Border Lands: Rural Conflict, National Security, and Military Politics on a Brazilian Frontier, 1889-1982

This dissertation uncovers a history of military intervention into rural property-making on a twentieth-century Brazilian frontier. Today, western Paraná, on Brazil's triple border with Paraguay and Argentina, is one of the country's wealthiest agricultural breadbaskets, producing millions of tons of corn and soy that feed humans and non-humans around the world. It is also one of Brazil's most politically conservative regions, a hotbed of far-right discontent where the farmers of the country's influential agribusiness lobby are in full alliance with the soldiers underpinning former president (and former army captain) Jair Bolsonaro's politics of nostalgia for the military dictatorship of 1964-1985. For most of the twentieth century, Paraná's border was an extractive frontier shaped by rapid settlement, flimsy property rights, land-grabbing gangs, and state–federal litigation over land ownership. Scholars have downplayed or altogether forgotten the captains, colonels, and generals who contended for official and personal control of western Paraná's borderlands. I argue that military conceptions of national security have been tied to Brazil's rural lands since the mid-nineteenth century, and that such conceptions had long afterlives into the twentieth century, coexisting with and informing the military's Cold War anticommunism. Military actors became involved in the land chaos of western Paraná's burgeoning frontier well before the 1964 coup, justifying their actions by blending a military rhetoric of national security with a program of rural economic development that prioritized private property, capital, and infrastructure investment in Brazil's countryside. Western Paraná's inhabitants, too, embraced military men as political alternatives to civilians. In western Paraná, I found the construction of a military–privatist consensus that would shape regional and national approaches to agrarian and environmental policy, especially during the military dictatorship.