CHAPTER OUTLINE

This dissertation is an analysis of territorial struggles over neo-extractivism, arguably the phenomenon defining contemporary Amazonian politics. I ground this analysis in a study of some of the wide-reaching effects of one of the decade’s most controversial development projects – the paving of the BR-163, the “soy highway”. That both the road and soy production itself, are somewhat de-centered in much of this

analysis is testament to the way that Amazonian development proceeds. The effects of mega-projects are incredibly far-reaching (in this case the BR-163 paving project re- worked territory in the entire western portion of the state of Pará) and in areas that have standing forest, logging precedes or works in conjunction with most extractive

development, especially agricultural. The state of Pará and the territorial re-organization associated with the BR-163 are particularly key sites for analyzing neo-extractivism for a number of reasons. Pará is Brazil’s second largest state – twice the size of France – and

the “area of impact” of the BR-163, also known as “western Pará” is vast, encompassing what the federal government identified as “one of the most important regions in the Amazon, from the point of view of economic potential, biological diversity, natural wealth, and cultural and ethnic diversity” (Brasil 2005). Further, the development of the region in anticipation of this road paving is the first attempt to operationalize the

“Sustainable Amazon Plan,” (Brasil 2006) addressed in Chapter Three which, explicitly brings together extractive development, conservation, and anti-poverty programs, which is precisely the neo-extractive model that the first half of this dissertation will sketch out more substantively.

This introduction (and preface) should be thought of as a presentation of the themes and concepts that organize this dissertation and an argument for how their analysis should proceed. The following four chapters are divided into two sections. In a brief introduction to Part One I briefly outline the primary elements that I argue constitute Amazônian neo-extractivism. Chapters Two and Three each explore different aspects of the governance structure created to address the arrival of soy into Amazônia and its “dragging effects,” namely the proposed paving of the BR-163. Chapter Two, examines two voluntary certification programs for soy produced in the Amazon, to analyze the emergence, functions, and effects of what I call, following Urlich Brand, “business-as- usual neoliberal governance,” itself part of what regional social movements are

increasingly calling “Green Capitalism.” I argue that such programs actually make soy production in the region possible and produce new networks and relations among social mediator organizations like the rural workers unions, regional and international

environmental benefits. At worst, they work to re-enforce the hegemony of international Environmental NGOs (ENGOs), to legitimize agri-business multinationals such as Cargill, and to destabilize strategies of resistance—reproducing the very dynamics of inequality and domination that governance seeks to eradicate.

I then turn to an analysis of the re-territorialization of the entire western half of the state of Pará implemented through what I call the ordering technology of

Ordenamento Territorial in order to facilitate the paving of the BR-163. While Chapter Two examined the immediate policies that made the territorial expansion of soy

agriculture possible, Chapter Three turns to the question of state (broadly conceived) ordering. I argue that although the mechanisms for ordering have changed substantively over the past several decades, the rationality – to reproduce a given order and relations of power – has not. The majority of the chapter is dedicated to a detailed study of the mechanisms for re-producing that order and a characterization of the substantive shifts in state territorialization within the current moment.

Part Two, examines the way that the changing dynamics of state and market in Amazonia meet changing strategies of resistance. My overall argument is that struggles have become explicitly territorial and that this shift is not simply a shift in the framing of movement struggles, but in the production of a different kind of collective subject. This has implications for the kind of claims that are made and for the nature of movement representation. Chapters Four and Five treat these two facets of shifting strategies of resistance through a recounting and analysis of the two struggles introduced in this chapter.

Chapter Four, examines the concept of territory as articulated by the Movement in Defense of Life and Culture of the Arapiuns River (MDVCA) by sketching out a sort of genealogy of the shift, in the lower Amazon, from the enunciation of struggle as a “struggle for land” to a “struggle for territory” over the past few decades. I argue in this chapter that this concept of territory, as conceived by the movement, actually marks a substantive and strategic shift from previous strategies of struggle that unhinges both the concept of territory from the territorial state and control over land and resources from the idea of property. In doing so, they simultaneously transcend the categories of state and political economy, while also deploying them in order to meet their strategic goals. At the core of this argument is a conception of territory created in and from below, that treats particular territories and subjects as co-produced and that, as a practice of resistance, is forged through a combination of everyday practices and struggle.

