Brazilian national integration policies and the Amazon: Discourses of modernisation between the past and the present

Abstract

The chapter presents a reflection on the projects of the Brazilian State, especially after the military coup of 1964, which, with the strong support of the national entrepreneurship, made the Amazon the strategic locus of the development model adopted for the country. We intend to analyse the general power strategy of the dictatorship in Brazil and demonstrate how the Amazon became the political and economic axis in this governmental experience, materialised in several public policies. Under these assumptions, it is important to study governmental discourses and practices that underpin the support that redefined power relations in Brazil, especially by focusing on the various political devices that are embodied in laws, decrees, plans and institutional programmes and in the State's own administrative reform. This last one, carried out during the dictatorship, was not discussed in the National Congress and was supported by the powers of exception of the Second Institutional Act approved in December 1966. The business logic prevailed as an administrative practice, which persisted in the political-administrative structure of the country after the military regime.