The Amazon Forest, a Brazilian Colonial Frontier for Over Two Centuries

In this interview with Paulo Tavares, we talk about the Brazilian colonization and extractive deforestation of the Amazon. The largest forest on Earth is the site of tension between this colonial violence and defense alliances between Indigenous, ecological, and other emancipative political movements. With that in mind, we reflect on forest epistemologies “from below” and how cartographic and architectural analyses can support them.

LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: In your previous contribution to The Funambulist (#35 Decolonial Ecologies, May-June 2021), you described the 20th century colonization of the Amazonian interior of Brazil. It is indeed one of the “absurdities” (for lack of a better word) of colonialism to enforce sovereignty upon a territory and its people even when it does not even know. Could you talk again of this era in which the Amazon is seen as an always pushable colonial frontier?

PAULO TAVARES: In many different ways, Brazil forged its image and identity as a sovereign nation claiming a continuation with colonialism. It was by expanding the nation towards the hinterlands—conquering and mastering the interior—that Brazil would emerge as a modern, civilized nation. One can see this frontier discourse since independence in the 1820s, but such ideas really got fruition during the 20th century, more specifically during a period of rapid modernization inaugurated with the government of Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s. For ideologues of this view (many of them associated with the modernist movement) such as famous sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the main theorist of Brazil’s supposedly “racial democracy,” colonization assumed the form of national character itself. This is what Freyre meant when he spoke of a process of “auto-colonization” of Brazil as national formation, for example: “The colonization of Brazil soon ceased to be strictly European to become a process of auto-colonization: a process that would, after independence, take on a national character.” Other ideologues of the modernizing dictatorship of Vargas’s New State (1937-1945), as sociologist Nelson Werneck Sodré, claimed that Brazil was “a country that needs to conquer itself in order to fulfill itself.”

The nationalist regime of Vargas, which implemented an ambitious state-led campaign of frontier expansion called “March to the West,” conceived Brazil as an imperial ground for national formation. As he stated: “Here is our imperialism […] we have an expansionism, which is to grow within our own borders.” So, in short, Brazil forged its image as a nation—and more precisely, a modern nation—in relation to a frontier ideology of “self-imperialism.” Within this ideological framework the Amazon has always been seen and described as a colonial frontier, one whose conquest would mean the accomplishment of Brazil’s historic mission towards self-imperialism. Beyond narratives, imaginaries, and symbols, such ideas unfolded into real political action through successive policies, plans, projects implemented by every subsequent government after Vargas along the 20^th century, democratic and authoritarian, culminating in the so-called “campaign of national integration” deployed by the late military regime (1964-1984) towards the entire Amazon Basin (also called “Operation Amazonia”). The consequence of this politics of modern colonization, just as in the colonial past, led to dire human and ecological consequences in the form of systematic violence and rights violations of Indigenous communities and widespread deforestation.

Lastly, I want to make a point about the lack of territorial knowledge as one of the “absurdities” that lay at the core of colonial power, as you mention.  Maybe this is not a good word, “absurd,” unreasonable… but rather the opposite, this is the very rationale at the core of colonialism insofar as colonialism is not about knowing, but about imposing an entire system of knowledge over a territory, introducing (by force and deception) an entire apparatus of knowing while at the same time operating the systematic extraction of knowledge from those communities and territories colonized and portraying them as Western inventions. Think of botany, for example, or maybe even the idea of freedom, usually described as an invention of the European enlightenment, but in fact, as David Graber and David Wengrow unpack in their paradigmatic book, The Dawn of Everything, has roots in Indigenous political inventions.

LL: In this same text, you were describing “forest alliances” between workers, ecological activists, and Indigenous movements. Have these alliances reactivated under the proto-fascist capitalist regime of Jair Bolsonaro, given how so much of its damage has been directed towards the forest and its peoples?

PT: In this text, I was describing a particular coalition of social movements that gathered around the defense of the Amazon in the context of the re-democratization process of the 1980s, which was also the period of the consolidation of the global environmental movement, and how the Amazon became one of the most significant political arenas in the defeat of the military regime through the innovative strategies of rubber-tappers and Indigenous movements. Today… well, I think so, absolutely, these “forest alliances” were reactivated—perhaps they have never been deactivated in the first place—but I would say that at this time these “forest alliances” are composed of a much more diverse and plural set of social movements and actors, also including queer and Black movements, for example, movements for the defense of culture and freedom of expression, movements for health in the context of the pandemics, among various others. In many different ways, the “forest alliances” of the 1980s were already an expression of such diversity, and it is no coincidence that at the core of Bolsonaro’s proto-fascist project is the systematic dismantlement of the systems of rights enshrined in the post-dictatorship constitution as a result of such broader coalitions. But it is also that we are in a different moment, and today’s “forest alliances” embrace a much vaster political landscape, although they remain “forests alliances” as such, inasmuch as, as Ursula Le Guin writes, “the word for world is forest.” Most people (journalists, analysts, academics) write about this period to denounce Bolsonaro’s neo-fascist discourse and his government’s scorched-earth environmental and Indigenous policies. This is certainly important. But equally important is to tell the other story.

