Mahogany

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, September 28, 2003
A Swirl of Foreboding in Mahogany's Grain

By JUAN FORERO

ON LOS AMIGOS RIVER, Peru -- After a month in the Amazon, feeding on spider 
monkeys and wild pigs, tormented by infected feet and mosquitoes, José 
Valderrama was about to see his efforts pay off.

He and his partners had ventured into the deepest reaches of Peru's rain 
forest, a region off limits to loggers. Under the jungle canopy, with 
parrots squawking nearby, they felled one mahogany tree after another, 
majestic giants that take 75 years to mature.

With the wood sawed into planks and lashed into a makeshift raft, Mr. 
Valderrama, 27, stood barefoot atop a cargo that would fetch $6,000 once he 
navigated it downriver, but be worth $300,000 by the end of its journey, 
most likely as furniture, home fixtures or high-grade paneling in the 
United States.

"I do not know who will exactly end up with it," he said.

(clip)

While once plentiful along waterways like Los Amigos River, mahogany trees 
have already been stripped from riverbanks easiest to reach. Still, 
grizzled men looking for a payday keep coming.

Contracted and equipped by middlemen, the loggers earn about $7 a day to 
sink into the jungle for up to half a year. Many come out with malaria or 
tropical infections. Some die from disease or accidents.

"The jungle makes you old -- the heat, the worry, the work," said one 
logger, Pedro Rojas, who is 37 but looks decades older.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/international/americas/28MAHO.html

====

From B. Traven's "Trozas":

Don Remigio left the men, who had been on the march since one in the 
morning to get there from their last bivouac by midday, standing in the 
tropical glare of the sun as if they were blocks of stone. Whether they 
were seriously sunburnt or even collapsed or went off their head, that 
didn?t seem to worry him. They cost so much of his money. He had to pay off 
each individual?s debts, since it was on account of them that the man had 
been sold or peddled to him. For each individual he had to pay the 
president of the municipality of Hucutsin the tax on the labor contract at 
a rate of twenty-five pesos, so that the authorities would arrest the man 
if he ran away. What is more, he had to pay a high commission to the 
advertising agents who bought out peons from the fincas, the estates and 
the villages, who were in debt to their masters, as well as other Indians 
whose police fines had to be paid in order to bring them here. No one could 
expect that the enganchadores, the advertising agents, would work for 
nothing, still less as they were in a business in which they hoped to get 
very rich. Finally, a cash advance had been paid to every man recruited by 
the agents, the better to tempt the men to confirm their contracts before 
the municipal president and thus, in the eyes of the civilized world, give 
the impression that it was a simple labor contract such as can be concluded 
anywhere on earth. The old cacique knew far better than the newly fledged 
dictators how to conceal the true conditions in his country from the 
suspicions of the other nations, helped by a gagged and self-corrupting 
press that groveled before him. What the workers themselves said or spread 
abroad was nothing but lies and slander. Truth was only what was written in 
the labor contracts, acknowledged by the workers, and stamped by an 
official authority. That the Indian workers could neither read nor write 
the dictator did not regard as his fault. Why didn?t they learn to read and 
write? They were too stupid for it and just didn?t want to learn.

All the amounts and payments that the contratista [contractor] laid out for 
a man he had recruited, that man had to earn back in the jungle. A 
contratista could not be expected to pay out all those amounts for an 
Indian, or even for two hundred of them, out of pure philanthropy, and then 
tell the man: "Many thanks for your friendliness, allowing me to pay your 
debts and give you an advance, which you take so you can get pissed and go 
whoring. Go back to your father?s house, increase and multiply, and live 
happy and contented to the end of your days!"

What would become of a contratista who did that sort of thing? In this 
world, where everybody has to fight for a crust of bread, even a 
contratista cannot give things away without there being something at the 
other end. He has to work damned hard to be able to live and to make 
something of it. If it happens that he has nothing once he is old, then he 
can go begging. So he must take care of his welfare as long as he is in a 
position to. Wife and children at home have to live too. And if he has to 
work hard himself, why not the peons? They?re not used to anything else 
anyway and do nothing but fool around. If they have no work to do, they 
just get pissed. Instead of thinking of something else, most of all how 
they can pay off their debts and escape from enslavement, they waste their 
good strength on nothing but bringing a crowd of kids into the world.

Besides, the people in New York and London want mahogany furniture. Why 
they want it has nothing to do with us contratistas. That is their 
business. But there is money to be made from it, a lovely mountain of 
money. Our jungles are full of caoba. We have no idea what to do with so 
much caoba. We have such an infinite amount of it that we actually make our 
railroad ties out of mahogany and ebony. Why shouldn?t we provide a few 
tons of our rich excess of this handsome wood for suffering mankind? Of 
course, it does have to be got out of the jungle. We contratistas can?t do 
that by ourselves. I least of all. I get great blood-blisters on my hands 
if I cut caoba just for three hours. Mahogany is as hard as iron, damn it. 
But those Indians, boozy fuckers that they are, are lucky to be able to do 
something for their fatherland and raise the exports figure.

This attitude of the contratistas is thoroughly comprehensible; it shows 
reason and a profound insight into the confused laws of world economics. Of 
course, the Indian thinks about it differently. But then he is only a 
wretched proletarian, not a director of a bank. And it is simply 
incomprehensible to any normal-thinking man that those goddamn proletarians 
simply won?t ever grasp how reasonable and right and patriotic are the 
ideas and opinions that are hatched out with so much trouble and worry and 
sleepless nights by dictators and factory managers, for the good of the 
fatherland. Goddamn it all, all those proletarians should just be shot, 
then there would be peace in the country at last. Why is the miserable dog 
a proletarian anyway? It?s his own fault after all. It certainly isn?t the 
fault of the contratistas that the peons are permanently so deep in debt to 
their masters. The master needs his money too, and if he finally loses 
patience and wants to have his money, because he has to have it, and so 
sells the peons to the contratistas for the amount of the debt, then there 
is an outcry and a lot of screaming about the slave trade and slavery.

It is all so clear, so simple, so logical, so reasonable, that one has only 
to wonder why the proletariat won?t understand it when they are dictated 
to. Once they understand for the first time and fully accept that 
everything done is done only for their good, that no dictator, no 
shareholder, thinks or has ever thought of impinging on the value of the 
worker or making him into a beast of burden, once they begin to see that 
people only want their good, even their best, then the time will at last be 
ripe when they may be counted among the reasonable, and every single 
proletarian will have the prospect of actually becoming a factory manager 
and chairman of a board of directors. But as long as he does not, or will 
not, understand, he must keep his mouth shut and let himself be managed and 
dictated to.

Everything here was therefore going right. No one was treated unjustly. No 
one had any cause for complaint. All the business, that of the advertising 
agents, of the contratistas and the companies, was carried on, always and 
in all circumstances, within the framework of the law. If gaps showed in 
the legal network, there was a dictator who mended those gaps with a 
signature. And what the dictator did was always right, for all his 
activities were confirmed by the Cámara de Diputados. If by chance one of 
the Diputados raised an objection, he ceased to be a Diputado, because he 
was hindering the order and the well-oiled progress of business. Only 
yes-men were accepted in the Cámara and the Senate. It was a joy to live, 
and anyone who didn?t like it had no right to live, and was shot. If there 
were moderating circumstances, then he went to the concentration camp, El 
Valle de los Muertos, an area fenced in with barbed wire, in the middle of 
the best-chosen fever swamp in the south of the state of Veracruz. He went 
there never to return. It was the golden age of dictatorship.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.