Foreign News: Jungle Sabotage

Far up the valley of the Amazon, in the region of the Purús River, a colony of Japanese settled some 20 years ago with money from their government to start a jute industry. Jute proved a failure, so the settlers switched to rice. When rice did not pay off, they planted pepper, clearing large areas of the jungle. Suspicious minds thought they might be preparing airfields for an attack on the Panama Canal. The outbreak of World War II found some 20,000 Japanese scattered over some 2,700 square miles of the Amazon basin. In the course of the first roundups of...

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