The world is condemning President Bolsonaro’s policy of developing the Amazon, which has been facilitating the spread of forest burning. Watching the forests burn is simply painful for many. At the same time, it is a familiar sight. Bolsonaro’s provocative rhetoric of developing the Amazon against the international demand of conservation is the same as the military government’s slogan of the 1960s: Amazônia é nossa! (The Amazon is ours!). This familiarity should make us pay closer attention to some important and often forgotten actors involved in practicing this rhetoric on the ground: 1) local politicians and municipality officers who are landowners and 2) cattle ranchers who fight to defend their territories in the frontline of deforestation frontiers in the Amazon. They are the ones who are actually allowing the fires to keep on burning. If we care, not only about extinguishing fires but about how to prevent this next year, we need first to understand who these destroyers of the Amazon are and how to engage with them in environmental governance.
A brief history of Amazon municipalities
While much attention is paid to Bolsonaro’s intention of attracting agrobusinesses to the Amazon, throughout the contemporary history of the Brazilian Amazon, the rainforest has been opened to infrastructure building including highway constructions or development of hydroelectric dams along the Amazon River’s major tributaries. These infrastructures typically embody the modernisation ideal and show a clear authoritarian intention of integrating the territory into a nation-state. The agrobusiness or extractivism is made easier because this integration has been already facilitated to some extent. Such an intention of integration has always been there with the Amazon and this essentially did not change during the leftist era. This means that the expansion is not only of deforestation frontiers but also of human settlement frontiers and, eventually, administrative, municipality frontiers.
