The construction of “Brazil as a World Power”: The propaganda to stimulate migration to the North of Brazil – A study based on the case of Rondônia (1968-1981)

Abstract

The rise of the military to power in 1964 was, from the perspective of asignificant part of Brazilian society, a strong response to the environment of political,economic and social instability that “threatened” to lead the country to “chaos” duringthe João Goulart administration. While at the head of the government, the civil-militarydictatorship developed and implemented a set of actions and projects aimed at expandingthe agricultural frontier and occupying areas in northern Brazil. The intention wasto make the Amazon, in particular Rondônia, part of the national productive system.These measures, disseminated daily by the media, led thousands of people to migrateto the region. In the wake of this process, the present text takes the newspaper O Globoand Veja magazine as sources of research, aiming to understand how the idea of progressis linked to the process of expansion of the agricultural frontier and how this discoursecontributed to compose the narrative of what the civil-military dictatorship began tocall “Brazil as a World Power”.