Cold War Amazonia: Knowledge, Policy, and the Formation of a Transnational Region

The modern history of the Amazon rainforest was shaped by the Cold War. In this paper, I show how an assemblage of technical and scientific ideas and practices linked to policy agendas in the realms of development, geography, counterinsurgency, and geopolitics created a distinctive historical formation. I outline four processes that showcase how a focus on the production of policy-oriented knowledge illuminates the interaction between foreign actors and the politicization of the global context “from within” that characterized what I call Cold War Amazonia. These processes were 1) The creation of unabashedly colonial discourses that supported state formation as “development” and “modernization” in an area largely, and wrongly, portrayed as “empty,” and their wide-ranging consequences for local populations and ecosystems, 2) The megalomaniac project by powerful American think-tank and government contractors to radically alter the Amazon’s landscapes, including the use of nuclear bombs, and create a “South American Great Lakes” system to favor United States’ interests, 3) The explosion of insurrections, including revolutionary guerrillas, and the military repression to them, both heavily influenced by ideas about the strategic importance of the region’s geographical features, in different domestic circumstances but also as part of shared hemispheric cycles of revolution and counterinsurgency, 4) Efforts to create strikingly homogeneous kinds of knowledge as a basis to intervene the region’s idiosyncratic waterlogged shantytowns as part of the urban agenda of the Alliance for Progress, which nevertheless led to radically different outcomes in dissimilar national and local contexts. As a whole, these case studies reveal the emergence of Amazonia as a field knowledge production and policy intervention largely organized around the conceptual, technological, and political frameworks of the Cold War. I end with a discussion about the importance of this transnational region in the broader context of the Latin American Cold War.