The Organic Territory: The Vargas Regime and the Environmental Legislation Boom in Brazil, 1930-1945

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Frederico Santos Soares de Freitas July 12, 2014 Paper presented at the Second World Congress of Environmental History Panel: “Fascist and Pseudo-‐fascist Regimes and Nature. A Global Perspective”

The Organic Territory: The Vargas Regime and the Environmental Legislation Boom in Brazil, 1930-1945

The period between 1930 and 1945 in Brazil, saw the adoption of fascist-‐

style programs by the regime of Getúlio Vargas as a way to stimulate industrial

growth and suppress both communist and liberal influences in the country.

Drawing from rational theories of social reengineering inspired by European

fascism, Vargas sought to implement in Brazil an “authoritarian democracy”

based on state intervention and reform of the State, hierarchical organic

solidarity, and the repudiation of political liberalism and the “unnatural

individualism” that was perceveid as been at its core.

The Vargas years also witnessed a boom in conservationist legislation

that was unprecedented in the history of the South American country.

Throughout the 1930s the Brazilian government enacted a series of

conservationist laws and decrees that included a forest code, a new water law,

the creation of the country's first national parks, the establishment of a forest

agency, and a national institute of forestry. This paper focuses on the creation of

national parks as a way to understand both how conservation fit into the larger

territorial preoccupations of the Vargas’ regime with Brazil’s underdeveloped

west, and the limitations of the Brazilian government to enforce its own

conservationist legislation.

The move by the Vargas regime to implement a conservationist agenda

was unprecedent—apart from the establishment of botanical gardens and a few

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protected semi-‐urban forests around Rio de Janeiro, previous governments had

never acted to establish a conservation program. The change brought by Vargas

had its root in a new phenomenon—the appearance on the Brazilian national

stage of a cadre of conservationists (many of them scientists) who, before 1937,

were able to align US and Europe-‐born ideas of conservation of nature with a

nationalist discourse akin to the one put forward by Vargas’s ideologues.1 One of

the most active conservationists of this period was Alberto José de Sampaio, who

was the director of the botany department of the National Museum in Rio de

Janeiro between 1912 and 1937. Sampaio’s conservationism took shape in the

1920s and 1930s, when he published books on forestry and the protection of

nature.2 Besides writing books to a specialized public, Sampaio also attempted to

reach a broader audience by writing in the Brazilian press about the necessity of

preserving forests. Sampaio edited a Sunday supplement titled Monumentos

Naturais e Proteção à Natureza (Natural Monuments and Nature’s Protection) in

one of Rio’s main newspapers, Correio da Manhã, where he frequently criticized

the destruction of forests, urging for a change in the attitudes of the public

regarding nature.3 Like other prominent members of this group of scientists and

conservationists, Sampaio occupied important positions in government

1 José Luiz de Andrade Franco and José Augusto Drummond, “Wilderness and the Brazilian Mind (II): The First Brazilian Conference on Nature Protection (Rio De Janeiro, 1934),” Environmental History 14, no. 1 (2009): 724–60. José Luiz de Andrade Franco and José Augusto Drummond, “Wilderness and the Brazilian Mind (I): Nation and Nature in Brazil from the 1920s to the 1940s,” Environmental History 13, no. 4 (October 2008): 724–60. 2Alberto José de Sampaio, Biogeographia Dynamica; a Natureza E O Homem No Brasil; Noções Geraes E Estudo Especial Da “Protecção Á Natureza” No Brasil. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1935); Alberto José de Sampaio, O Problema Florestal No Brasil, Em 1926. Relatorio Succinto, Visando a Phytotechnia E a Phytogeographia, Apresentado Ao Congresso Internacional de Silvicultura de Roma, Abril-Maio 1926 ... (Rio de Janeiro: Cysneios & cia., 1926). 3 Alberto José de Sampaio, “A Mentalidade Reflorestadora,” Correio Da Manhã, January 21, 1934; Alberto José de Sampaio, “Parques Nacionaes,” Jornal Do Commercio, March 1, 1931; Alberto José de Sampaio and Edgar Roquette-‐Pinto, “Parques Nacionais,” Correio Da Manhã, November 19, 1933.

