Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
OPENING UP THE AMAZON
Kubitschek, who built a dirt highway linking Brasília to Belém, took the first step towards
opening up the vast interior of the
Amazon
. But things really got going in 1970, when General
Médici realized that the Amazon could be used as a huge safety valve, releasing the pressure
for agrarian reform in the Northeast. “Land without people for people without land!” became
the slogan, and an ambitious programme of highway construction began. The main links were
the
Transamazônica
, running west to the Peruvian border, the
Cuiabá-Santarém
highway
into central Amazônia, and the
Cuiabá-Porto Velho/Rio Branco
highway, opening access to
western Amazônia.
For the
military
, the Amazon was empty space, overdue for filling, and a national resource
to be developed. They set up an elaborate network of tax breaks and incentives to encourage
Brazilian and multinational firms to invest in the region, who also saw it as empty space and
proceeded either to speculate with land or cut down forest to graze cattle. The one group that
didn't perceive the Amazon this way was, naturally enough, the millions of people who already
lived there. The immediate result was a spiralling
land conflict
, as ranchers, rubber tappers,
Brazil-nut harvesters, gold-miners, smallholders, indigenous communities, multinationals and
Brazilian companies all tried to press their claims. The result was chaos.
By the 1980s the situation in the Amazon was becoming an international controversy,
with the uncontrolled
destruction of forest
in huge annual burnings, and the invasion of
indigenous lands. Less internationally known was the
land crisis
, although a hundred people
or more were dying in land conflicts in Amazônia every year. It took the assassination in 1988
of
Chico Mendes
, leader of the rubber-tappers' union and eloquent defender of the forest, to
bring it home (see box, p.394).
rates could not provide enough jobs for the hordes migrating to the cities, and the
squalid
favelas
expanded even faster than the economy.
After 1974 petrodollars were sloshing around the world banking system, thanks to
oil price rises. Anxious to set this new capital to work, international banks and South
American military regimes fell over themselves in their eagerness to organize deals.
Brazil had a good credit rating - its wealth of natural resources and jailed labour leaders
saw to that. The military needed money for a series of huge development projects
central to its trickle-down economic policy, like the
Itaipu dam
, the
Carajás
mining
projects in eastern Amazônia, and a
nuclear power programme
. By the end of the
1970s Brazilian debt was at US$50 billion; by 1990 it had risen to US$120 billion,
and the interest payments were crippling the economy.
Democracy returns: the abertura
Growing popular resentment of the military could not be contained indefinitely,
especially when the economy turned sour. By the late 1970s debt, rising inflation and
unemployment were turning the economy from a success story into a joke, and the
military were further embarrassed by an unsavoury chain of
corruption scandals
.
Geisel was the first military president to plan for a return to civilian rule, in a slow
relaxing of the military grip called
abertura
, the “opening-up”. Yet again Brazil
managed a bloodless - albeit fiendishly complicated - transition. Slow though the
process was, the return to democracy would have been delayed even longer had it not
1968-73
1980s
1984
1985
Economy
experiences
spectacular growth
Economy stagnates -
rampant inflation
becomes major problem
Itaipu Dam
completed
Tancredo Neves elected first
civilian president in 21 years,
but dies shortly afterwards.
José Sarney becomes president
