Objective/Context:

This research analyzes the circumstances and argumentative apparatus that affected the officials who planned the jungle areas of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru between 1968 and 1978.

Methodology:

Intellectual history tools are employed to unravel the construction of the Amazon as an object of knowledge among planners. Their interpretative mechanisms are observed in the dispute over the relevance of building urban or agricultural societies in the jungle. Considering their personal trajectories introduces a contextual analysis of the configuration of their argumentative bodies when giving meanings to the rainforest. The Amazonian monitoring and its insertion in the web of knowledge and technologies deployed with the implementation of development plans allow us to point out the most notorious environmental effects after their performance.

Originality:

Analytically comparing the planning activities in the Amazon brings an innovative description of the circumstances that defined its planners’ work. The article shows how it emerged in the context of the “great acceleration,” with which Environmental History describes the turning point in which state action gained a momentum of sensitive magnitude in the jungle space.

Conclusions:

Among the planners of Brazil, Ecuador and Peru, the intention to advance development centers prevailed, fostering industrialized urban societies, while those of Colombia preferred a model that affirmed the modernization of agriculture and cattle ranching. The former sought to industrialize natural resources in the cities to strengthen their countries’ political and economic independence; the latter that using hybrid seeds and machinery would allow farmers to increase their productivity and income, with which they hoped to open the national economy to the global market.

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