BR-163 : from “ landless men ” to “ manless land ”

In 1970, the Brazilian government started the project of building the large highways in the Amazon, highlighting the Transamazon, linking the region from East to West, and BR-163, known as Cuiabá-Santarém, from South to North — highways that crossed each other opened axes of penetration and integration. On the 16th of June, 1970, the Plan of National Integration (PIN) was created. The displacement of peasants from areas submitted to “demographic pressure” is made official and the speech of connecting the landless man of the Northeast to the manless land of the Amazon is put into practice in a chaotic and socially unfair way. In December 1974, the highway Cuiabá-Santarém was opened to the public. In Mato Grosso, the road would motivate the penetration of large agricultural projects and the colonization commanded by private groups. In the state of Pará, in the stretch between Santarém and Rurópolis (at the crossing of Cuiabá-Santarém and Transamazon), the colonization directed to small landowners is predominant, commanded by the National Institute of Colonization and Land Reform (INCRA). Along all the road, the appreciation of the land, the attraction of migratory currents and the land speculation had immediate impacts to the local population — especially the indigenous ones. Our final consideration allow us, for the sake of concluding, to claim that the successive changes in the “development plans” according to the political and economic conjunctures, contributed to the failure of the great majority of colonization projects. Our conclusion is directed to some variables that points to the unsustainability of the regional development model: An excluding model: in the effort of choosing an image which is revealing of the environment of the present frontier I would say that it is of exclusion. A productivist model: after twenty year it is agribusiness that, notably in Mato Grosso, has the strongest development, supported by the necessity of Brazil obtaining income from exportable goods such as soybean. Deforesting and continuous fragmentation of Amazon forest.


Introduction
Brazil is one of the few countries in the world where new spaces are continuously integrated on the costs of disrespecting the populations of the Amazon Forest, marginalizing a significant portion of its population and transforming the natural and rural space. This phenomenon, highlighted by recent changes, having on one side the social-economic needs, and on the other side, the consequences to the environment, hinders the definition of a model that would be socially fair and ecologically correct.
The regional development assumed two kinds of action: (a) Public Policies of structure development, so that it could be coherent to the speech of "landless men" to "manless land", in the chart of During the government of General Geisel (1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978), Polamazônia was instituted, as a means of facilitating even more the entrance of oligopolistic capital in the region. In order to attract big economic groups to participate in the projects of the North region, the government offered great advantages: lands in large expansion, available and cheap, as well as subsidized financing and tax incentive.
The Amazon and the Center-West region suffered great impacts of the politics of the military governments. The Amazon, identified with the production of rubber, and the Center-West, identified with the extensive cattle raising, had their economies diversified.
The federal government led the occupation of these spaces in the national territory aiming at its potentialities and at ending a dangerous empty space for the national security. Using the favorable natural conditions, it was about producing cereals, meat, ores and wood for the international market 1 . 1 In 1974, the World Bank lent US$ 6 million to Brazil for cattle raising, in order to foment the exportation of processed meat, according to its policy, in the beginning of the 1970s, of encouraging the investment in In the 21 years of the military governments   (3) social goal: decrease the social tensions provoked by large land properties in the apparently profitable large farms of cattle raising during the time of meat high prices. Brazil was, in fact, the fourth biggest country to be contemplated with loans from the bank, right after Mexico, Colombia and Paraguay, with about US$ 150 million given to projects like this. After 1970, however, the bank loans to commercial cattle raising in large scale decreased because of many reasons, including a substantial drop in the world prices of meat, and a change in the policy of the institution for programs of integrated development, aiming at "fighting the poverty", as well as an internal reorganization (Jarvis, 1986).
nº 39 -2019 Northeast and the small land properties in the South of the country.  [1970][1971][1972][1973][1974] to the commercial colonization, characterized by the sale of land to big farmers (1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979) 3 . 3 The Association of Amazon Enterprises (AEA, in the original), with its headquarters in São Paulo, created in 1968 as an interest pressure group for the southern industry owners, that defended the subsidized financing of their new cattle raising enterprises in the Amazon, had a great influence on the formulation of the official policy for the region and applied decisive pressure to obtain renewed emphasis on cattle raising, on the expenses of small producers (Pompermayer, 1984). The Ministry of Planning, together with the Bank of Amazon (Basa), organized several visits to businessmen from the South of the country to the Amazon, encouraging them to invest in projects of private creation and colonization, under the fundament that only the large companies "can take rational advantage of the enormous potential of the Amazon". During one of these trips, organized in 1973 for 20 big businessmen, including the president of Volkswagen of Brazil (Wolfgang Sauer) and Bradesco (Amador Aguiar), civil authorities defended the role of the private enterprise. The Ministry of Planning, Reis Veloso, criticized the "predatory occupation" by the small producers and appealed to large companies so that they "took over the job of developing the region" (Branford & Glock, 1985, pp. 70-71). The Ministry of the Interior, Gen. José Costa Cavalcanti, endorsed these ideas, claiming that "the future of the Amazon is on the hand on the Brazilian or foreign businessmen, once Brazil has lost its fear of foreign capital" (Branford & Glock, 1985, pp. 70-71). An accentuated difference of opinion between INCRA (Ministry of Agriculture) and its policy of "social colonization" on the one hand, and on the other hand, Sudam (Ministry of Interior), that supported the interests from AEA became clear. Close to the end of the government of Médici, José Francisco Moura Cavalcanti, the new Ministry of Agriculture and former director of INCRA, and Walter Costa Porto, the new president of INCRA, attempted to defend the policy of directed colonization in terms of reducing the social uneasiness and using the Amazon as an "exhaust valve" for the social pressures that were taking body in other areas of Brazil (Branford & Glock, 1985;Foweraker, 1981). Sudam, however, continued its attacks to INCRA's policy and, in 1973, its recently nominated superintendent, Colonel Câmara Sena, described the Amazon as "a region made for cattle raising, with excellent natural pasture and abundance of space for the expansion of this sector that, for this reason, will form the base of its economic integration" (Cardoso & Müller, 1977, p. 158).

