A Spanish journalist declared himself president of a country in the Amazon in the summer of 1899, in a town that had been renamed, on land that technically belonged to Bolivia, on the authority of no one but himself. Brazilian troops arrested him within eight months. Another president followed, a little more briefly. Then a veteran soldier raised an army of thirty thousand men in the jungle and tried a third time. Acre - the rubber-rich strip of forest Bolivia never really governed - became an independent country three separate times between 1899 and 1903, and disappeared back into a map within four years. The story is half boardroom, half swashbuckling adventure, and all about trees.
The trouble started with a treaty drawn in ignorance. In 1867 Brazil and Bolivia signed the Treaty of Ayacucho, dividing up the western Amazon. The line they drew gave Bolivia most of what is now Acre - territory Brazilian settlers had already been quietly colonizing for decades. Then the late-nineteenth-century rubber boom arrived. The hevea tree, native to this forest, produced latex that the industrializing world suddenly could not get enough of. Tires, belts, hoses, insulation - the whole mechanical age ran on it. Brazilian rubber tappers flooded into Acre chasing the seringais, the rubber groves, and by the 1890s the population of the supposedly Bolivian territory was about ninety-five percent Brazilian. La Paz was too far away, across the Andes, to do much about it.
Luis Galvez Rodriguez de Arias was a Spanish journalist and former diplomat, and in 1899 the state government of Amazonas - the Brazilian state to the north - secretly hired him to lead an expedition that would detach Acre from Bolivia. Galvez did exactly that. On 14 July 1899 he declared himself president of the First Republic of Acre, set up his capital in a river town called Puerto Alonso, and renamed the place Cidade do Acre. For eight months he was the head of state of a country nobody else recognized. Then, in March 1900, the Brazilian government - worried about the diplomatic fallout of a Brazilian-backed adventure turning into a real secessionist country - sent troops to arrest him. Galvez was deported to Spain, and Acre was handed back to Bolivia.
The inhabitants of Acre had expected the Brazilian state to back them up. Instead they now faced both Bolivia and Brazil. In November 1900, someone tried again. Rodrigo de Carvalho declared a Second Republic of Acre. It lasted only a matter of weeks before being suppressed. What had been an elaborate, well-financed operation the first time was now a hopeless one. For the next three years the rubber tappers of Acre lived in a territory that officially belonged to Bolivia, paid taxes to Bolivian agents, and waited for someone to try a third time.
Jose Placido de Castro was a veteran of Brazil's Federalist Revolution of 1893, a soldier from Rio Grande do Sul who had come to Acre in 1899 as chief surveyor of an expedition and was about to head back to Rio de Janeiro. The separatist Acre leaders approached him in 1902 and asked him to lead a third attempt. He accepted. Castro imposed strict military discipline, organized a revolutionary army that eventually reached about thirty thousand men, and led them from victory to victory through the jungle. On 27 January 1903 he proclaimed the Third Republic of Acre with himself as president. This time the Brazilian government did not simply send troops to arrest him. Brazilian forces moved into northern Acre, and the issue was kicked to diplomats.
Jose Paranhos, the Baron of Rio Branco, was Brazil's foreign minister and one of the most skilled diplomats in the Americas. He negotiated the Treaty of Petropolis, signed on 17 November 1903. Under its terms, Bolivia ceded Acre to Brazil in exchange for a package that included lands in Mato Grosso, two million pounds sterling in cash, and Brazil's commitment to build the Madeira-Mamore Railroad - a line that would give landlocked Bolivia access to the sea by circumventing the unnavigable rapids of the upper Madeira River. On 25 February 1904, Acre officially became a federal territory of Brazil. It is now a state, with its capital at Rio Branco. The railroad was eventually built, at enormous cost in lives to yellow fever and malaria, and ran for a few decades before being abandoned. The Baron got a city named after him. Placido de Castro got a town named after him. Galvez got a historical footnote. The forest remained a forest.
The events of the Republic of Acre centered on the Acre River basin in what is now the Brazilian state of Acre, around 9.97 degrees south, 67.80 degrees west. The core territory runs along the Bolivian border in western Brazil. The modern capital Rio Branco (SBRB / RBR) sits at the historical heart of the former republic. Visible from altitude as dense Amazon canopy cut by meandering rivers; the border itself is invisible except where a road or a town marks it.