The Price of “Progress.” On Development, Displacement and Dictatorship in the Amazon

What is Mine was born from an intellectual unrest and an intimate desire. The unrest: was it possible to narrate the history of a society from the trajectory of an “ordinary man”? The desire: to listen closely to my father’s stories, which had been my primary vehicle for knowing my country—Brazil—and for discovering how enormous the world and life were. At the beginning of the writing process, while my father was undergoing a harsh treatment for intestinal cancer, I interviewed him during the long periods of interaction we had in 2021, a year which brought us closer due to his health condition, amid of a horrific chapter of the pandemic, in a country governed by an authoritarian populist president.

The book is written in two literary voices: that of the narrator (the son), and that of the man whose life serves as a gateway to narrate many stories (my father). Drawing from the life history of this truck driver who traversed and helped to build a country of continental dimensions for five decades of his life, the book sketches a portrait of a society, a territory, environmental devastation, illness, class relations, and the relationships between father and son, whose lives traveled very distinct roads.

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“I want my opera house! I want my opera house! This church remains closed until this town has its opera house!”
–Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo
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At three in the afternoon on 19 August 2019, it was no longer possible to see the sunlight in São Paulo. I was discussing The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with my students—Karl Marx’s classic essay in which he analyzes how different groups of common people and reactionary elites were mobilized by a leader, until then seen as stupid and vulgar, to establish an authoritarian government in December 1851. It’s at the start of this book that Marx presents his celebrated idea that all the events and characters in history are staged twice, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”

If Marx had been with me and wished to illustrate his thesis on the repetition of history, he could have simply asked the students to look out of the window: a dark, dirty cloud was sullying the São Paulo sky. Like the Benjaminian angel of history, the grey monster was inviting us to look at the ashes of the past and our foolish insistence on restaging our catastrophe in ever more tragic ways. That somber blanket was the exaggeratedly oracular incarnation of our dismal present and our history of devastation. The result of a season of criminal fires in Amazonia and the country’s mid-west region, the cloud condensed the accelerated destruction of the forests, the socio-environmental crimes that were only becoming more common, seas of waste carrying away entire villages, mercury poisoning of indigenous Amazonian people and a presidential election that had recast tragedy as a cause for celebration.

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In the grey São Paulo sky, the tragedy of the past was fused with the authoritarian farce of the present, pointing towards a future of ruins.

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The first memories I have of the Amazon Rainforest, its rivers and roads, indigenous people and ribeirinhos come from my father’s stories. Narratives of his travels through the region helped me to compose my infant vocabulary, my sentimental geography, the mythology of a traveling father and a country that seemed infinite.

To drive a truck in the Amazon, back when they were opening it all up, you had to be an adventurer. Restaurants and markets were almost non-existent, just the roadside stalls. The tastiest food they would have there would be tapioca flour. And there was lots of fish, dried fish, every kind of fish. There was lots of bush meat. Paca, armadillo, coati, deer, anaconda meat; those were the kinds of things we ate. The company building the road had a hunting team whose job was to gather food for people to eat so they could work. At that time lots of people were starting to arrive from the south, from Mato Grosso and from the northeast, but it increased a lot once the road was ready. Then you really saw people coming.

The Trans-Amazonian highway (BR-230), a megalomaniac project to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by land, promised to elevate the country to a position of greatness at the start of the 1970s. The nearly four-thousand-kilometer-long road, running from east to west, would cross six states, from the Atlantic north-east to the border with Peru, promising to be the great corridor through which north-eastern workers would arrive and from which wood, gold, cattle and agricultural products cultivated on deforested land would leave.

When I was a child, I thought of the Trans-Amazonian highway as “my dad’s road.”

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These immense infrastructural projects first drew breath in the early 1970s, the bloodiest period of the dictatorship then led by General Médici. The government heralded the Trans-Amazonian as the miraculous fulfillment of a program of national engineering. This would guarantee the occupation of the northern region in accordance with the Doctrine of National Security, promoting the rapid development of the country, protecting against foreign invaders and offering a solution to the poverty and rural tensions of the north-east.

