18/01/2023 14:48 From Nothing to Nowhere - The Transamazonian Highway | New Internationalist

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FROM NOTHING TO NOWHERE - THE TRANSAMAZONIAN HIGHWAY

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Sue Branford (/author/Sue+Branford )

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2 October 1980
In 1970 General Medici, military ruler of Brazil, visited the impoverished north-east of the country. 'Nothing
in my whole life has shocked and upset me so deeply,'. he reported on his return to Rio. Land reforms were out
of the question. For those who held power in Brazil relied heavily on the landowners. Then the General had an
idea - a road which would open up the wilderness and provide employment and markets for the poor. Ten
years down the road, *Sue Branford* files this report.

The Transamazon highway is a vast 5,000 kilometre road which cuts across the heart of the Amazon forest, spanning
Brazil from Joao Pessoa in the northeast to the border with Peru. It was built in just 18 months.

At about the same time, in the early 1970s, the Brazilian government also constructed the Mato Grosso highway,
running in a north-south direction from Santarem, a port on the Amazon river, to Cuiaba, near the borders of Bolivia
and Paraguay.

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It was planned for these two roads to form a huge symbolic cross, representing the occupation of the world's last great
virgin forest. It was confidently predicted that by the early 1980s, the region would be bustling with the settlement of
ten million people along the Transamazon alone. According to official plans, these families would be supplying the
domestic market with millions of tonnes of beans, rice and maize, as well as earning millions of dollars through the
export of coffee, cocoa, pepper, oranges and other crops.

In the event, none of this has happened. At the most 20,000 families have settled beside the road. Many of these
moved in of their own initiative, outside the official colonization pro­gramme. A far cry from the prosperous farmers
envisaged by the government, most of the settlers are scratching out a meagre, near-subsistence living. Inhabiting
traditional wattle-and-daub huts with palm-leaf roofs, they are farming the land in the old way, without tractors or
other farm machinery. They cultivate rice, cassava and maize, largely for their own consumption; and isolated in the
tropical forest, thousands of kilometres from the main consumer centres, they even have difficulty in marketing their
small sur­pluses when they have them.

What went wrong with the grandiose scheme? Was the prgramme misconceived from the outset? Or did the failure
stem from the way it was implemented?

In 1970 the huge, backward, north­east of Brazil was undergoing one of its Advert

periodic droughts. Tens of thousands of peasant families were being driven off
their tiny plots of land (minifundio) into the swollen cities which offered little
prospect of employment. Hundreds of children were dying from starvation.

General Emilio Garrastazu Medici, president of the tough authoritarian

government then ruling Brazil, visited the region. By all accounts, he was pro­‐
foundly shaken by the suffering he saw. He commented: 'Nothing in my whole
life has shocked and upset me so deeply. Never have I faced such a challenge.' The
president clearly felt that he must take decisive action.
(https://ead.newint.org/click.php?
Rationally, a long-term solution to the human suffering imposed by the droughts should have been sought within the
id=399)
region itself. If the president had pushed through a radical programme of land reform, giving each family an
adequate plot of land and providing them with reliable credit facilities and technical advice the peasants would have
become much less vulnerable to the droughts.

However such a policy was inconceiv­able, then and now. The government would never declare war on the large
landowners - faithful and important supporters of the regime. It would con­tradict the essence of the military govern­‐
ment which is busy promoting an elitist, non-populist form of capitalist development.

Instead, the president searched for some kind of deus ex machina, an emer­gency solution outside the region that
would end the intolerable suffering with­out changing the existing social and economic structures. The rapid construc­‐
tion of the Transamazon highway, in itself creating a heavy demand for un­skilled labour, was to be followed by a
massive colonization project that would settle millions of landless peasant families on virgin forest land. It seemed to
be a heaven-sent solution.

After President Medici's visit to the north-east in 1970, the Plano de Inte­gracao National (National Integration Plan) -
was unexpectedly announced. It was launched as the master-plan that would solve simultaneously the problems of
both the north-east and the Amazon. Under the plan, about $400 million was to be spent on road construction, irriga­‐
tion and colonization projects. The money was to come from a drastic 30 per cent cut in the resources going to
SUDENE, the north-east development agency, which had been grappling in­effectively with the region's huge
problems for over a decade.

