“On Ascension Sunday they saw at starboard side a powerful river, whose mouth was too big that it formed three islands… There were many big settlements, and the land was beautiful and fertile”. Thus did the Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal, Orellana’s companion in the expedition of the Amazons in 1538, write after seeing the mouth of the Purus River flowing into the Amazon.
A hundred years later, the Jesuit Cristóbal de Acuña, chronicler of Portuguese explorer Pedro Teixeira, navigating up the Amazon, described the Purus as “a famous river which the natives called Cuchiguará, navigable, although there are rocks in some areas. There is a lot of fish, turtles, an abundance of corn and manioc and everything needed to facilitate their entrance. The river is inhabited by various peoples…”
In 1689, the German Jesuit priest Samuel Fritz entered the Cuxiuara (Purus) river and wrote: “Many Cuxiuara Indians with their children came from their villages and occupied those abandoned houses. For eight days while I was there they attended to me with promptness and love, even more than if they were Christians, bringing me fish and turtles … and showing me that they wanted me to stay with them”.
There is little notice of expeditions into the Purus River. It appeared in the maps as a little parallel line to Madeira River, and like an insignificant river. It was a despised river, barely penetrated and explored. In the 19th century there were failed attempts to establish mission colonies and a reconnaissance expedition.
The rubber
Drought gave way to the rule of the water, the desert to the rule of the forest. The discovery of rubber was the spark that set off the invasion and colonization of Purus River by colonizing firms and shipping companies, with the support of the Brazilian government, from the middle of the 19th century.
Colonel Antonio Rodrigues Pereira Labre, who founded Labrea in 1873, was one of the pioneers and among the few northeasterners who made a fortune with rubber. He went as far as envision a railroad from Labrea to Bolivia – in the middle of the thick forest – to facilitate commerce, the transport of cattle, and to lower the price of food. Labrea would thus be converted into an international center of commerce, with a customs office and other offices for import and export.
The indigenous people were used to living in harmony with nature: they gathered only what they needed; in a fertile and generous land they did not need to store and they did no trade. It was impossible for the colonizers to reduce the natives for slave work and oblige them to tap rubber. In the face of colonizers’ force and weapons, the forest was an impenetrable hideout.
In that period, Labrea produced a third of the rubber of the Amazon. The brutal drought of Northeastern Brazil in 1877-1878, in which only in the State of Ceará 119,000 people died, was the occasion to encourage the transfer of thousands of men folk and transform them from farmers to rubber tappers. They hoped to get rich quickly, return rich to their land and return with their family. It was not to be so. Left on the banks of the Purus, in an unknown, harsh and insalubrious forest, many of them succumbed to sickness and others suffered cruel conflicts with the natives. The strongest survived. With them had arrived the recently ordained diocesan priest Francisco Leite y Barbosa, also from Northeastern Brazil. In that period, Labrea produced a third of the rubber of the Amazon.
First missionary
On 6 September 1878, with the presence in Labrea of the bishop of Pará and Amazon, the parish of Our Lady of Nazareth was created. As there was no church, the bishop said mass in the boat “Andirá”. He had sailed in that boat from Belém do Pará, in the mouth of the Amazon River, for many weeks. Manaus, a nascent city, had no bishop still. Two days later, on 8 September, feast of the Birth of Mary, Father Francisco Leite y Barbosa was installed as first parish priest of Labrea. The area of his charge extended from Peru and Bolivia to the mouth of the Purus in the Amazon: 400,000 sq. km., 3,000 km. of meandering Purus River and thousands of kilometers of tributaries.
The canoe and the oar were Father Leite’s only means of transport. He wrote in his diary that he spent long months going from one rubber plantation to another visiting the families, “trying with kindness and amiability to lead them to good and moral behavior, not finding it too difficult to unite in matrimony the couples who were cohabiting”. The immigrants from the Northeast brought their faith, their devotions to Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Sebastian, Saint Raymond Nonatus and Our Lady of Nazareth. They were the catechists and evangelizers. In rivers where, at most, people saw the priest once a year, it was the devotions that kept the faith strong.
Parish priest and councilman
For thirty years, Leite was the parish priest of Labrea and almost always the only priest. He constructed a brick factory, a carpentry shop, he organized the populace, and he was a councilman of the first town council and in his house was celebrated the first meeting of the town council wherein the councilmen swore, before the Holy Gospels, “to sustain public happiness”. In more than thirty years, Fr. Leite baptized more than 23 thousand children (more than five thousand were considered “illegitimate” having been born out of wedlock or of cohabiting parents) and he officiated the wedding of more than four thousand couples.
