Ditadura Militar e Amazônia: Desenvolvimentismo, representações, legitimação política e autoritarismo nas décadas de 1960 e 1970

Abstract

Researches about the Brazilian Military Dictatorship have grown in number and diversity. There are many aspects about this authoritarian period that can be studied by History and the others human and social sciences. Thus, seeking to contribute for those researches, that have been carried out in recent years, this work aims to understand the relations between Brazilian Military Dictatorship and the Amazon, starting from the analysis of the developmentalism actions performed by the government in the region. Studies that approach discourses about these great idealized projects that, sometimes, made concrete by the military, makes possible to understand them inside the ideals of developmentalism and conservative modernization. In addition, the relationship between these initiatives and the National Security Doctrine, a national-statist political culture, as Daniel Aarão Reis proposes, or a Brazilian political culture, as Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta suggests, will be exposed. In this way, the government’s own discourses about these works, besides press and academic literature about the subject, will be investigated, bringing local and outside expressions. It aims to understand how the different representations about the Amazon were mobilized endogenously (from inside) and exogenous (from outside) in order to legitimize or question the dictatorial projects in this vast portion of Brazil. It is intended to figure out how the press opined and transmitted the impacts of the development projects of the military dictatorship in the Amazon, interpreting the execution and planning of these works as a form that the dictatorship exercises control and power in the region. In addition, seeking to interweave this work to Amazonian history in a broader way, the formation and transformations of the representations about the Amazon over time will be studied, linking them to the appropriations made by the dictatorship, the press and the literature. Also, the concepts of development and developmentalism present in the governmental discourses, in the press and in the intellectual productions published in the 1960s and 1970s will be mapped, understanding that this concept and its attempts to apply it predate the period of the military dictatorship. Besides that, this thesis tried to insert that moment of Amazon history into some national events connected to military dictatorship and also to the increase of developmentalism ideas, that emerge before 1964.