Violence in the Amazon

Governmentality based on failure

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2024/86352i

The Brazilian Amazon is a region of precarious development and high rates of violence. Most
security and defense experts point to the lack of development and the abandonment of
public power as the main cause of the conflicts that plague the region from the first half of
the twentieth century to the contemporary advance of the criminal factions of drug
traffickers. In this text, I want to demonstrate the limitations of applying this negative thesis,
which I call absence discourse. From the point of view of Brazilian sovereignty there was
never normative abandonment of the Amazon; quite the opposite, the legal and political
control over the region was always inflexible by systematically denying autonomy to its
peoples and communities. My conclusions, supported by Michel Foucault's relational analysis
of power, point out that violence is not the undesirable surplus of natural power relations,
given the precarious contextual conditions. On the contrary, it is the positive effect of
normative-oriented production of illegalisms that keeps Amazon’s complexity under the
regime of colonial governmentality based on failure and the constant weakening of its best
internal potential.