Deep in the Jungle

WAS BONANZA your favorite TV show? Did you crave the sight of Chuck Connors shooting 'em up on The Riflemen? Well, Jonathan Kandell wants you to experience the real thing. Just hop a flight to Rio, but don't tarry too long in Sugar Loaf's shadow. To see the world of frontier adventure you must go inland to the heart of South America, the Amazon basin. There, in a climate only somewhat wetter than Dodge City, is the familiar world of shootouts, corrupt lawmen and hardy pioneers.

In his book Passage Through El Dorado, Kandell plays up the similarities between the wave of settlement now occurring in the jungle interior of South America and the push west so important to U.S. history. The wild, reckless settlement of the Amazon region has much of the character of an Oklahoma land rush. And they may have the same importance for the nations south of the border that the settlement of the west had for the United States-relieving overcrowded cities and rural areas of some of their excess populations. This could be especially important in nations like Brazil, whose urban areas have been deluged recently by a flood of migrants from the poorer sections of the country.

Passage Through El Dorado's best moments come when Kandell describes the frontier's conflicts and the people who fight them. As a chronicler of the new frontier he varies between the sociological reasoning of a Frederick Jackson Turner and the adventure-packed storytelling of Louis L'Amour. He does a better job at the latter. While he makes many interesting observations about the changes the settlement of the frontier will have for South America, the book remains very much a fun read, highly suitable for beach-towel browsing. In what current novel can you meet Robert Suarez, the "Cocaine King of the World," head of a $400 million dollar operation which harvests, refines and exports the leaf, gathering it from the hillsides of Bolivia and transporting it to the skichalets of Aspen and the dorms of Choate.

But the settlement of the frontier also has a deeper meaning; it is a new turning inward by a continent used to relying on its ties with other parts of the world for its sustenance. The Amazon basin represents a huge region whose conquest and utilizations is one of the continent's brightest hopes.

These hopes are not simply economic. By realizing a common interest in the development of their interiors, the nations of the Amazon region may be able to form closer links and pacify some of the contintent's most troubled border regions. As Kandell notes, this has already taken place along the Paraguayan-Brazilian border, where the two nations have been united by the building of the world's largest hydroelectric dam on a river which separates the two nations. Unfortunately, this analysis is overly optimistic; the increased importance of frontier areas can just as easily create new tensions. The recent discovery of oil deep in the jungle along the border between Ecuador and Peru, for example, has only intensified the long-standing feud between the two nations.

But Kandell does note feuds of another sort that are commonplace in certain areas of the new frontier. In Brazil the encouragement given by the government to settlers in the agricultural regions newly carved out of jungle has had the unexpected side effect of creating large numbers of poor squatter settlements, where would-be settlers wait to receive land. In Paraguay, the sudden influx of large numbers of settlers to the region around the Itaipu dam has caused many Paraguayans to become concerned over the security of the border.

But the biggest conflict in the new frontier has occurred in Bolivia's sparsely settled Beni region, where the number one export is cocaine. The millions of dollars the fad drug of the 80's has brought to the impoverished nation gives the growers an important role in the national economy. So important, Kandell reports, that the last government which cooperated with Drug Enforcement Administration officials from the United States was quickly removed from office by the military.

Kandell, whose years with the New York Times were spent covering the paroxysms of violence which swept Argentina, Chile and Uruguay in the early 1970's, is obviously happy to emphasize the hopeful side of the continent's recent history. However, his optimism looks not to the past, but the future. The book takes the reader along an imaginary road, five thousand miles along-a crescent along the fringes of the Amazon watershed. The road was sketched out by Peruvian President Belaunde, for whom it was part of a vision of a prosperous, developed core of a continent that would have freed itself of social turmoil. The reader can only hope that Kandell's vision, like Belaunde's, can be realized.