THE MILITARYIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND AGRARIAN ISSUES: AMAZON GOVERNANCE IN THE BOLSONARO PERIOD
governance of the Amazon, militarization, agrarian and environmental question, frontier
The following thesis aims to analyze the resurgence of mechanisms and practices of militarization over agrarian and socioenvironmental conflicts, under the guise of “agrarian and environmental issues” throughout the Bolsonaro government, whose epicenter was characterized in the Amazon with the intensification of the agrarian and mining frontier expansion, as well as other new forms of capital accumulation. For that a literary review of academic literature on the military and militarism will be undertaken with a focus on the Brazilian context, approaching different conceptions of the political dynamics of that social group, also a State institution, both in its internal settings and its “external” projections. As follows, a trajectory of different practices, plans and forms of military presence and occupation in the Amazon will be made, enabling the identification of regularities, continuities and ruptures. By surveying the environmental and agrarian policies of the Bolsonaro government, they will be investigated through two perspectives highlighted during that period: i) the occupation of positions in the federal administration by military and associated personnel, that is, the militarization of the administrative apparatus and; ii) the employment of troops in Law and Order Guarantee (GLO) operations in vast areas of the Amazon, which came to be under the coordination of the National Council of the Legal Amazon, that being the territorialized dimension of the militarization. Such an effort will characterize the content and orientation of the military action in these spheres, defining the meanings cast upon regional disputes and the effects that the military intervention had on the other actors and on the agrarian and environmental field itself, which leads us to an analysis of the militarization of these subjects as a paradigm, notwithstanding its movement on a global level, with very singular expressions on the Brazilian context.