Labrea saw the publication of four newspapers, one after the other. At the end of the 19th century, with the guidance of the Spanish engineer Emilio Canizo, Fr. Leite started the construction of the cathedral of Labrea: the roof tiles came from Marseilles, the steel tower from Hamburg, the pews from Belém do Pará (Brazil) and the masons from Northeast Brazil. The cathedral was blessed and inaugurated in 1911. Three years before, the sick Fr. Leite, after 30 years in Labrea, had gone back to his native town. The town of Labrea, the seat, had “80 families and 120 houses”.
Augustinian Recollects
In 1926 the newly created Prelature of Labrea was entrusted to the Augustinian Recollects. The governor of the Amazon offered to the first Recollect, Marcelo Calvo, the post of mayor of Labrea. He declined. The missionaries always accompanied the proclamation of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments with a desire for cultural and social progress of the town.
A year after the Recollects arrived, the “Archifilarmónica Labrense”, directed by the religious Benvindo Beamonte, as well as the choir of singers, made their debut. The missionaries constructed boats and the town’s lighthouse. With electric generators they put up street lighting; they established schools and organized education; they fomented the arts and the theater; they constructed artesian wells; they were doctors of the soul and the body; they constructed the hospital, churches, social centers; they ploughed the field for agriculture; they encouraged social organization and unions; they constructed the landing strips for planes, and they spent months on end in the riverine rubber plantations.
Sister Cleusa, an Augustinian Recollect missionary, was brutally killed on her trip to pacify the mortal conflicts between the natives and the wood dealers of the Passiá River. Martyrs of the Amazon
And it was in the Purus River where three Recollects gave their life for the mission: Ignacio Martinez succumbed to fever during a desobriga (pastoral visit to the communities); Jesús Pardo died after saving three children from the Purus; and Mario Sabino disappeared in the waters of the Purus after a boat collision. Sister Cleusa, an Augustinian Recollect missionary, was brutally killed on her trip to pacify the mortal conflicts between the natives and the wood dealers of the Passiá River.
Labrea today
The rubber industry failed. Families fled the misery of the rubber plantations, only to fall prey to the wretchedness of the urban squatter colonies. The Labrea mission, however, conserves the original missionary enthusiasm: the evangelization of everyone and the progress of the poorest; the proclamation of God’s Word and the construction of churches, schools, community centers, houses; catechesis and education; month-long desobrigas by the river and the administration of the sacraments; formation of communities and associations; indigenous peoples and farmers.
Today two brilliant notes mark the face of Labrea:
– The committed participation of the lay in evangelization;.
– The participation of the Church, through different apostolates, in all moments and areas of human life, especially where the excluded are.
A no-holds barred war has been waged to prevent and destroy the entrenched evils like poverty, illiteracy, injustice, hunger, alcoholism and premature death, and to confront the new evils like drugs, violence, child prostitution, and the phenomenon of “street children” and “child mothers”. Work is being done for a better future, like the organizing of the indigenous peoples and framers, the defense of ecology, the rehabilitation of drug dependents, the preventive work with teenagers, the attention of the youth, the married couples and the aged.
Working arm in arm with Recollect Bishop Jesús Moraza are the Augustinian Recollect friars and the Augustinian Recollect Missionary Sisters, the Marists, the Oblates of the Assumption, the Marian Missionary Sisters, the consecrated lay of Epiphany Community and hundreds of lay people who in a disinterested way assume commitments in the different apostolates, which range from clear and explicit evangelization to frontline social involvement.
At present the challenge for the Church of Labrea is the formation of a native clergy.
MISSION DATA
– Nine Indigenous Tribes: Apuriná, Paumarí, Jamamadí, Jarawara, Banauá-Yafí, Dení, Yuma, Suruahá, Katauxí.
-Four Parishes:Labrea (68,508 sq. km. /38,451 inhabitants); Canutama (29,946 sq. km./11,844 inhabitants); Pauiní (43,447 sq. km./18,938 inhabitants); Tapauá (89,966 sq. km./19,996 inhabitants) according to official data.
-Some Pastoral Data: 1 bishop; 4 parishes; 3 incardinated priests; 10 religious men; 10 religious women; 215 basic ecclesial communities; 3,000 undergoing catechesis and 266 catechists; 4,286 children from 0-5 years of age being attended to and 124 pregnant mothers accompanied by 327 leaders of the apostolate for children; three schools with 4,100 pupils; 600 teenagers in the training shops of Centro Esperanza; 80 extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist and 697 members of the Legion of Mary.