Investor Presentaiton
During the 70s, the federal government intervened in the Amazon in general, editing a Decree
Law "federalizing” the vacant land located in the range of one hundred kilometers width of each
of the federal roads already built, under construction or planned in the region. In Article 5 it
recognized the legal situations already established. With this measure, about 70% of the State of
Pará area was federalized (Benatti et al, 2013, p. 6).
With the institutional invention of the Legal Amazon, which covers Pará, the Union is turns itself
the sovereign agent, planned and implement its policy of occupation and development going over
the interests of the actors in the region. To submit the state and local governments to the interests
of the federal government new regional institutions were created and redefined the roles that the
federal government and the private sector would then take in their geo-economic and geo-
political dimensions. (Carvalho, 2012, 78)
The occupation of the Amazon region during the military governments was based on the
National Integration Plan (PIN) under the slogan of "a land without men for men without land"
and under the premise that the Amazon was a "demographic vacuum", engendering in 21 years a
higher demographic occupation than in five centuries of history. The implementation of
settlement projects in series was disjointed and disorganized, did not seek to guarantee the rights
of indigenous peoples and had as the main objective to use the expansion of the internal frontier
as an escape valve, transferring thousands of zones of families of social tension in the
countryside, in the South and Northeast to the Amazon region.
With respect to land regulation, during 1987, the law that federalized the majority of lands in the
Legal Amazon was revoked and once again the regulations spread disorder: the new decree
provided that the unoccupied lands before federalized were now transferred to provincial
management, except for lands that were not vacant and subject to legal situations already
established or in process of formation. With this provision, until today none of the land that were
once "federalized" effectively returned to the provincial public domain.
It is possible to see how the long process of regulation of Pará's territorial occupation has always
followed the same tone as the rest of the country, permeated with contradictions and structural
inefficiencies in the way that repeats this perverse pattern of land regulation, although its effects
are amplified in the internal frontier expansion region. We will see in the next section how theView entire presentation