The highway Cuiabá-Santarém
It is undeniable that the visit of the President Emílio Garrastazu Médici to the Northeast region, victimized by the disastrous draught of 1970, was the motivation for, in a speech delivered on the 6th of June of the same year, announcing in a patriotic way that "the government would take all the necessary measures to connect the landless men of the Northeast to the manless land of the Amazon".
Ten days later, the Plan of National Integration (PIN, in the original) was created, which had as its main goal the immediate building of the highways Transamazon and Cuiabá-Santarém 4 .
The immediacy in which these two highways were planned and executed did not minimally contributed to attenuating the social-environmental impacts that ended up appearing even in the building process, and that were managed to the taste of the governors, the availability of resources and improvisation.
In this year (

BR-163: route of conflicts with indigenous
The area of influence of BR-163 is a space whose evolution is articulated in two moments: the long time of a history "without history" or hidden -"and the short time that approaches the process of recent territorialization, synonym of an aggressive human 5 The policy of Amazon occupation is covered by two variables -among many others -which are extremely negative: (a) as a general rule, the effective action of the State manifested themselves in a downstream of negative effects; (b) the State and the society act as if they were "changing the tire with the car in movement".

Figure 1
The Before the Portuguese conquer, the Brazilian Amazon had 8 million indigenous, who lived in a "wild" space, in ecological balance with the forest.
Currently, they are no more than 300 thousand. The diseases that came from Europe (from varicella to syphilis) contributed to their extinction; the disorganization provoked by the territorial occupation policies completed the picture.
The brief and rich cycle of rubber  motivated the white people to penetrate, at last, in the interior of the forest 7 , populated by "invisible" indians to whom the white men are not welcome. There was a shock in the national imaginary.
The encounter with the indians Panará was the most announced "first encounter" of a group in the time of modern telecommunication. During years, the search for gigantic indians was followed by the Brazilian press, was well as the international press, with generous headlines and fantastic expectations.
In the middle of a military dictatorship, with the country in a patriotic fever for the great projects of