Advert The most spectacular and costly of the projects was the Transamazon highway
and its colonization scheme. Transport Minister Mario Andreazza explained why
the government had decided to regard the construction of the road as one of its
urgent priorities: 'On the one hand, the north-east, ravaged by periodic droughts,
with a huge sector of its population lacking even the basic conditions for survival,
sees many of its inhabitants emigrate to the centre-south where the large cities
are not in a position to absorb this unskilled labour. On the other hand, the
population of Amazonia, which is a vast region with fertile valleys and important
mineral deposits, is concen­trated in tiny hamlets beside the river.' The solution
was to let the two regions solve each other's problems. The slogan became: 'Land

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without people for the people without land.' It was predicted that two million people would be settled along the road
within two years.

The project was presented as a fearless patriotic undertaking, carried out by a government in a hurry to develop the
hinterland and to bring progress to the poorer sectors of the population. All leading government officials dutifully
expressed enthusiastic support.

However, a few middle-rank civil servants dared to challenge these facile assumptions. Jose Sergio de Paz Monteiro,
director of the road department for Amazonas, one of the states to be cut by the Transamazon, gave an interview to a
leading Sao Paulo newspaper 0 Estado de S. Paulo in June 1970. He commented: 'The simple fact of building roads
(https://ead.newint.org/click.php?
does not mean that we are creating conditions for the occupation of the demographic vacuum. As well as roads, we
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must pro­vide the settlers with technical and financial assistance so that they can produce and fix themselves on the
land.' The engineer estimated that a successful colonization project would demand an investment twice that calculated
on for the road.

Moreover, the engineer had specific reasons for believing that the Transamazon highway was particularly unsound. He
said that the road from Manaus south to Porto Velho made economic sense, because it linked an area with a high
consumption of raw materials (the in­dustrialized south) to an area that required manufactured goods (the Amazon
region). 'But this is not the case with the Trans­amazon', he added, 'for the north-east consumes very little of what we
produce and it produces very little of what we consume.'

In keeping with the prevailing climate of political repression, the government could not tolerate these criticisms. Jose
Monteiro was forced to make an unconvincing retraction in which he denied even talking about the Transamazon to
the Sao Paulo paper.

The engineer did not have to wait long for the vindication of his predic­tions. The idea of settling millions of north-
easterners was given up within a year. The project struggled on until June 1974, when it was finally abandoned. By
then, only 4,969 families had been officially settled. In all about 20,000 families had come into the region.

The families we visited in 1975 were facing serious problems. They were housed in flimsy, pre-fabricated little wooden
houses with corrugated iron roofs which looked incongruous in the midst of the tropical forest. And according to the
settlers they were less suited to the humid climate than the traditional wattle-and­daub huts. Many complained of
failures in the government's back-up programme: little technical assistance, highly expensive farm inputs (pesticides,
fertilizers, sprays etc.), inadequate marketing facilities and so on. One settler told us that the road should really have
been called the Trans­misery highway.

A few stretches of the road that fit into north-south routes have been heavily used. For the most part however, the
road has had very little traffic. It was dubbed 'the road that links nothing to nowhere' by one Brazilian journalist.
Predictably enough the earth road, which was coated with a thin layer of fine gravel, has not stood up to the torrential
rains that beat down on Amazonia from November to April. A heavy outlay is required each May and June to repair
the wooden bridges, fill in the potholes, and replace the broken drainage pipes.

In parts, the failure of the Transamazon is due to inherent weaknesses in an over ambitious project. However, the
main reason for the fiasco was probably politi­cal. From the very beginning, one of the the main objectives of the
project - to solve a serious social problem of poverty in the north-east - was jarringly at odds with the principal aim of
the successive military governments in Brazil, which have been to further the interests of a small elite of powerful
landed, industrial and banking groups.

Until recently *Sue Branford* was the Sao Paulo correspondent of the Financial Times. She is just completing a book
on land conflict in the Amazon.

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(/issues/1980/10/01)
This article is from the October 1980 (/issues/1980/10/01) issue of New Internationalist.

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