Rubber, Soybeans, and Developmentalism in the Brazilian Amazon

Matthew Abel, Southern Methodist University

This paper examines a series of social inclusion policies, infrastructure investments, and anti-poverty programs implemented under Brazil’s “growth with redistribution” model of economic development and their implications for the eastern Amazon. Billed as a deviation from the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” Latin American neodevelopmentalism has garnered criticism and praise from social scientists across a variety of disciplines and political affiliations. However, these debates often ignore substantial continuities between the forms of state intervention practiced today and the unique variety of political and economic liberalism that characterized many Latin American nation-states at the turn of the twentieth century. Through historically informed ethnography with riverine farming populations in the Amazon Delta, I identify several parallels between neodevelopmentalist programs implemented over the last thirty years and the patterns of capital investment and state intervention that emerged during the Amazon Rubber Boom (1850-1920). This paper seeks to expand our geographic and temporal understanding of the "developmental state" beyond the twentieth century United States while advocating for a more materialist approach towards its ongoing transformation in the present.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 184. Rethinking the Developmental State 3: Latin America and East Asia