ABSTRACT
Throughout history, the Brazilian government has had a changing and ambivalent attitude toward the Amazon region within the national scenario. It has sometimes perceived the Amazon as a paradoxical ecosystem (both superabundant and fragile at the same time) with a wide range of problems requiring solutions (the need to protect its extensive land borders, the purchase of large tracts of land by foreigners, criticism from international organizations for the deaths of members of indigenous communities and environmental damages), and as a challenge to development with part of its territory occupied both by local communities, considered uneducated and primitive by the ruling elites and economic organizations, and indigenous peoples divided into approximately 180 ethnic groups, speaking over 100 dierent languages. At other times, however, the Amazon region was seen as the prime location for national exploration and a solution to Brazil’s problems. Periods exemplifying the latter are: a) the rst years of the 20th century, when the region emerged as a producer of rubber, a raw material extracted from the native forest and exported to Europe and the US; b) during World War II, when the region was called upon to meet the allied troops’ demand for rubber, because the Axis nations blocked the access to the Malaysian supply of this product; or c) in the 1980s when Serra Pelada began to produce gold and the military regime planned to use this commodity to pay o the Brazilian national debt: gold was extracted by thousands of people working under degrading conditions who risked their lives on a daily basis, in an insane venture encouraged by the Federal Government.
