Jim's Jungle Juice

The ad first ran in the daily paper of Porto Velho, a steamy jungle city 2,000 miles in from the sea up the Rio Madeira tributary of the Amazon river. Last week papers all over Brazil were still delightedly reprinting it.

"Open a bar in your house. Be your only customer. Give your wife 1,440 cruzeiros [$7.57] to buy a case of 24 bottles of caninha Garcas [raw-sugar-cane alcohol]. Buy a bottle a day at 5 cr. (3-c-) a shot from your wife. If you live another ten years and then drop dead, your widow will have 115,200 cr. [$606.31] in the bank--enough to raise the kids, pay off the mortgage, marry a good man and forget that she ever knew a drunken bum like you."

Payoff on Gamble. The ad was no joke to its author, James Bryan Choate, 35, a lanky Texan, or to the Brazilian territory of Rondonia (pop. 65,000) where he lives. For Choate, it began the payoff of a $125,000 gamble to tame 500,000 acres of jungle. To Rondonia it signalled the start of local industry, a supply of jobs as well as caninha. The territorial government willingly blessed the venture with a five-year tax grace.

No longer would the natives have to send money for caninha out of the territory to Rio de Janeiro from which it took five months by river to reach Porto Velho. More important, the ships can carry badly needed beans and flour instead.

Choate married a Brazilian girl, settled in the country twelve years ago and knocked about at various jobs until he accumulated $24,000 dealing in land.

Then in 1955 he came across the 500-acre tract in Rondonia, an overgrown remainder of a busted boom in wild, natural rubber. "I wanted that land so bad my head boiled over" he recalls. He got it on time payments for a price estimated at less than 25-c- an acre, left his wife and three sons in Sao Paulo and moved in to make something of it.

The Brazilian Amazon Development Agency lent him $125,000 to start his rubber and Brazil nut groves, but since they take seven years before they bear fruit, he planted sugar cane for a quicker crop. It grew fast-- 18 ft. high. To make the most of it he had to process it into a product he could sell locally. Friends in Texas dug up $30,000 to build the distillery.

Vows Jungle Jim : "They'll get triple their money's worth." From the size of the native thirst, he will pay off his land next year, net $150,000 in 1962.

Dried Fish. This is just the beginning of the profits he intends to wrest from the jungle. Next he plans to buy another 1,200,000 acres of nearby land and clear enough so he can grow more cane and build a refinery to supply the sugar needs of the whole territory. After that he hopes to build a plant to dry fish caught in the Rio Madeira, sell them for 20-c- to 30-c- for 2.2 Ibs. in the Amazon basin to replace the imported dried codfish that sells for $1. Furthermore, the rubber and Brazil nut trees soon will begin bearing cash crops. Says Jungle Jim: "This is pioneering the way we did out West 100 years ago. It's the most exciting place on earth." With the success of his plantation assured, Choate is building a brick house so that his family can join him. But no matter what his ad advises, he will not set his wife up in business selling him caninha: he cannot stand the stuff.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.