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institutions like the National Museum and the Federal Forest Council, which

demonstrates the ability of the 1930s conservationists to reach the higher

echelons of the Getúlio Vargas’s Provisional Government.4

The Brazilian environmentalists of the 1930s drew their blend of

nationalism, belief on a strong state, and conservationism from Alberto Torres, a

lawyer, politician, and essayist who was the first to align an authoritarian

discourse with conservationist preoccupations in his 1910s books.5 By adopting

Torres’s nationalist approach to the environment, conservationists like Sampaio

managed to open a communication channel with the Vargas’s higher echelons.

Between 1933 and 1934 the Vargas administration, in an effort to refound the

Brazilian state, decreed forest, hunting, fishing, and water codes, putting natural

resources under the tutelage of the federal government. It also established the

Federal Forest Council under the authority of the Ministry of Agriculture, which

established an institutional place for conservationism within the regime.

By mid 1930s this generation of conservationists had achieved a relative

success in influencing decision-‐making on environmental topics at the federal

level. However, the year of 1937 brought important changes in the political life in

Brazil. In September 1937, Getúlio Vargas shut down the congress and assumed

dictatorial powers, establishing a new regime known as the Estado Novo

(literally “New State”). The interruption of most channels of political

participation, the suppression of free press, and the new concentration of

4 “Nomeados Os Membros Do Conselho Florestal Federal,” Correio Da Manhã, March 15, 1934, 12053 edition. 5 Alberto Torres, A Organização Nacional, 4th edição (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1982); Alberto Torres, O Problema Nacional Brasileiro; Introducção a Um Programma de Organização Nacional. (São Paulo: Companhia editora nacional, 1933); Alberto Torres, As Fontes da Vida no Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1915).

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powers in a smaller cadre of politicians and military orbiting Getúlio Vargas

might have alienated many conservationists from the higher echelons of power,

as claimed by some authors, but the new Vargas self-‐established dictatorship did

not stop conservationist policies from being carried on by the state, especially if

they could be aligned with the government’s desire to develop and control the

country’s western hinterland.6

Among other things, Vargas created Brazil’s first national parks around

that time: Itatiaia, in the state Rio de Janeiro, was created at the eve of the self-‐

coup in 1937, Iguaçu at the border with Argentina, in Paraná, and Serra dos

Órgãos, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, were both established in 1939. The Estado

Novo also enacted a new set of laws regulating water (1938), fishing (1938),

hunting (1943), and mining (1943), which, with the exception of the Forest code,

updated the 1934 natural resources law for a new era autocracy. Morevoer, two

other agencies were created after 1937, the National Institute of Mate (1939)

and the National Institute of Pine Tree (1941), which aimed to rationalize the

extraction and production of two important frontier commodities, mate and

timber.7 The Varga’s regime also created the Forest Service in 1938, which was

the office inside the Ministry of Agriculture designated to enforce the 1934 forest

6 This boom in the “environmental” legislation of the early 1930s had been preceded by the creation of an ineffective Forest Service in 1921, whose only attribution was to operate Rio de Janeiro’s tree seedling nursery. See José Augusto Drummond, and José Luiz de Andrade Franco, Proteção à Natureza e Identidade Nacional No Brasil, Anos 1920-1940, (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2009) 67-‐68, 213-‐214, 217-‐218; Teresa Urban, Saudade Do Matão: Relembrando a História Da Conservação Da Natureza No Brasil, (Curitiba, Brazil: Editora da UFPR, 1998), 72-‐77, 103; Dean, A Ferro e Fogo, 271-‐272, 275-‐278; José Augusto Drummond, “A Visão Conservacionista,” 19-‐24; Duarte, “Pássaros e Cientistas no Brasil,” 24-‐25; Franco, “A Primeira Conferência Brasileira de Proteção à Natureza,” 95; Silva, “As Percepções das Elites Brasileiras,” 180, 214; Brazilian Forest Act, Decree n. 23,793 – January 23, 1934; Brazilian Animal Protection Act, Decree n. 24,645 – July 10, 1934. 7 Paul Israel Singer, “Economic Evolution and the International Connection,” in Brazil: A Century of Change, ed. Ignacy Sachs, Jorge Wilheim, and Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, trans. Robert N. Anderson, Latin America in Translation (Chapel Hill [N.C.]: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 69-‐70.

