- Internal migration in Panamazonia was driven by the gold rush, improved infrastructure, land grabbing and job opportunities in large-scale infrastructure projects such as industrial mines and hydroelectric plants.
- Rondônia’s population grew from 100,000 in 1972 to more than 400,000 in 1982, when it became one of Brazil’s states. By 1990, it had surpassed one million inhabitants.
- Migration within the Brazilian Amazon is now largely internal, as Amazonian residents move to cities. Internal migration is motivated by lack of opportunity in rural communities and the creation of temporary jobs linked to construction sites
There have been three major sources of Brazilian immigrants in the twentieth century: the Northeast, where emigration offers one of the few realistic opportunities to escape poverty; the South, where middle-class families embraced an opportunity to continue a farming tradition; and the Central West, where immigrants have flowed northward as part of an organic expansion of the agricultural frontier. Internal migration within the Amazon responds to gold rushes and land grabs when roads are about to be improved, as well as job opportunities at large-scale infrastructure projects, such as industrial mines and hydropower plants. The most persistent trend is the flow of people from rural to urban communities. Immigrants have included entrepreneurs, professionals and cattle ranchers, but a much larger cohort has consisted of impoverished or marginalized families seeking economic opportunity.
Migration was first stimulated by the construction of the Rodovia Belem-Brasília. Built between 1958 and 1960, this transportation corridor linked the new capital with the largest city in the Amazon and triggered the first land rush into the Legal Amazon. During this period, the state governments of Pará and Goiás commercialized millions of hectares of land to promote colonization and settlement by affluent and middle-class families. An even larger migratory flow occurred in the 1970s, however, when large-scale highway building led to the construction of the Rodovia Transamazônica (BR-175), the railway to the Carajás mining district (EF-315), and the trunk highway connecting the municipalities of Eastern Pará (BR-158). In the 2010 census, 725,000 residents of Pará listed their origin as one the states in Brazil’s Northeast region.
Most of the new immigrants were Nordestinos responding to opportunities and programmes being advanced by the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (INCRA), the newly created federal agency distributing land parcels of between forty and a hundred hectares as part of an integrated highway construction and colonization programme (Plano de Integração Nacional). Like the Nordestinos of the rubber boom, they were fleeing poverty and pursuing freedom, or at least personal autonomy, by escaping their previous existence as sharecroppers bound by unfair contractual relationships.
Most failed to obtain an allotment in a government-organized settlement and would simply occupy a plot of public land, thus becoming posseiros (rather than proprietários), a tenure status that provides certain legal rights that improve over time. Unfortunately, without access to credit or extension support, many were unable to make a living and had little choice but to become rural workers employed by middle-class and corporate ranchers who were simultaneously responding to the military government’s call to colonize the Amazon.
By 1975, it had become evident that inadequate extension, poor infrastructure and the lack of basic services were creating a chaotic situation on the small farm landscapes of the forest frontier. Consequently, the military government modified its development strategy to favor land transactions creating large-scale ranches. Nordestinos continued to move into these landscapes, however, which led to conflict, often violent, between large landowners with political influence and smallholder communities supported by the Catholic Church and civil society.
A less conflictive process occurred on landscapes adjacent to long-established river ports on the north bank of the Amazon River (Prainha, Monte Alegre, Alencar, Óbidos, Oriximiná), where Nordestino immigrants and resident Ribeirinhos established small farms to cultivate basic food crops, particularly manioc (cassava). Over time, these producers would expand their spatial footprint and diversify into cattle production.
Fluvial transport also facilitated the arrival of a new wave of Nordestinos to northeast Rondônia in the 1960s. Many were attracted by the boom in cassiterite (tin) mining, but the government had also improved Rondônia’s mule trail between Cuiabá and Porto Velho, which would eventually evolve into BR-364. These events set the stage for a colonization boom in the 1970s with the initiation of four INCRA-sponsored colonization projects along the rustic frontier highway. This inflow turned into a massive land rush in the 1980s, when the POLONOROESTE project created nineteen additional colonization centers in a renewed attempt to create a migratory alternative for the rural poor.
The population of Rondônia surged from 100,000 in 1972 to more than 400,000 in 1982, when its status was elevated from a federal territory to a state of the union. By 1990, it had a population of more than a million, most of whom were small farmers, including both Nordestinos and recent immigrants from Paraná, who had transformed wilderness into a vast agricultural landscape. This transition was neither conflict free nor particularly well planned, despite technical assistance from two high-profile projects financed by the World Bank. In spite of the setbacks, Rondônia is now home to one of Brazil’s most egalitarian farm economies.
Acre preceded Rondônia in elevation to statehood by almost twenty years, during which time its citizens pursued livelihoods based on rubber tapping and Brazil nut gathering. This changed dramatically, however, following the extension of BR-364 into Acre and the installation of a half-dozen INCRA-sponsored agrarian settlements. The population expanded from 111,000 in 1970 to 300,000 in 1980 and to more than 490,000 by 1990.
Most of the immigrant families created small- to medium-scale cattle farms that led inevitably to conflict with the seringueiros who were struggling to maintain their forest-based livelihoods in an economic and political environment that was undermining their existence. The military government was in the process of ending rubber subsidies and was actively promoting the expansion of the cattle industry to increase settlement in the region. This coincided with the self-organization of the rubber workers into syndicates, which originally were created to improve their bargaining position with seringalistas, but which became essential in their struggle to protect their rubber concessions from land grabbers representing medium- to large-scale cattle ranch owners.
The movement was led by Chico Mendes, who pioneered a tactic known as empate, a standoff in which a group of seringueiros would confront a team of forest-clearing contractors. This was a dangerous gambit in a pioneer landscape where the rule of law was either nonexistent or perverted by officials seeking to benefit from the government’s policies to advance the agricultural frontier.
