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Hi, I'm Susanna Hecht. I'm a Professor at
UCLA, and I'm the Director of the Brazil
Center there. Right now, in this next
chapter, we're going to look at the
background to modern development. It
really goes from, sort of, earlier times——
particularly, the military times——to about
1964, through to the end of the
military period. It's important to
remember that for most of the 20th century,
Brazil was under military rule. So, when
we think about Amazonia, it's useful to
think about a kind of "military
developmentalism." First of all, that
there's always been geopolitics in there;
the scramble for the Amazon goes on for
hundreds of years between Spain and
Portugal. The key idea is that of Roman
law, which is called "uti possidetis"——"he who
has, keeps." So, in this sense, you can kind
of understand the pressures for
colonialism going on. The second thing is
that "kings make maps, and maps make kings."
So, there's a lot of strategic mapping
and survey groups going through, and,
essentially, the military concerns are
fundamental. So, it's important to
understand that for most of its history,
Amazonia was of concern to its nation states,
primarily for military reasons; yes, there
was gold and other stuff coming out of
it, but the military orientation in the
geopolitics was really important. Also,
the ideology of the "March to the West,"
particularly in the early part of the
20th century, becomes central to thinking
about Amazonia and incorporating
Amazonia, and the interior, more generally
into the concept of the nation state. As
historians will tell you, most of the
history of South America is so-called
"coastal history," rather than the more
central——for our interests——interior
history. So, Amazonia has been a
globalized space for a long time; it's
been a militarized space; and it's been a
space of conflict, both between
Indigenous populations, various kinds of
nations, and other kinds of dynamics,
including the Cold War and European
structural changes. One of the things
that is important to keep in mind––and
we're now moving forward here––
modernization, authoritarian high
modernism, and military developmentalism
to about 1984. So, there's
been this history that I just mentioned
of constant military concern. What we
start to see at this juncture is that
Amazonia becomes a central question for
the military regime. No sooner do they
take power then the next day, they
essentially come out with an Amazonian
program. So, it has has been a worry that
Amazonian military theorists have
thought about for a long time, and they
come prepared. One of the things that's
important, and has been important all
along through the 20th century, is the
development of infrastructure. So, what we
see in this is an emphasis, immediately,
on expanding infrastructure. So, this
means the development of the Trans-
Amazon Highway, and, also, we begin to
start to see the interest in the western
Amazon, with BR-
364. What's important to understand about
this, too, is that there's this idea of
"growth pole development," so, there's
investment in key sectors linked by
infrastructure. Those growth pole
activities are highly subsidized; you'll
be amazed to hear that these involved
mostly livestock and mining, but there's
also another piece of this, which is the
use of Amazonia as a safety valve for
pressure for agrarian reform. So, one of
the things that's important to keep in
mind here is that we have sort of three
central things: infrastructure; growth
poles——mining and livestock, for the most
part, at this point; and then, third,
agrarian reform. So, these become the
dynamics. These roads go
in, and the March to the West becomes
really important. It's a national
ambition; it's national integration.
What's important to keep in mind here is
that they imagined the place empty——that
is, a "tabula rasa" on which they could do
whatever they want; it was the call of
the "virgin lands." And, of course, this was
appealing, not just to the military, but
it was also legitimizing for this
military regime. What you see here is a
sort of blackened landscape on one side
and the forest on the other. And while
we see it that way, this important
drawing from an Indigenous person
basically shows an Indigenous version of
this, which isn't just the logs and the
machinery, but rather all the animals and
all the creatures that are lost in this
process of large-scale transformation.