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code, from the establishment of national parks to the regulation of federal forests

to the management of botanical gardens. The new authoritarian scenario not

only did not halt Brazil’s conservationist measures but, in a way, expanded it,

despite the fact that most of the channels for groups and individuals to promote

conservationist themes had been shut down. Vargas himself had no interest in

conservationism or nature, and the official propaganda of the regime, heavily

focused on urban masses, rarely utilized nature as a symbol of nationality. Hence,

how to explain the continuation of the early 1930s environmental policies under

the Estado Novo?

We argue that the post-‐1937 conservationist measures taken by the

Brazilian government can only be understood through Vargas' attempt to

integrate the Brazilian western hinterland into Brazil’s dynamic Atlantic core.

By promoting conservationism, the Vargas regime aimed not only to

rationalize the use of natural resources, but also to integrate non-‐dynamic

regions into a national system of production that mimicked a harmonious

hierarchy of a society free of class conflicts. At the eyes of the regime's

ideologues the rationalization of extractive industries and the creation of

national parks in distant border areas served to the same purpose: to promote

the occupation of an “internal living space” as a way to eliminate regional

centrifugal tendencies generated by backward regions.

A 1938 interview with Vargas provides the clues to understand the

reasoning behind the move to use the control of nature to rationalize and

nationalize the territory. In the interview, Vargas argued that historically Brazil

presented two borders, a well-‐established, political one, and a second one, which

he called a “mobile frontier,” meaning a “territory integrated in the national

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system of production.” To him, the Brazilian “expansion” was naturally the

process that would bring the mobile frontier to coincide with the political

frontier. The existence of such internal border divided the country into two

areas. One comprised the dynamic regions that acted as “the agents of national

economy.” The best example of such areas was the state of São Paulo, whose

economy was based on coffee exports and manufacturing of non-‐durable goods

like clothes and food. Stagnant regions that “were acted upon,” like the state of

Mato Grosso, whose main economic activities were subsistence agriculture and

extensive cattle ranching, formed the other area. As a result of this imbalance,

part of the population lived a “colonial,” and isolated life, whereas the other part

enjoyed an “accelerated economic evolution.” What he called “Brazilian

imperialism” was the occupation of this internal living space that would,

enlarge [Brazil’s] economic frontiers and create an integrated and coherent system, where the circulation of wealth and utilities is free and fast, and which is based in efficient transportation that will annihilate the forces that disintegrate the nation. The backlands, the isolation, the lack of contact, are the only enemies of the integrity of the country. The localisms, the centrifugal tendencies, result from closed regional economies. The economic expansion will bring the desirable equilibrium between the different regions of the country...

Vargas’s choice of the word imperialism indicates his goal in creating a

strong central government to be present on all the Brazilian territory and, one

which would not curb to state-‐level interests. The Brazilian living space already

exised politically inside the country’s geographical borders, and it was the

mission of the Estado Novo to transform this archipelago of isolated regions into

a coherent, economic whole. In fact, Vargas acknowledged that his was a

different expansionsim from that professed by European and Japanese fascisms,

as in numerous other occasions he would repeat the mantra that Brazilian

imperialism, in contrast to European powers, operated only within its borders,

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as a manner to give economic cohesion to a territory that was already united

