Nature’s revenge: War on the wilderness during the opening of Brazil’s ‘Last Western Frontier’

Abstract

This article seeks to identify the key confrontations between frontier expansion and nature present in the discourses and documents generated by the ‘The March toward the West’ (Marcha para o Oeste), a Brazilian federal policy of territorial occupation initiated during the first half of the twentieth century. The paper identifies the representation of the frontiersmen of the Brazilian West, dealing with the creation of the heroic image of the road-building engineer Bernardo Sayão. Sayão was responsible for the construction of the 2,169 km highway that connects Brasília, the then new federal capital, to Belém, located in Brazil’s Amazon region. In 1959, shortly before the completion of this major road, Sayão died in a dramatic accident, crushed by a falling tree. Research for this paper was based on biographical accounts, combined with studies generated by environmental historians and historical geographers.