In the language of the time, the colossal undertaking would link the north-east’s “men with no land” to the rainforest’s “land with no men.” It was necessary to occupy, to penetrate the “green inferno,” “integrate not abdicate.” Médici described the road’s construction as “the greatest adventure any people on the face of the earth have ever lived through.” At the inauguration of one of the stretches in 1972, the then-minister of transport, Mário Andreazza, professed: “Finally, Amazonia is populated. Brazil is broadening. The country has greater magnitude and its children more faith in their own destinies.”

The highways were the spearhead of this aggressive endeavor, my father one of the thousands of workers occupied with its construction. He transported stone, sand, gravel, basic items and provisions for construction workers as well as the soldiers who oversaw their work.

The sad opera of progress in that ravaged Amazonia was staged by chainsaws and machine-guns, land-grabbers and mercenaries, truck drivers and small farmers in search of land and work, contracted workers, poor people from the region itself and other corners of the country—the many different faces of the wretched of our land in the service of “the great business of the nation.”

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By the end of the sixties there was already a lot of logging, but it was only after more roads were opened up that the timber business really exploded. When I was traveling through Acre in the sixties and seventies, all you saw was convoys of timber trucks. No one ever talked about conserving the forest, you never heard any of that. Cherry, mahogany, chestnut…in those streams you could count two hundred logs bobbing along, one tied to the other; they would float down the river until they could be transported on a truck.

To workers attracted by these expanding frontiers, the destruction of the forest was sold as an inevitable path towards collective progress and a dignified life. Many of them ended up settling there, minor pawns in the process of deforestation and the occupation of government lands. Others formed the outskirts of cities that were beginning to expand; impoverished urban nuclei whose economies depend to this day on predatory acts of environmental exploitation, prospecting and a whole host of activities on the fringes of the law.

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Every town we passed through had a sawmill by the side of the road. We transported lots of hardwood timber. My brother Nerso almost only did jobs carrying wood from here to there; I did a few myself. Even back then I thought it was destructive. I had a feeling it was no good, but at the time no one talked about it, they thought the forest would never end. It was all incentivized and we had to make a living.

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My father crossed the Araguaia region dozens of times in the early 1970s. There, between south-eastern Pará and Tocantins, the dictatorship pursued young revolutionaries and local peasants in one of the bloodiest chapters of Brazilian military rule. Inspired by the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, these young militants mostly came from the south and south-east of the country. The peasants called them paulistas or ‘students.’

This was a region of small farmers, mostly poor migrants from the north-east, who had settled there to escape from the poverty and oppression of the countryside. In their places of origin their enemies were “drought and fences.” Otávio Velho, in his classic study on the frontiers of expansion in the Amazonia in the 1950s and 1960s, points to the way this mass of poor, landless peasants saw geographical mobility as the chance to escape from what they called ‘captivity’: work for which you receive nothing in exchange, under the political command of landowners in north-eastern and central Brazil. These conditions harked back to the captivity of slavery and made its material and symbolic continuation apparent in the lives of these populations.

In Amazonia, the outsiders founded towns and cities with Biblical names, a succession of Canaans, Promised Lands and New Jerusalems. The majority of these north-eastern migrants in the 1960s and early 1970s settled in these territories with no support from the government or any other patrons. This would change somewhat in the coming years, when the federal government created some official ‘settlement’ programs which attracted new waves of rural migrants, many of them from the south, seduced by a series of benefits and fiscal incentives.

The Araguaia guerrilla war, which took place in the vicinity of the recently opened Trans-Amazonian highway, was another stage for the dictatorship’s sadistic theatre, ramped up by the Institutional Act 5 of 1968. Of the nearly eight hundred fighters, only twenty or so survived the incursions of thousands of soldiers in successive military offensives between 1972 and 1974.

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Many of the local farmers in Araguaia, with no political connection to the young people who opposed the regime, were victims of the same violence. Witnesses of this official brutality attest that electricity first reached the region in the form of the loose wires used by the military during their torture sessions.

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Truck drivers lived alongside soldiers on these frontiers of expansion. In their day-to-day encounters, camaraderie sometimes gave way to confrontation, and authority did not always lie with the other side.