Coincidentally, deforestation was a newly important theme within civil society organizations and had become an international issue, in part because of Chico Mendes’ charismatic leadership and his ability to communicate his community’s situation to a global audience. Among his accomplishments was his advocacy for the creation of extractive reserves as a land tenure solution that would guarantee the rights of forest communities and promote forest conservation.
In 1987, the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation invited Mendes to attend the annual conference of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C., where he spoke to members of Congress about an IDB-funded road project in Acre that threatened the rainforest and its inhabitants. Both the IDB and the World Bank subsequently endorsed the idea of establishing extractive reserves. Ceding to international pressure, the Brazilian government created the first extractive reserve in 1988. Unfortunately, his international prestige did not protect Chico Mendes from the wrath of the cattle ranchers who continued to invade and clear the forests around his hometown of Xapuri. He was assassinated in his front yard by a hired killer in 1988.
Another major vector for migration into the Amazon is the highway that traverses southeastern Pará (BR-150 and BR-158), where most ranching families immigrated from Goiás, which had been settled in the 1950s and 1960s. Goiás is dominated by the beef industry, and its popular culture is infused with a pioneer spirit associated with cowboys and cattle ranching. This group’s influence can be seen in the composition of the settler communities in São Felix do Xingu, which was established in 1910 during the first rubber boom. The municipality was transformed in the 1980s by the Projeto de Colonização Tucumã, a private settlement venture implemented by a construction company (Andrade Gutierrez), which included a commitment to build a regional highway, PA-279, to connect São Felix with BR-150 at Xinguara.
The colonization project was overwhelmed by settlers and wildcat gold miners, causing Andrade Gutierrez to abandon its commitment to develop a series of agrovilas and, instead, reverted the land distribution process to INCRA, which was likewise powerless (or disinclined) to stop the appropriation of public lands. Although the population of São Xingu is not unlike that of other municipalities in eastern Pará, the migrants from Goiás were particularly skilled in the dark arts of land grabbing, known as grilagem. Approximately forty per cent of all landholders in the municipality originate from Goiás, followed by immigrants from Mato Grosso, Minas Gerais and Tocantins.
The history of immigration into Mato Grosso is also unique. Between 1981 and 1991, the state received about 500,000 migrants in a demographic phenomenon radically different from those of Pará, Acre and Rondônia. Almost half of the new arrivals were from the South, and a majority were of European descent. They came as intact families seeking to continue a tradition of family farming and were attracted to the state because it was increasingly difficult to acquire arable land in their home villages in Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. They were attracted to frontier landscapes in the northern part of the state, where settlements were being organized by private companies or cooperatives acting as intermediaries for both large- and small-scale farmers.
Several of these schemes reflected the influence peddling that characterized the federal and state governments in the 1960s and 1970s. In the most notorious transaction, two million hectares were sold to four companies for US$4 per hectare. There were dozens of these land companies, and their history is memorialized in the unusual names of these municipalities, derived from the name or acronym of the land company: Sinop, Colíder, Cotriguaçu and Colniza.
Southern migrants enjoyed several cultural advantages. They had social and family connections to influential individuals and institutions that opened doors and created opportunities denied to the landless peasants who settled in Pará. They also arrived together, with a preconceived spirit of community, since many hailed from the same municipality in southern Brazil. Among them were individuals like André Antonio Maggi, the father of Blairo Maggi, the soybean magnate, former governor of Mato Grosso and agriculture minister in 2016 and 2017.
Migration within the Brazilian Amazon is now largely internal, as Amazonian residents move to cities as part of the worldwide phenomenon of urbanization. Internal migration is motivated by lack of opportunity in rural communities and the creation of temporary jobs linked to construction sites. For example, the hydropower projects on the Rio Madeira motivated approximately 80,000 people to move to northwest Rondônia during the construction of the dams at Santo Antônio and Jirau, while up to 20,000 migrants moved to Altamira during the construction of the Belo Monte hydropower project.
Gold rushes have attracted tens of thousands of wildcat miners, known in Brazil as garimpeiros. The most famous gold field, or garimpo, was at Serra Pelada, a massive, hand-dug, open-pit mine about 100 kilometers east of the Carajás mineral complex, which operated between 1979 and 1992. Other gold fields that experience periodic rushes exist in southwest Pará (Tapajós-Crepori), southeast Pará (Cumaru-Oirlandia do Norte), northwest Mato Grosso (Alta Floresta-Jurua) and in the border regions of Roraima. The potential for future gold rushes remains latent, and there has been a renewed boom due to the rise of gold prices in international markets since 2018. Where garimpeiros move after an ore body is exhausted is not well documented. Some undoubtedly move to other gold fields, but others may join the regional labour force or became small-scale entrepreneurs or cattle ranchers, depending upon their luck in the gold fields.
The formal mining sector in Pará has been a magnet for migrants. Work in the industrial facility is only one of several job opportunities, and economic activity linked to the mine is an accelerant for growth in the service sector. The region surrounding the Carajás mineral complex is one of the most heavily deforested landscapes in the Amazon, where more than eighty per cent of the area is dedicated to beef cattle ranching and an approximately equivalent area is occupied by large- and small-scale landholdings.
Recent studies suggest that deforestation is a secondary impact of the mining industry, but it is not clear whether this is cause and effect or merely correlation. Many other drivers of deforestation developed simultaneously with the mining industry in Carajás, including colonization projects, national highway infrastructure and land speculation.
Banner image: Fire in the Jaci-Parana Extractive Reserve, in Porto Velho, Rondonia state. Taken 16 Aug, 2020. Credit: Christian Braga / Greenpeace.
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