The Trans-Amazon Experience: Northeastern and national integration plan

Abstract

The Trans-Amazon Highway evokes multiple speeches about their socio-economic viability in the course of recent Brazilian history. In order to understand how these discourses are constructed and reconstructed, either in the mass media or in memory of those who actively participated in the implementation of the state project, we search from the methods of oral history, to understand the path traced out during the construction of these representations. Our analysis we rely on the methodology proposed Orlandi [1], Delgado [2] and Montenegro [3,4]. The voices of workers are taken, along with newspaper articles as sources for interpretation of the historical process developed from the year 1970, under the auspices of the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-1985) and had as one of its main projects Construction the Trans-Amazon Highway, inserted in the National Integration Plan (PIN). This project consisted of the construction of a major highway in Brazil that cut the east-west direction, integrating the Amazon region to the rest of the country and promoting a major migration directed to same. Trumpeted in newspaper headlines as "redemption of the northeastern people", and presenting itself as the paradigm "land without men for men without land" the great highway is the target of a series of works that seek understanding of the reasons and consequences of project.