We were on our way from Porto Velho to São Paulo, carrying cargo. We got to Pimenta Bueno, in Rondônia, and the road was closed off. There was a mudhole so big that no one could pass, not even the army’s jeeps. The soldiers put two tractors on the dirt track, to block the way, and there was a huge queue of trucks wanting to pass. I was fifth in line.

It rained night and day and we were just sitting there. It didn’t stop.

That queue of trucks was stuck there for four days. There were more than a hundred trucks. The fifth day arrived and what did we decide? We’ll cross tomorrow. There’s no other way. Most of us agreed. There were only two soldiers at that post and two tractors blocking the track. There was no way of passing with those vehicles there.

There was a driver, Paulão, and he said to me: “Jaú, if I move the machine, will you pass?” I said I would.

He went and moved one of the tractors from the middle of the road. Then me, Joel, Jaques, Bastião, Catarina and Goiânia all passed. Six trucks passed.

Then all hell broke loose.

One of the soldiers jumped onto the truck and put his revolver to my head. “Stop or I’ll kill you! Stop or I’ll kill you!” And I said, “You won’t kill anything, you don’t have the courage, look at all the drivers behind me.” And he didn’t shoot. He jumped down from the truck and stayed on the road watching the others pass. And we passed.

We worked for four days and four nights without stopping, until we’d crossed fifty kilometers of boggy land.

But then I had a word with the other five who had crossed before me: “Let’s be quick, ‘cause when we get to Vila Rondon we’re gonna get the shit kicked out of us; get ready for a beating, jail or worse.” There was another army camp there. We crossed the mudhole and arrived. The commandant at the military post asked, all puffed up: “Was this what you wanted?” I said, “Well, the soldiers at the post were doing nothing, so we decided to handle it ourselves. We know how to drive through mudholes. You just need to grab buckets wherever there are holes, fill them with stones, close up the hole and drive past. One truck tugs another if needed. That was our only intention, so that’s what we did and now we’re here and ready to continue the journey.” There was a pause, and then he said: “Then go with God and may God bless you, may you always have such courage in your work.”

The five of us all clapped with joy and relief, see, because we thought we were going to be stuck there or that they’d get rid of us…

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Zé, you always say you’re on the left, but what does that mean? he asked me recently when he heard me cursing some politician on the TV.

Even though he spent several years of his life on the colossal building sites which functioned as postcards for the authoritarian regime, my father rarely talks about the dictatorship. This word is absent from the many hours of our conversations, as if it had been in some way negated.

I cannot name the Brazil that emerges through his stories using my academic vocabulary. Almost none of my father’s words square with the narrative critical of the authoritarian regime recorded in the books I read as a student, researcher and professor. Neither does his discourse align itself with a kind of vainglorious thinking, with reactionary praise of the military-led regime. I get tied up when I try to dress his speech in the glossary of the enlightened, progressive political debate I am accustomed to.

These critical accounts did not reach him in a way that made any sense or shed any light on his experiences, nor did they suggest other ways of telling his and his country’s story. When he recalls the financial backers behind the military regime, he mentions the enormous machines that opened colossal furrows in the coastal mountains, or the times he met Mr Camargo Correa, who was also from Jaú, inspecting building projects and cursing the waste of parts he saw thrown around on the ground. If he brings up soldiers, he’s referring to concrete individuals that he met in some corner of the country, like the soldiers he transported to Santarém in his trailer in the early 1970s, on a recently opened stretch of road that took days to cross. Sometimes he remembers that we used to be scared of even saying the word ‘president’. But he can’t describe where this fear came from, nor does he draw any great conclusions from it. In my father’s stories, there is no Marighella, no Golbery, and the battles he witnessed did not take place in Rua Maria Antônia or Cinelândia square.

All that torture and repression stuff, we heard about it from time to time, but I never saw any of it on the road. When I ask if he remembers the dictatorship’s propaganda about the Trans-Amazonian highway, the ‘colonization’ of the northern region, the way the military promised to bring ‘progress’ to these regions, the guerrilla war in Araguia and other instances of resistance to the regime, his answers are always brief: I wouldn’t know what to say about that. Or: No, I don’t remember that.

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From What is Mine by José Henrique Bortoluci, translated by Rahul Bery. Copyright © 2024. Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in North America on the 15 October 2024.