There is still to be written the history of resistance during these four years, a resistance which, at the end, defeated Bolsonaro through political organization and popular vote.  

LL: In another text, you talk about these massive efforts of turning what was deemed a “green desert”—with all the colonial connotations the term “desert” contains here—into a hyper-exploited agricultural landscape. You cite the leader of a land-grabbing gang that makes an interesting claim: “If it weren’t for deforestation, Brazil would not exist.” I suppose that you do not disagree with him!

PT: Well, yeah… it is such a brutal, violent statement and I think that its brutality carries a truth about what Brazil is and its history. In the context from where this citation was taken, this criminal meant that deforestation—the extraction of natural resources—was the source of Brazilian wealth, development, progress… This is an old tale, and today is still the typical discourse one finds in the mouths of land-grabbers, miners, cattle-ranchers, the agribusiness establishment, and politicians: that Brazil’s economic growth is dependent on exploring the forest as a capitalist commodity. But there is also a deeper meaning in that phrase and the brutality it contains, which is what I am trying to unveil by reframing it within this text.

Here deforestation appears at the heart of national formation, as an ideological and political discourse of national identity and self-image, as the historic motor of the founding and evolution of the settler-colonial state of Brazil, a country born over ecocides and genocides. 

LL: Brazilian modernism is taught in schools of architecture around the world, in particular the history of Brasília through the “grand” gesture of urban planner Lucio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer—who did not know they were preparing the perfect place for the military junta to run the country for twenty-one years—and perhaps interestingly, landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx. Could you tell us in which ways the construction of the city epitomizes both architecture’s active complicity with settler colonialism and the European modernism that constructs (citing you) “relations of dominion between domesticated and wild, cultivated and uncultivated, artificial and natural spaces?”

PT: It is important to start by saying that Lucio Costa, the urban planner of Brasília, was not only one of the most important—if not the most important—ideologue of the modern architectural movement in Brazil. Through his architectural theories and projects, as well as through his activity as a heritage expert, Lucio Costa can be considered one of the most crucial interpreters of Brazilian national formation. He is part of a whole generation of intellectuals that gave shape to the image of Brazil as a modern nation, including people such Gilberto Freyre that I mentioned earlier, for example, as well as a whole generation of canonic modernist artists and writers such as Portinari, Tarsila do Amaral, Mario de Andrade, etc. In his architectural theories, Lucio Costa contended that the particular modern language for which Brazil became internationally known evolved from baroque colonial architecture, which he defined as “traditional Brazilian architecture.” He was a militant modernist, an author of some of the most paradigmatic modernist projects in Brazil, and at the same time a conservationist at the Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage, which he helped to create in 1938. Through his work, Costa refined such a theory in sophisticated ways, weaving a powerful ideological construct in which the architecture of modernism, the abstract language of the machine age, appeared as the logical development of the architecture of colonialism. His ideas are very much connected to the frontier imaginary of Brazil’s “self-imperialism.”

Like fellow modernists, Costa found in the backlands the source of the authentic national character in architectural terms, identifying a more genuine colonial architecture that he believed constituted the core of national artistic traditions, Brazil’s own antiquity. He was so obsessed in trying to make this equation between the colonial and the modern as a distinguished aesthetic character of Brazilian tropical modernism that, in the 1937 canonic text “Necessary Documentation,” he pedagogically captioned one of his drawings of colonial houses with the phrase “pure Le Corbusier.” In another seminal text, Costa went as far as saying, in bold theoretical conceptualizations, that Le Corbusier’s concept of the house as “machine for leaving” was equivalent to the complex Master House-Slave Quarter in colonial plantations. So here you see Costa trying again to make the equation coloniality and modernity through architecture, and this reasoning obviously upheld deeply racialized, racist assumptions. I wrote a book about that, to problematize Costa’s racial thinking, which was informed by early-20^th century eugenics.