politically.8

The idea of colonizing and integrating the western hinterland guided

much of Vargas’s actions in the Estado Novo years. Already in 1937, in a radio

broadcast on New Years Eve, Vargas announced that the “true sense of

Brazilianess” was the integration of the country’s hinterland to its economic

core, a campaign he baptized as “The March to the West.” He viewed the

Brazilian west as a potential source of cheap raw materials and new markets for

the industries he intended to create in the eastern part of the country. In the

radio show he argued that the Brazilian people had a mission: to create a unique

civilization in the new world and, for that, it was necessary to integrate the entire 8 Cassiano Ricardo, Marcha Para Oeste: a Influencia da “Bandeira” na Formação Social e Política do Brasil... (Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1940). Getúlio Vargas, A Nova Política Do Brasil, vol. 5 (Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1938), 163-‐166, Getúlio Vargas, A Nova Política Do Brasil, vol. 8 (Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1938), 23-‐24, 32-‐33.

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territory into a harmonious whole, one in which backward subsistence activities

like slash-‐and-‐burn agriculture were substituted by the rational exploitation of

natural resources under the guidance of the federal government. Vargas’s

avowed goal was to dissolve local economic particularities into an organic

internal market that channeled western resources to eastern industrialization. 9

The Estado Novo conservation policy was steered toward production and

the territorial integration of the nation. There was a great emphasis on forestry

and the regulation of natural resources.10 Yet, the period witnessed the creation

of the country’s first three national parks, all of them provisioning for the full

protection of the forests and natural monuments encompassed by their

9 Getúlio Vargas, “Marcha Para Oeste -‐ Rio de Janeiro, 31 de Dezembro de 1937,” in Getúlio Vargas, Câmara dos Deputados, Edições Câmara, Série Perfis Parlamentares 62 (Brasília, 2011), 368–373 10 Apollônio Salles, As Atividades Agrícolas do Brasil 1942, vol 2 (Rio de Janeiro: Serviço de Informação Agrícola, Ministério da Agricultura, 1943), 79-‐104.

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territories. Undoubtedly the creation of national parks by the Estado Novo was

an aftereffect of the conservationist effervesce of the early 1930s. But the

manner in which the parks were implemented in the period between 1939 and

1945 reveals the importance of an ideal of frontier incorporation to the

conservationist policy of the Vargas regime. Of the three national parks created,

two, Itatiaia and Serra dos Órgãos were located in the state of Rio de Janeiro, in

the developed Atlantic core of the country, while the other was established at the

Iguazu Falls, in the westernmost section of the state of Paraná. In the 1930s, this

was a region completely isolated by a dense carpet of forests from the rest of the

country—the fastest way to reach the falls coming from Rio or São Paulo was

going south to Buenos and going up north again through the Paraná river. And

indeed, it was the location of the Iguazú national park in an isolated frontier

dominated by Argentina that what made its creation, in the words of Francisco

Iglesias head of the national park service, a “manly endeavor” that would

symbolized the entirety of the March to the West. To Iglesias, the creation of the

park would serve to integrate a “bastard and cosmopolitan” borderland

population that was, at that time, “dominated” by a foreign language (the

Spanish), a foreign currency (Argentine peso) and foreign customs.11

11 Francisco de Assis Iglesias, "Os Parques Nacionais Existentes" Descrição e Relevância" in Anais, IX Congresso Brasileiro de Geografia, vol. 3 (Rio de Janeiro: Conselho Nacional de Geografia, 1944) [Brasília, Biblioteca do Ministério da Agricultura].

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A comparison of the investment in infrastructure made by the Brazilian

government in the three national parks reveals the importance of territorial

concerns in Estado Novo conservation policy. In the period between 1939 and

1945, the Iguaçu National Park, the park located in the Brazilian frontier,

received about sixty-‐six percent of the budget destined to the building of

infrastructure in the new national parks, despite the fact that it only received

seven percent of the visitors of national parks in Brazil.

