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Fordlandia - the lost city of the Amazon

By Jorge Sotirios - posted Tuesday, 12 May 2009


The morning mist scattered to reveal Fordlandia as I disembarked on to a long wooden pier. A group of dark gauchos shaded by cowboy hats stood idly by and muttered among themselves. Tourism was up. My arrival had doubled the year’s intake.

I took out my camera and began to focus. Most buildings had broken windows. No one bothered to smash those still intact; the dust that accrued over the years repelled even the hardest stones. Processing ramps criss-crossed at useless angles. I zoomed closer. Even snails had given up on them midway. Tufts of grass tumbled out of the hoods of skeletal Fords lying in fields whilst hydrants “made in Michigan” poked their red heads above weeds starved of fire.

I grabbed a coffee at the dockside canteen and was directed to the Ford production plant behind the schoolyard. At the end of a gravel driveway, a gate was tightly wound with heavy chains and clamped with an enormous lock. I managed to crawl beneath the honeycomb fencing and scramble over barbed wire that blocked the path to the main entrance. I felt as though I was trespassing. If this were a museum I would have it all to myself.

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The doors were barred. I entered the main building through a broken window. The interior was vast and practically empty. From what I could tell from holes drilled in the floor, machines had been unbolted and sold as scrap iron. What remained were large green turbines next to electricity meters with dangling wires. I swiped a layer of dust off the metal casing and sneezed over the words “Wesson of Chicago”. Dials and switchboards with burnt fuses in squeaky boxes were the last vestiges of a lost world. A hoist in a corner was surely where the chassis were once welded. In another corner, bric-a-brac piled together: a wheelchair, a pram, a filing cabinet. The Ford factory was a resting home for aged metal.

An iron plaque inscribed Fordlandia’s origins. It had been inaugurated in 1928 with equipment shipped from Detroit, where the Ford Motor Car Company created an alliance with Harvey Firestone (Ford produced the carriage, Firestone the tyres). Fordlandia was an ambitious plan to construct sawmills, a hospital, a radio station, employee housing and even an 18-hole golf course. A workforce of single men, mainly from Brazil’s north-east, was lured there with the prospect of good.

Fordlandia was conceived in the interwar years and designed to break the Anglo-Dutch rubber cartel. By growing his own rubber, Ford was pursuing a long-term strategy conceived in the offices of American planners. The United States was vying for global supremacy; therefore it had to control not only the means of production but also the source. “Vertical integration” became the ruling zeitgeist.

A car can be broken up into constituent parts: iron for the chassis, electricity for internal wiring, rubber for tyres, petrol and oil for energy, aluminium for wipers, chrome for fenders, glass for mirrors and windows. And so Ford bought up big in Brazil: ships, ports, railways, steel mills, hydroelectric plants, iron and coal mines, even the river for water supply and to discharge refuse. But with overheads like this, how was Henry Ford ever going to turn a profit? So where did it all go wrong?

For one, Amazon ecology proved resistant. Trees poorly planted allowed for overhanging canopies to spread the dreaded leaf blight microcyclos. Workers resisted too. They rebelled at the level of segregation in barracks, hygiene rules, eleven-hour shifts, wearing shoes, even the food they were forced to eat in the canteen (“death to spinach” was a rallying cry that fostered solidarity). A strike in 1930 was the beginning of the end. When workers united for better conditions (access to docks, quashing the prohibition on alcohol, unfair dismissals), the Brazilian military was called in to quell the uprising, arresting leaders and gaoling malcontents.

Fordlandia was an experiment that tried to modify human nature by replacing nature: workers were woken by bells and whistles instead of birdsong. They read clocks instead of the sun. The punched card at the entrance signalled the siesta they had lost. It seems inevitable that by 1935 Fordlandia had collapsed and by 1946 Ford had ceased operations in Brazil altogether, US$20 million out of pocket.

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Henry Ford was surely of his time. Fordlandia was once a thriving industrial town. Now it’s an abandoned antique warehouse no one bothers to visit.

Fordlandia is not unique. Development along this path has become a Brazilian fixation, acquired from the thinking of its masters. Whether it is roads (the Transamazonia highway), dams (the proposed Belo Monte), cities (Brasilia) or industry (Fordlandia), the zeal to construct is conceived in the Brazilian mind well before it is etched into the landscape. All it takes is a whisper in the ear from America or Europe.

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This is an edited extract of an article first published in the Griffith REVIEW, in the Cities on the Edge edition, May 2008.



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About the Author

Jorge Sotirios's book Lonesome George, C'est Moi recounts his South American adventures and will be published in 2009.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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