Pantanal: new books tell the region’s history – 04/28/2023 – Environment

Two recently released books bring complementary insights into the history of the Pantanal and the families that participated in the process that connected the region with the rest of Brazil throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Memoirs of a Pantanal”, work by journalist Teté Martinho in a bilingual edition (Portuguese-English), outlines a broader picture of the occupation of the Pantanal territory. Its narrative begins with the first contacts between Europeans and indigenous people in that territory, in the first decades of the 16th century, and reaches the present day, with special attention dedicated to the region of the Negro River, in the southeast of the floodplain.

“Pantanal: Reminiscence of Our Lives” is a new edition of the memoirs of Izabel de Arruda Viégas (1919-2013). Together with her husband, José Gomes Viégas, she became a cattle rancher in one of the most isolated areas of the interior of Mato Grosso do Sul from the 1930s onwards, raising her children there.

Both books were published by the Documenta Pantanal initiative, whose objective is to expand the dissemination of information about the region.

Although Viégas’s autobiography is mainly an account of the last three generations of his family and the Pantanal people with whom they lived, Martinho’s book also contains a considerable proportion of family histories, especially that of the clan started by Cyríaco da Costa Rondon ( distant relative of the military and indigenist Marshal Cândido Rondon, who called him uncle).

At Fazenda Rio Negro, owned by Cyríaco and his heirs, the iconic townhouse that appears in both versions of the telenovela “Pantanal” would be built.

The emphasis given to the trajectory of individual families may seem too narrow from a historical point of view, but it makes sense when one considers how the Pantanal was incorporated into the economy and society of the rest of the country. The vast wetlands, with their natural fields, were seen as an appropriate environment for the development of extensive livestock.

In addition, the low value of land until the first decades of the 20th century allowed a relatively small number of pioneering breeders to obtain legal ownership of thousands of hectares without much difficulty.

However, these immense properties did not arise in a vacuum. The Pantanal’s vocation for extensive cattle raising, according to Teté Martinho, was the result of a complex process, which also involved the participation of indigenous peoples in the region and ended up benefiting from their territorial spoliation.

In fact, when the Portuguese and Spanish arrived in the Pantanal lands, there had been no more herds of large mammals there for almost 10,000 years (that was when the so-called South American megafauna disappeared, at the end of the Ice Age). But the permanence of natural grasslands in the region made it a suitable environment for large herbivores.

This is how, when oxen, horses and pigs from the first colonial settlements began to flee, either through carelessness or during conflicts and natural disasters, populations of these animals quickly became wild in the Pantanal.

Some of them were once again domesticated by indigenous ethnic groups such as the Guaicuru (ancestors of the current Kadiwéus), who became knights and imposed tough resistance to colonizing ventures. Other native groups, such as the Paiaguá, took advantage of the rivers and wetlands to carry out surprise attacks against the invaders.

The slave expeditions of the bandeirantes from São Paulo, the brief gold cycle in the Cuiabá region and the border disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish empires led to the destruction of a large part of the indigenous populations and the gradual incorporation of the Pantanal territory to the rest of Brazil. This process intensified after the Paraguayan War (1864-1870) and with the population growth and industrialization of the country.

The urban centers of the early 20th century created a demand for meat consumption —for a long time, in the form of beef jerky— which the pioneer farms in the Pantanal sought to meet. As both books narrate, the creation of this economic nexus was far from being an easy process, even for those who managed to acquire vast lands in the region.

The work of Izabel Viégas immerses the reader in the scenario of that time, portraying the tremendous difficulties of transport on horseback or in oxcarts, the difficulties of access to medical treatment, the precarious security.

It is a striking reminder that, as the world grappled with World War II, huge swathes of the country still led a life that differed little from conditions found in Colonial Brazil.

Both books perhaps fail, to varying degrees, in overly romanticizing the Pantanal clans, either in their courage as pioneers or in their ability to create an economic system with low impact on the region’s ecosystems. In any case, the two works make valuable contributions to the understanding of one of the most fascinating natural and human landscapes in the world.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}