development as the conquest of new natural spaces. This approach leaves hardly any room for the state as a guarantor of rights. Consolidating a well-regulated state that included a monopoly on violence was no longer high up on the agenda. The second conquest of the Amazon Basin took place in an alliance with the region’s traditional oligarchies. Weak statehood accompanied by equally strong parallel powers (traditional oligarchies with huge latifundia – illegal actors) that exercise quasi-state functions right up to a monopoly on violence still remains a structural characteristic of the region today.
Thomas Fatheuer The Amazon Basin – A Paradigmatic Region Between Destruction, Valorization, and Resistance
The Amazon Basin as an object of development The intentions declared by Vargas did not take real shape until the 1950s, which saw the beginning of the epoch of the “modern” development of the Amazonas. Integration, national security, and colonialization were objectives that were just as important as promoting regional development. When talking about development, what was meant was a development imposed from the outside. The caboclo economy and extractivism were not seen as potentials, but as deficits. Nevertheless, hopes of discovering and exploiting valuable metal ores did continue to play a role. In 1953, the local supervisory authority, the Superintendency of Economic Recovery Plan of the Amazon (SPVEA – Superintendência do Plano de Valorização Econômica da Amazônia), was created with the aim of promoting the commercial exploitation of the Amazon region. This saw the beginning of a phase of state activities in which the planning and creation of new institutions and financing instruments played a decisive role. The valorization of the Amazon region was the central idea, while what existed was considered to be of no value. Brazilian experts differentiate between strategic and economic exploitation. Both are part of the same process but, to pave the way for private business investments, first and foremost the infrastructure had to be extended and skilled labor mobilized. The National Institute of Amazonian Research was set up at the same time as SPVEA, and constituted the establishment of a central research institute. Roads were of critical importance for the vision of developing the Amazon Basin. The Belém–Brasília road is certainly the greatest legacy from the SPVEA era and was a significant step toward the “integration,” at least of a great part of the Amazon region. It was constructed under President Juscelino Kubitschek between 1958 and 1960, and the new highway was celebrated in a poem by Lauro Rolim in the tone of the heroic development optimism of the era:
Nature shall yield. The conquered “enemy ” will now assist, under the roar of the motors, in the invasion of progress and among the roar of civilization, march in its glory. However, not only poets, but President Kubitschek himself celebrated the Belém– Brasília route with words that sound very strange to the modern ear: 79