People & Histories
1970s – present

The Amazon: development, deforestation and defenders

From the dictatorship's Trans-Amazonian Highway onward, roads, ranching and soy push into the rainforest, and a fight between developers, Indigenous peoples and environmentalists makes the Amazon a global issue.

  • The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon — Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, Verso (1989)
  • PRODES: Monitoramento do desmatamento da floresta amazônica brasileira por satélite — Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE)
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)
  • Censo Demográfico 2022: Indígenas — IBGE, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (2023)
  • Brazil — Encyclopaedia Britannica

Well established landindigenousenvironmenteconomy

For centuries the Amazon was the least-settled part of Brazil, apart from the rubber boom of around 1880–1912. In the 1970s the military regime set out to “integrate so as not to surrender” it, building the Trans-Amazonian Highway, offering land to settlers and subsidising cattle ranches. Contact brought epidemics to Indigenous peoples, and clearing accelerated.

  • The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon — Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, Verso (1989)
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)

In December 1988 Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper who organised forest workers against ranchers, was murdered in Acre, and his death made the Amazon an international cause.

  • The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon — Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, Verso (1989)
Brazil’s space agency INPE has measured deforestation by satellite since 1988 through its PRODES programme. Annual clearing peaked at more than 27,000 square kilometres in 2004, fell by about four-fifths over the following decade thanks to enforcement, protected areas and soy and cattle moratoriums, then rose again in the late 2010s before falling once more. The rise and fall track politics closely, which is why Brazilians argue about the Amazon as much as about the economy.

Indigenous territories now cover a large share of the Brazilian Amazon, and studies of satellite data show they are among the best-preserved forest. Yet invasions by illegal gold miners, such as those that caused a humanitarian emergency among the Yanomami in 2023, and the long legal fight over the marco temporal, a claim that Indigenous peoples only have rights to land they occupied in 1988, show how open the question remains.

  • Censo Demográfico 2022: Indígenas — IBGE, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (2023)
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)

How it's seen
Development and sovereignty

The Amazon is Brazilian territory, and the millions who live there need roads, jobs and income. Agribusiness is the engine of the economy, and rich countries that cut down their own forests have no right to dictate Brazil's choices.

  • The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon — Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, Verso (1989)
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)

Indigenous and environmental movements

Forest clearing is driven by land-grabbing, illegal logging and mining, often violent and tied to organised crime. Indigenous territories are the best protection the forest has, and defenders such as Chico Mendes, Dorothy Stang and Bruno Pereira have paid with their lives.

Why it matters today

Brazil

Around 60% of the Amazon rainforest lies in Brazil. Many Brazilians are proud of it and resent foreigners lecturing them about it, while also being divided over whether its future lies in protection or in farming and mining. For Indigenous peoples it is home, not scenery.