Amid today’s conflagration in the Amazon, Bolsonaro went on television to pledge to protect the delicate - and globally vital - ecosystem. Known as the Baron of Rio Branco Project, the plan envisions large-scale development projects, eventually raising the Amazon region’s contribution to the Brazilian economy. Previously unpublished documents obtained exclusively by The Intercept flesh out the military’s plan for a push into the interior of the Amazon. And the army, empowered by Bolsonaro’s presidency, is simultaneously beginning another push of its own: the largest-scale plan to occupy and settle the Amazon since the dictatorship. Today, the Amazon is on fire, the result of moves attributed to Bolsonaro’s allies among the agribusiness interests trying to open up the forest for their economic gain. Isolated and off the grid, the nearly 200 residents of Laranjal village are among the some 800,000 indigenous people President Jair Bolsonaro says he wants to “integrate into society.” Photo: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images Reviving an Old Military Dream And a new military industrial push into the forest could prove to be a death blow to the Amazon.Īrara indigenous children drink water at the Laranjal tribal camp in Arara indigenous land, Pará, Brazil, on March 14, 2019. Over the nearly two decades of dictatorship, deforestation rates in the Amazon tripled.Įventually, in the mid-2000s, the deforestation rate was reduced. Extractive and agricultural industrialists moved into the region, polluting and depleting resources. Nearly 10,000 miles of roads were built in seven years. Operation Amazon came at a tremendous environmental cost. The National Truth Commission estimates that at least 8,350 Indigenous people were killed by the military government. In 1972, the Waimiri-Atroari had a population of 3,000 by 1983, their number was reduced to 350. In these moves and others like it, thousands of Indigenous people were massacred. That pacification came through so-called demonstrations of force - using machine guns, grenades, and dynamite - against the Waimiri-Atroari tribe. We will not change its layout, and the only burden for our battalions will be to pacify the Indians.” “This road is important and must be constructed, whatever the cost. João Tarcísio Cartaxo Arruda, who led the construction battalion, said in 1975, according to a document made available by the National Truth Commission. “The highway is irreversible, for the integration of the Amazon into the country,” the army’s Col. One highway, for instance, was designed to travel from the city of Manaus, on the Amazon River, to nearly the northern edge of the basin. Like all the other so-called development pushes into the Amazon, the results were catastrophic - for the forest itself, but especially for the communities who already lived amid it. Read our Complete Coverage Climate Crimes “The idea was that it was necessary to channel activity into regions with smaller population density, and this became a state policy.” “One aspect of the doctrine said that Brazil could not leave any empty space, because it could threaten national security,” said João Roberto Martins Filho, a professor at the Federal University of São Carlos who has spent decades researching the dictatorship. Known as Operation Amazon, the colonization plan hatched during the military government envisioned integrating the territory into Brazil through building roads and developing agricultural and corporate enterprises - all accomplished by settling people from the south, southeast, and northeast of the country and the coasts in the forest.Īs for the aim, the dictatorship’s motto for the project spoke volumes: “Occupy to avoid surrender.” The military government argued that a thinly populated Amazon might create avenues for foreign powers to invade Brazilian territory. From the populist president-turned-dictator who made one of the early industrial pushes into the forest in the 1930s to the military dictatorship that ruled the country for two decades from 1964 until 1985, the justifications have largely been the same - economic gain and geopolitical paranoia - as were the often poor results. For more than a century, a series of Brazilian governments have sought to move into the country’s interior, developing - or, to be more precise, colonizing - the Amazon. B Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is planning to push industrialization and development in the interior of the country’s Amazon basin.
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