REPRESENTAÇÕES DIVERGENTES DA AMAZÔNIA E SUA UTILIZAÇÃO PARA JUSTIFICAR PRÁTICAS ESTATAIS DURANTE O SÉCULO XX

Abstract

When we analyze the federal policies aimed at the Brazilian Amazon during the first half of the 20th century, we can see that the political discourse produced about it by the center of national power takes a 180-degree turn when the dominant ideology changes through the 1930 Revolution. We then move from a segregating attitude, which delegitimizes Amazonian aspirations, to an attempt to build an integrated country, through a discourse that exalts the qualities of the empty spaces in the interior. The First Republic and the Vargas Era see and think about the Amazon in very different ways and an analysis of how the Amazon is understood in these two periods reveals significant ruptures, but also continuities in the way the country acted in the region from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1960s. The Brazil-Amazon relationship moves from an entirely negative interpretation of the region, consolidated during the period of political decentralization of the First Republic, to a reimagined and reconfigured representation from the Vargas Era onwards, but which continues beyond it, bringing an unprecedented policy of regional valorization to the Amazon region, implemented in the early 1950s.