The politics of the progressive state and the emergence of “socio-territorial movements” (Mançano 2005) explored in Chapter Four will raise the questions explored more explicitly in Chapter Five, of how these changing dynamics of power and resistance manifest in the relationships between social mediator organizations (namely the rural workers’ union), movements, and progressive government. I delineate how the

intertwining of clientalist and counterhegemonic strains within the rural workers’ union manifests in their tendency to perform the work of the state (albeit a re-constituted one). That is, they function as the state both institutionally, in that members of Rural Workers’ Union (STR) leadership simultaneously hold municipal and state offices, and effectively, in that they are deeply invested in maintaining given order, namely hierarchical relations of control. I highlight, in contrast, the nascent emancipatory impulses of the Movement in

Defense of Renascer (MDR) to break with institutional politics-as-usual and how those impulses are acted on by these organizations to fold them back into the dominant political logic.

While Chapter Four explicitly explores the concept of territory in the emergence of the Movement for the Defense of Life and Culture on the Arapiuns River, and Chapter Five explores the tensions between traditional mediator organizations and emerging movements in the struggle for Resex Renascer. Although I focus on the question of territory more explicitly in the chapter on the Movement in Defense of Life and Culture of the Arapiuns River and the question of tensions between movements, mediators and the state more explicitly in the chapter on the struggle over Renascer, this separate treatmeant is not meant as a comparison, nor is it meant to suggest that MDVCA only embodies this territorial shift and Renascer the tensions of progressive government. Rather, both struggles express multiple and overlapping aspects of the shifts explored here, but I found the elements of these struggles to be particularly expressive of the specific dynamics discussed in each respective chapter and developed them accordingly. More broadly, I argue that these two movements together express a larger shifting regional dynamic and, further, they are linked. They are part of a loose regional network of movements that has included anti-soy mobilization, the growing mobilization against the damming of the Tapajós, among others. They are connected, in part, through their relationships with organizations such as the Pastoral Land Commission, the movement of those affected by Dams (MAB), and the Amazon Defense Front in Santarém and their participants frequently meet, support each others struggles, and remain in ongoing conversation.

I will conclude by returning to the proposition put forward in this introduction that a research program adequate to the complexities of the new political moment in Amazonia requires a processual notion of antagonistic struggle. This means, I will argue, a move away from technocratic assessments of conflict, from a frame of analysis that measures the effectiveness of movements purely by their capacity to affect the state or to protect “the environment,” and requires a shift in methodologies, including a more substantive engagement with the work of Brazilian scholars.

Part One. Neo-extractivism: Capital, Nature, Difference, Territory

The re-emergence of commodity-oriented industrial extractive development as a primary strategy for economic growth, justified on a national level through links to anti- poverty programs, is a key element of the neo-developmentalist program among

“progressive” governments across Latin America.26 _{This section traces the parameters of}

this “neo-extractivism” (Gudynas 2010) in Brazilian Amazônia. The argument is that Amazônia’s vast wealth of extractive resources (timber, minerals, agricultural land, water-based energy) and its large, economically depressed population makes it the emblematic site for neo-extractivism. The potential environmental devastation associated with the exploitation of “natural resources” necessary for this extractivism, however, means that it encounters concerted resistance from the global environmental community as well as from traditional, indigenous, and migrant smallholders (the latter is addressed more substantively in Part Three). As a result, in addition to the links to anti-poverty programs that justify industrial extractivism in much of the country (e.g. that render it socially progressive), for these projects to be implemented in the Amazon, they must also be “greened.” Further, because of the historical links forged between local social

movements and international environmentalists (an assumed alliance that these chapters                                                                                                                

26  _{Neo-developmentalism emerged across Latin America with the crisis of neoliberalism as a heterodox} policy response that incorporated monetary and fiscal policies of neoliberalism along with state policies to nurture the growth of national firms and social programs based in economically distributive programs. Despite substantial modifications to the neoliberal program, neo-developmentalism does not depart from a programmatic focus on expanding productive capacity and increasing accumulation (Katz and Haine 2006; Acosta 2008; Escobar 2010; Ricci 2010; Morais and Saad-Filho 2011a; Morais and Saad-Filho 2011b).