 30, 40 and more years, and they got nothing, they have nothing: not a house, not a piece of their own land where they can work. And they persecute us and criticize us, and call us communists, because we shout as loud as we can that this is an injustice.
One of the highest government authorities in terms of rubber and rubber tappers comes to Lábrea a lot and always visits us and tries to find out about the problems in this field, to try to solve them. I think one can believe in the correctness of his conscience and in his interest in improving the situation of the rubber tappers.
To him they owe the creation of a chain of existing stores in this rubber zone, in which the owners or employers buy cheaper than anywhere else, on the condition that they also sell cheaper to the workers. The last time he was here, he found out that the wishes of the Government, its wishes to help the poor, were not being fulfilled due to a lack of awareness among the bosses, and he threatened to close the Lábrea store if things did not improve.
An aid program in the field of health is also due to that same authority, consisting of a ship with doctors and nurses that travel through our Purús helping and caring for the inhabitants of its borders.
The first such program failed miserably. Doctors, nurses, and ship employees led the high life, earned astronomical salaries, and cared for no one. He found out what was happening and with a stroke of the pen closed the program. It seems that in the current and following program, it is giving better results.
There is a will on the part of the Government to improve things; there is interest in encouraging rubber production and try to provide better living conditions for rubber tappers to make this possible; What happens is that, as I already noted, the problem is old, it has deep roots and it is not easy to change when people are insensitive to the poverty and miseries of others, selfish, who only think about their profit and growth, even though for this they trample and humiliate others.
Going back a little, I think that anyone would think of asking: why don’t individuals, rubber tappers, buy directly from those warehouses established by the Government?
The question is easy to answer: many, most of the rubber tappers, live very far from the cities where the warehouses are. Some live fifteen, twenty and more days away. When for any reason they come to the city, they take advantage and buy, but usually the boss buys for everyone, sells for everyone and gets rich making scandalous profits from everyone.
I continue to believe that behind everything that is said and written, there is a situation of poverty, misery and injustice that I have not been able to describe. Perhaps you and some other reader who can see this, can imagine it. But I tried and apologize if I didn’t know how to recount it.
I end by recommending prayers for the fate of our rubber men. May God give us his light and his strength to always be on his side and one day be able to see them living a dignified, human life, as they deserve.
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