Belterra and Fordlândia

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Amazon [1]’s rubber industry had long been overtaken by Asian plantations, However, in the 1920s, American automobile scion Henry Ford got a bee in his bonnet that Santarém [2] was the ideal place for him to build a plantation that would supply rubber for his Model T’s tires. Ford purchased a vast tract of land, 100 kilometers (62 miles) southwest of Santarém, and then began shipping all the materials necessary for the construction of a rubber plantation town in the midst of the jungle.

The spitting image of a quintessential Midwestern town circa 1925, Fordlândia possessed cute little row houses with front gardens, a hospital, school, church, and even a cinema (aside from a rubber processing plant). Unfortunately, poor soil conditions, fungi that attacked the rubber trees, and the outbreak of diseases such as malaria doomed the project.

Never one to give up, in 1934, Ford purchased another tract of land, only 30 kilometers (90 miles) from Santarém (on the eastern bank of the Tapajós), called Belterra, where he installed yet another Made-in-America community. Although Belterra fared somewhat better than Fordlândia, the outbreak of World War II hampered transportation of supplies and equipment, and the introduction of synthetic rubber knocked the bottom out of natural rubber prices. By the end of the war, Ford had had enough. Having squandered over 25 million dollars, he gratefully sold both areas to the Brazilian government for $200,000.

Today, both of these utopian cities are eerily intact (Fordlândia’s rubber plant is still in operation), their retro Americana jarringly out of place in the midst of the Amazon [1] jungle.