THE MILITARYIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND AGRARIAN ISSUES: AMAZON GOVERNANCE IN THE BOLSONARO PERIOD
militarization; Amazon; agrarian issue; socioenvironmental conflicts; territorial control
The following thesis objective is to investigate the process of militarization as explicited during the Bolsonaro government (2019-2022) by framing this phenomenon in its environmental and agrarian dimensions and its expressions in the Amazon region from two of its most evident manifestations: the military occupation of public institutions and the Law and Order Guarantee Operations occurred in that period. Based upon literary review, the first two chapters describe the trajectory of political-military action in the country and, subsequently, its specificities in the Amazon throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, in a way that characterizes patterns, continuities and ruptures. In the following chapters we deepen our findings from fieldwork and interviews: Chapter 3 is dedicated to analyzing the militarization in the “bureaucratic centrality” of State organs and agencies related to territorial, environmental, agrarian and indigenist management and the effects, implications and orientations foist upon these instances due to the deployment of military personnel, contrating those findings with the academical literature on the topic. In Chapter 4, the analysis shifts to a regional and local scale concerning the Law and Order Guarantee Operations for environmental purposes, with a focus on the southern region of the Amazonas state. Through these procedures, the thesis contributes to a reflection on: (i) the distance between civilian and academic perceptions and the categories and those that inform military action; (ii) the “civilian-military” relations in the Amazon and its interaction with the expansion of agroextractivist frontiers in the region; (iii) how the dispute for the meanings of the environmental issue is increasingly traversed by military interpretations, which oscillates between denunciation and alignment with business and financial sectors – tendencies that were intensified during the Bolsonaro government –, ultimately in an effort to broaden the scope of political-military action and territorial control