In that sense, Brasília can be seen as the most defined form—the urban and territorial epitome— of Lucio Costa’s synthesis between the colonial and the modern. He stated this very clearly in the conceptual text that accompanied the original submission for Brasília’s pilot-plan in the 1957 competition. Brasília, Costa wrote, was born from “a deliberate act of possession […] a gesture still in the sense of the pioneers, along the lines of the colonial tradition […] two axes crossing at right angles, that is, the sign of the cross itself.” He uses the sign of the cross—a catholic cross as it was—as the main urban concept of Brasília’s pilot-plan, associating it with the gesture of Europeans colonizing the territory. Here, once again we can see the frontier discourse of Brazil’s self-imperialism, but now assuming the form of an entire city planned and built in the middle of the territory, the most symbolic representation that modernization in Brazil was bounded to the continuation of a frontier movement inaugurated with the European invasion—hence the architecture of colonialism is defined as “Brazilian artistic tradition.”

Beyond the symbolic, the colonial dimension of Brasília can also be seen in the way it was part of a larger political project of frontier expansionism that took place during the Vargas era in the 1930s and 1940s, and culminated in the violent order imposed by the late military regime in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

General Golbery do Couto e Silva, the master planner of the military regime, saw Brasília as a “platform” from which to deploy a new movement of frontier expansion over the Amazon.

Indeed, the modernist city functioned as a truly “frontier outpost” in the process of conquering the Amazon that was put forward by the military, with grave human rights consequences for Indigenous communities of the Brazilian interior. This resonated with the ideas espoused by Varga’s New State regime, and beyond that, with epistemic constructions inherited from European colonial-modern thought that placed the Amazon outside the realm of  history, considering the forest as a wild, virgin, natural, uncultivated space to be conquered and mastered. The ways in which such Western epistemic and imaginary constructions that oppose nature to culture, forged in and behalf of European colonialism, turned into leitmotifs of the colonial-modern politics embodied in Brasília can be seen, for example, in one of Vargas’s famous assertions about the forest: “The Amazon will cease to be a simple chapter in the history of the earth, to become a chapter in the history of civilization.”

LL: Indigenous epistemes in relation to the forest do not simply consist of mutualistic relationships between humans and the many other living and non-living entities with whom they live. Indeed, they also involve readings of the forest “from below”—quite literally—which strongly contrasts with the colonial airplane gaze, manifested through canopy views or the usual “discovery shot” of Indigenous people looking up. In this regard, your work around the localization of Xavante villages that had been evicted and destroyed by the colonial state is telling, in how it is through a knowledge of trees that such a localization was made possible. Could you tell us about it, and what it means for our understanding of forests?

PT: In this project, I believe we mapped one of the largest Indigenous archeological complexes in Brazil, identifying numerous ancient Xavante settlements from where they have been forcibly displaced by the “politics of pacification” implemented by the Brazilian state throughout the 20^th century, specially during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. As you mentioned, what is remarkable in the archeology of many of these sites is that a large patch of forest, formed by various sizes of trees, palms and other types of plants, currently demarcates the urban footprint of the ancient village. So in that sense the trees and the palms—or rather, the forest itself—is an index of the past existence of these villages, it is the equivalent to an archeological evidence.

We did many field incursions guided by the elderly to map those archeological forest sites. It is incredible how the elderly hold a very sophisticated botanical and geographic knowledge of their ancestral territory, even in regions that have been completely defaced from the environmental point of view because of the advancement of cattle farms and soy plantations. They can interpret the land, the savannahs and the forest in great detail, and identify the history of particular places that would appear completely generic to western eyes, recalling histories of epic huntings and episodes of violence from white settlers. They easily identify ancient village sites, and interpret these forest formations as proper archeological sites of ancient villages. Policarpo Waire Tserenhorã, the sage elder who guided us in many of such incursions, could even recall the name of every single family of the former village, associating their houses with specific trees and plants.

So, as you say, there is indeed a form of knowledge “from below” that can map such a landscape in very singular ways, ways derived from Indigenous epistemes and visions that escape the knowledge-technological apparatus of the colonial-modern western gaze.

However, on the other hand, in this project we have used various apparatuses and instruments to chart this archeological territory in innovative ways that are associated with the technological history of colonial power, such as maps, airplane photographs, satellite images, remote sensing, drone photography and others. To subvert the use of this colonial technological apparatus, to move from the micro to the macro, and vice-versa, to use on-the-ground non-Western knowledge and remote sensing technologies in combination was essential for us to provide a picture of the historic and heritage value of this archeological complex in its various layers—cultural, historic, legal, political—in front of state institutions and claim their protection by state institutions. I think that in my practice I am always trying to bridge and connect different forms of knowledge and technologies, learning from the indigenous leaderships and communities I have the privilege to work with, while at the same time engaging critically with the tools of spatial mapping and design in order to expose the ways in which they have been complicity with colonial power by the very act of using them against neocolonial systems. ■