Back to the lands of Peixoto de Azevedo
On

The environment of the frontier
The objective, at this moment, is to explicit some of the several reflections/ evaluations performed during my study trips on the colorful dust of the road. Therefore, the term "environment" is being used to make reference to the "material and cultural atmosphere" lived in the frontier areas.
The pioneers are plural, because they come from regions whose social-spatial formation happened  contemplative spirit of the "old frontier" and, at the the southern people arrived and dominated everything: they bought the best land, obtained the best funding from Banco do Brasil, built the best houses of the city, made noise everywhere with their trucks and stereos, are arrogant to the local people, already have the political dominance of the county and they will dominate the state as well…; these southern people bother too much, but they are good--looking, the women are blonde with blue eyes, the tall gaucho men with white skin… and he concludes: they are making, even the native people from Mato Grosso, with ugly, scorched faces, more beautiful. This is pure progress!"; (b) the interview with Dom Pedro Casaldáliga (7/9/91), the testimony of the conflicts between the "new" and the "old" frontier: "this is conquering territory! Indigenous land! From 1920, the northeastern arrived, the family clan, they came motivated by the speeches of Father Cícero that referenced them to the pursuit of the "Green Flag", the fertile land and the humid weather. At the beginning, there were conflicts with the Indians, but the accommodation and even the miscegenation prevailed. From 1960, the big landowners arrived, from São Paulo and the South, arrogant people, went on acquiring land, deforesting, forming pasture areas, introducing cattle, expelling people -Indians, northeastern people -those who arrived before. (Passos, 2015, p. 91) The "new frontier" and its corollary resisted little to the arrival of the southern people -more capitalized, more organized, more numerous, more supported, including by governmental policies.
The "new frontier", started in the 1970s, was built from inside to outside and from outside to inside. And it had several steps and dynamics. In the effort of choosing an image/ an expression that is revealing of the environment of the 11 It is never too much to remind that the "occupation of empty spaces", notably in the Brazilian Center-West, despite all the advertised policy of governmental incentive, taxes incentive etc., happens from the understanding that the Brazilian State is only built and only becomes effectively present from the "actions" and these actions, generally speaking, are together with the arrival of pioneers. current frontier, I would say that this image is of "exclusion". And why is that? It is because the current phase is the one of growing from "inside to outside", which means, "build body". Build body must be translated by the need of answering the elevated costs of production from the increase of volume.
Volume of the machiner y field, volume of the  (Passos, 2015, p. 87) The need of building body so that they can survive leads the pioneers fronts to "change the tire with the car running", that is, the phase of Settlers, that created planned cities, seems to be out of fashion. We can observe some pioneer fronts which are clearly "producer fronts" (and not settlers). Two

Land use planning
"A country of continental dimensions, Brazil had in its frontier economy and in the geopolitics two central cores of its formation." Bertha K. Becker (1982, p. 16) In Brazil, Acselrad (2000) highlights that the EEZ (economic and ecological zoning) has been used   The debate about the territorial planning in the Amazon started incorporating environmental issues from the 1980s. The tendency followed by territorial planning follows the chronology of the genesis process and consolidation of environmental issues, that starts to receive more body and importance from the 1980s.
The Federal Government, through establishing and contextualizing of EEZ started to indicate its use, by public and private actors, with the goal of rationalizing the use and management of the resources in a certain territory. Accord to Acselrad (2000), the "ecological planning" intended by the government, mainly in the Amazon, faces difficulties of practical establishment. It is due to, according to Acselrad (2000), the structural weakness that there is in the public sector to advance in terms of territorial planning. The sustainable development has been one of the challenges of the government, mainly federal, in the process of occupying and colonizing the Amazon, initiated in the 1960s.
In the context of territorial planning of the Amazon, in which EEZ is inserted, Becker (2010) criticizes the strategy of centralism adopted by the federal government along the years, which was restricted to the offices of the federal capital and unable to bring positive results in terms of planning and coordinating the occupation of a region which is more than half of the national territory. For Becker (2010), it is essential that the public policies start to see the reality and the historical moment in which the region is and start observing the processes that interfere in the changing and planning of the Amazon territory. It is only possible through local participation in relation to making decisions about plans and strategies for the region.
The private colonizing policy resulted in a "land counter-reform", in the way that it excluded "agricul-  The sign indicating the future installation of Cargill before the soybean planters. Source: Passos, 2004. On the other hand, many of the proposals that today orientate the effort of territorial planning in the area of influence of BR-163 -such as the mosaic of Conservation Unit -were formulated thanks to the relative success obtained by the social-environmental paradigm and by the sustainable development ideas in the state level and international pressure.
Given the current structure of the job market, the persistence of generalized land conflicts and immense inequality that prevail in the access to goods, services and citizen rights, we are far from reaching an ideal situation in which the public policies conceived for the region, even w ith the best intentions, lead automatically to a more equitable distribution of income.
Our final consideration allow us, for the sake of concluding, to claim that the successive changes in the "development plans" according to the political and economic conjunctures, contributed to the failure of the great majority of colonization projects. Our conclusion is directed to some variables that points to the unsustainability of the regional development