It's this large-scale transformation and
the kinds of losses that occur——and the
fact that there were Indigenous people,
traditional people, and so on——that begin
to also
trigger a huge outcry against the
military strategy, the top-down strategy
of occupying this place without
attention to the other living creatures,
without attention to the other complex
societies that could be found there, and
the other kinds of histories that might
imply a different kind of future. So,
it's important to keep in mind that when
we look at military developmentalism,
it has three big ideas:
(1) infrastructure; (2) subsidized, large-scale,
and agrarian reform; (3) and almost total
indifference to environment. What happens,
of course, is that they aren't
coming to an empty land; they're coming
to a very full and complex land, and then
there is a global outcry. And it becomes
so intense, and so problematic, that the
questions of human rights, the questions
of environment, the questions of the form
of development, come under review, and
this is part of the pressure that
undermines, eventually, the continuation
of the dictatorship, with a kind of
dramatic moment in which Indigenous
insurgent citizenship of various kinds
and international concerns over
environment collided with a national
critique of the problems of military
developmentalism. This produced a new
constitution in 1988, which was
landmark and, in fact, widely imitated
elsewhere throughout Latin America. What
does it do? It involves the expansion of
rights and resources——that is, people who
were previously disenfranchised, who had no
political role, find that political role,
and also find it in light of control
over new forms of territory, and also in
a really single important thing:
emphasize the importance of environment,
and even things like the rights of
nature——the Pachamama, as it's said,
as it's described in the Andes. These
new forms of rights and rethinking are
really important for regional processes,
particularly as they moved into the 20th
century. It's the rights of nature——the
Pachamama. It's also a recognition of
new forms of citizenship, so that you
start to see Quilombos, Indigenous people,
traditional people, and other people
who've been disenfranchised taking on
new roles in trying to structure their
own history, as well as the history of
the nation. So, Amazonians, who had been
extremely marginalized, start to move
into positions of importance and also,
intellectually and politically, they take
on a new weight. This is extremely
important, and it results in the creation
of a number of new institutions. We have
to understand that state formation
involves creating new institutions——it's
not just people being active or being
concerned about things. We have the rise
of civil society, but also we have the
rise of new kinds of institutions. These
include a number of activities——the
creation of environmental agencies,
the creation of the ability to
surveil, a lot of monitoring of
deforestation, and other kinds of things.
But these also occur in light of a
larger structural change that has to do
with the rise of neoliberalism. So, while
state formation involves a lot of civil
society and actual institutions of the
state, what is also happening——and you can
sort of see why because, actually, at the
time this was occurring, the
authoritarian state no longer really
existed, and civil society hadn't evolved
very much——but what we see, then, is a kind
of market-led, export-led development. And
this basically involves neoliberal
reforms, which is largely contained in
privatization, much more open markets,
more open to international capital and
finance, and export-led development, which
has always been historically important,
as we've discussed, but which becomes
much more important. The other thing
that's often overlooked in these
discussions is what I call, and what is
generally called, the "China shock," which
is, as China moves into international
markets, and is open, and these areas have
opened up, what happens is that the
industrial and manufacturing bases of
the Amazonian countries become
extremely uncompetitive globally, and
even nationally, because of the cheap and
excellent Chinese goods. So, one
problem is that what had been sort of
the option for development——which was
manufacturing in certain kinds of
industry——are overridden to some
degree by the "China shock." One other
problem with this is the emergence of petrostates.
You don't, maybe, think of Amazonia
as being centrally engaged in
petroleum and other kinds of
hydrocarbons, but it has been, actually,
since the 1920s. What's important to
realize is that there are massive
hydrocarbon deposits throughout
Amazonia, along the, sort of, foothills of
the Andes and then also on the ocean
areas. So, what has happened is that
oil development, which is very high-tech
and does not create a lot of jobs——even
though it creates a lot of money and a
lot of opportunities for corruption——
becomes a kind of "oil curse." It also is
highly polluting, and, so, in the context
of trying to change things in terms of
climate change, expanding oil production
more generally is really a problem. The
problem that also emerges with this
is that there really aren't that many
other important alternatives——and,
also, the opportunities for corruption
are so delirious that it becomes a kind
of seductive sector, and this, of course,
has driven several
several nations into a lot of
political trouble and a lot of
corruption problems in the national
State. So, it's important to realize that
Amazonia has, sort of, what is called
"the oil curse," which is also part of this
expanding, new Amazonia that we're
starting to look at.
[Music]
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SDGAcademyX: AMZN001 The Living Amazon: Science, Cultures and Sustainability in Practice

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