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Sources: Fernando Costa, As Atividades Agrícolas do Brasil 1939, (Rio de Janeiro: Serviço de Informação Agrícola, Ministério da Agricultura, 1940), 353 vol. 1, 11 vol. 2; Fernando Costa, As Atividades do Ministério da Agricultura em 1940, vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Serviço de Informação Agrícola, Ministério da Agricultura, 1941), 486; João Augusto Falcão, O Serviço Florestal no Biênio 1943-1944 (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Agricultura, 1945), 12 [DF -‐ Biblioteca Min. Agricultura]; João Augusto Falcão, O Serviço Florestal no Biênio 1943-1944 (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Agricultura, 1945), 14 [DF -‐ Biblioteca Min. Agricultura]; João Augusto Falcão, O Serviço Florestal no Biênio 1943-1944 (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Agricultura, 1945), 32-‐42 [DF -‐ Biblioteca Min. Agricultura].

In fact, the federal government initiated a series of infrastructure works

in Iguaçu that were not repeated in the other two national parks, despite the fact

that they were located close to country’s capital and received visitation from

nature-‐loving urban middle-‐classes from Rio and São Paulo. At Iguaçu the

government used the national park as an excuse to build an airport in the nearby

city of Foz do Iguaçu, a small hydroelectric dam that would supply the park and

the city, roads, park headquarters, and a large and luxurious hotel. By 1942 the

airport was fully finished, completed with a “beautiful passenger terminal in

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colonial style” in the words of a visitor. The park headquarters were also almost

completed as well as the dam, which would be the main source of energy for

both the park and the town of Foz do Iguaçu until the 1950s. Given the greater

scale and costs, the construction of the Hotel only started after the war, in 1948,

and it took ten years to be completed. To the authorities of the Forest Service

the, investiment in the Iguaçu national park was devised as a way to

reincorporate into the nation’s body a borderland that had always seen as

suspicious due to the presence of foreigners. The control of the borderlands—

the creation of the Iguaçu National Park included—meant for them the securing

of the political border at the same time that it provisioned the federal

government with the tools to development the of economy of the region. 12

For the nationalist Estado Novo government and for some sectors of the

military, border areas like the west of Paraná, where the Iguaçu Falls were

located, had always been strategic. National parks could play an important role

in military affairs, as explained by Major João Baptista Magalhães in his response

to Alberto José de Sampaio’s article on national parks published in 1931.

Magalhães argued that the forest service, reforestation, and national parks, all

had important military aspects. First, armies in campaign needed firewood for

fuel, and timber for building barracks, warehouses, trenches, bridges, wells, etc.

Furthermore, an army in campaign needed forested terrain to hide in and keep

the secrecy of its operations, which was especially true in a time when air

observation was already available and air raids were a reality. Because the

country was sparsely populated, with few settlements and devoid of places for a 12 Fernando Costa, Projeto do Parque Nacional de Iguaçu, Arquivo Nacional, G. M. 1036, December 27, 1938; Decree n. 23,793 – January 23, 1934; Decree n. 1,713 – Jane 14, 1937; Decree-‐Law n. 1,035– January 10, 1939; Cândido de Mello Leitão, A Vida Na Selva, (São Paulo: Companhia editora national, 1940), 175-‐194.

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moving army to get supplies and rest, a network of forested patches was

necessary to supply troops with safe havens to rest and avoid air raids.

Magalhães proposed a system of national parks guarded by military forest

rangers, agronomists, and scientists, all living in military colonies. Such system of

integrated national parks and military colonies would not only be beneficial for

the country due to direct strategic-‐military reasons, but it would also “concur to

the solution of the issue of the peopling of our hinterland.” Besides been one of

the many depopulated hinterlands of Brazil, the area around of the Iguaçu Falls

was doubly strategic because of the shared border with Paraguay and

Argentina.13

If national parks were devised as tools for the territorialization of

backward areas, why did the Vargas regime fail to create other national parks

during this period? To understand the institutional context of the creation of the

Iguaçu National Park by the Estado Novo it is necessary to examine the federal

power to manage land. The text of the 1934 Forest Code concealed a reality of

chronic lack of federal control over both public lands and private land. Brazil had

a long tradition of what historian José Drummond called a “weak hand in

controlling the use of associated resources and features, such as soils, ores,

water, coasts, flora, and fauna.”14 After the fall of the monarchy and the

promulgation of the Republican constitution of 1891, all public land, which had

been in control of the Brazilian state in the imperial period, was then turned to

the states. In the 1930s the Brazilian central government had almost no public

13 Drummond, O Sistema Brasileiro, 11, 13; Sampaio, Biogeographia Dynamica, 97-‐103. 14 José Augusto Drummond, and Ana Flávia Barros-‐Platiau, “Brazilian Environmental Laws and Policies, 1934–2002: A Critical Overview,” Law & Policy 28, no. 1 (2006): 85-‐86.

