Selecting, caring, and sending: doctors at the Battle for Rubber (1942-1944)

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the participation of doctors from Serviço Especial de Mobilização de Trabalhadores para a Amazônia (SEMTA) in the Battle for Rubber during the Second World War. The war effort and the agreements signed with the United States in 1942 implied the massive and urgent dispatch of Brazilian labor to the Amazonian rubber plantations. The article shows how the process of recruitment and selection of men from the northeast region for latex extraction revealed and bumped into historical problems of Brazilian society: disease, malnutrition, and illiteracy. These doctors should recruit thousands of workers in a poor, drought-stricken population and take care of them until they travel to the Amazon. It is a process marked by enormous pressure from the USA towards the federal government and northeastern governments to ensure that SEMTA and other agencies meet their agreed targets. Also, by criticism from economic sectors for the decrease in the supply of cheap labor in the Northeast.These doctors' performance reveals the dramatic living conditions of Northeastern men selected for a march that would heroically and tragically transform them into ‘rubber’s soldiers’.

Keywords Rubber soldiers; Medicine; Amazon; Health; Northeast; Getúlio Vargas