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land left to manage. Besides a handful of federal and military properties and the

land alongside railroads, most of the Brazilian public land was in the hands of the

state governments. This meant for example that almost all the public land in the

western half of the Paraná state, the area covered by forests where the Iguaçu

National Park would be created in 1939, was outside federal hands. Also, the

federal government had no legal instrument to expropriate land. It was only in

1941 that the Brazilian federal government issued a decree-‐law granting itself

the powers to expropriate land for public interest. This new legislation also

allowed the federal government to expropriate land that was owned by the

states or municipal governments, but it failed to trigger new conservationist

measures by the Vargas regime. It was only wih the military coup of 1964 that all

the public land controlled by the states returned to the hands of the federal

government. Thus, from 1891 to 1941, the capacity of the federal government to

promote agrarian reform or nature conservation was limited by its restricted

powers of controlling land. In comparison to other countries, Vargas

administration’s ability to create national parks and enforce its own

conservationist mandate was severely limited. Obviously such limitations were

relative, especially during the Estado Novo, when Vargas himself held dictatorial

powers and appointed subservient state governors. But yet, any attempt from

Rio de Janeiro to manage public land was only put in practice before passing

through the filter of state governments. The creation of the Iguaçu National Park

in 1939, two years into the Estado Novo, is a good example of the institutional

dependence of the central government on local power in matters of land

management; the creation of the park was based on the expropriation of the area

by the government of Paraná in 1916, and on the donation of this area to the

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federal government by the local revolutionary government in 1930. The Itatiaia

National Park, created in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, was originally a scientific

station managed by the Botanic Gardens in Rio, and hence, it also originated in

public land that was already federal. It is clear that the Vargas regime chose to

implement protected areas like national parks and national forests in public land

that it already controlled, thus avoiding conflicts with local state governments.15

Conclusion

The new conservationism promoted by the Brazilian government can

only be understood through Vargas' attempt to integrate the entire territory into

a coherent, organically integrated whole. The Estado Novo, especially after 1937,

acted to use its new conservationist tools to promote the rational use of natural

resources and bring development to non-‐dynamic areas like the borderlands of

Iguazu, where a population that was seen as suspiciously foreign threatened the

integration of the region with the rest of the nation. Yet, despite this, the

government did not succeeded in fully implementing its own conservationist

policy. With only three national parks created and a chronic lack of

infrastructure to enforce the new conservationist laws, the Estado Novo failed to

establish a regime of federal management of the environment. In the end, the

government’s lack of political power to overcome local interests and to control

land prevent it from developing backward regions and take control of its own

15 The Iguaçu National Park was not the only park implemented out of previous administrative actions. The first Brazilian national park, created in 1937 in a mountainous region in the state of Rio de Janeiro, was based on an earlier Station of Botanical Research created in the area by the Ministry of Agriculture in 1914. Drummond, O Sistema Brasileiro, 14-‐15; Drummond et al., “Brazilian Environmental Laws,” 85-‐86; Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand, 261, 271; Drummond, A Visão Conservacionista,” 22-‐23; Baeta-‐Neves, Preservation of Forests and Irrigation in Brazil, 13; Rudy Nick Vencatto, “Debates Ambientais e a Constituição do Parque Nacional do Iguaçu.” Tempos Históricos 13, no. 2 (2009): 186-‐187.

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“internal living space” through the promotion of the rational use of natural

resources and the creation of protected areas.

The Organic Territory: The Vargas Regime and the Environmental Legislation Boom in Brazil, 1930-1945

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