Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil. By Jacob Blanc (Durham, Duke University Press, 2019) 320 pp. $104.95 cloth $27.95 paper

Abstract

Blanc has written a comprehensive people’s history of the dictatorship-era construction of Itaipu, Latin America’s largest hydroelectric dam, built into the Paraná, the planet’s seventh-largest river, where it flows between Brazil and Paraguay. Like the river fed by major tributaries, Blanc’s history emerges in a plurilinear narrative flow to reveal the unique destinies of human groups. Although divided by sociocultural identity and (in)experience with political resistance, these groups were collectively transformed by their land’s submergence. As Blanc argues, their differences shaped patterns of oppression and possibilities long before the flood let loose upon their lands and would endure the varied consequences long afterward.The resettled Avá-Guarani, the original inhabitants of the drowned lands, joined the settlers in a struggle seeking compensation. The settlers—divided between lighter-skinned farmers with land titles and darker-skinned, landless farmers—forged a potent, although ephemeral, social movement. Politicized by Itaipu, the Avá-Guarani maintained a persistent struggle for indigenous, territorial rights. Farmers without title, sent primarily to new, practically unlivable areas in remote northern borderlands, created the most important landless movement in Latin America and beyond. The titled farmers among the settlers benefited the most, securing enough financial renumeration to become entitled once again. In effect, Itaipu was never simply an energy development project; it was also a grand national strategy to achieve geopolitical dominance through the movement and violent containment of bodies, both water and human.Blanc mobilizes events to reinterpret the history of Brazil’s dictatorship (1964–1985) as it slowly unwound (the dam first came online in 1984). He analyzes the opening toward democracy, the “abertura,” as a “double reality”—on one hand, electoral and political reforms and, on the other, a “dialectic of land and legitimacy” aimed at meeting long-term needs of rural communities (84, 200–201). In the hinterlands, the elites and the military government undermined collective resistance through violence and political tactics, ultimately satisfying the titled farmers at the expense of the indigenous and landless. Through this lens, scholarly reliance on the dominant narrative that hangs the old dictatorship on a “before and after” frame is revealed as exceedingly partial. More importantly, this book challenges historians’ reliance on periodization more generally.Blanc may reject periodization as an organizing framework, but he appreciates timing and serendipity. He conducted fieldwork in the immediate aftermath of the report issued by Brazil’s National Truth Commission in 2014. He benefited from documents such as the Memórias Reveladas project of the National Archive and was the first scholar to work extensively with internal holdings of the Itaipu Binational Corporation. His research includes thirty diverse archives and databases in Brazil, Paraguay, and the United States, as well as ample sets of personal files and interviews with key participants (16–17). Blanc’s comprehensive analysis of archival findings undoubtedly informed his ability to tell a rich and detailed story while emphasizing broad strokes of history—of Brazil’s interior and of the military’s borderland shenanigans with Paraguay. The only aspect missing are women’s social-movement contributions. Although Blanc determinedly weaves in traces of women’s voices as he discovers them, only an oral-historical, or ethnohistorical, explicitly feminist method could defeat the patriarchal bias in the archive.Blanc invents a unique chapter structure to differentiate—yet thematically interrelate—clear strands of plurilinear history. Abertura emerges from the cities via mass media to create opportunities for new, rural anti-dictatorship movements and to empower them with worldwide visibility. The Itaipu dam was devastating, but it also gave participants a taste for the combined power of collective organizing and mass media. In contrast to land, such skills and sources of confidence cannot be taken away.A pleasure to read, this book illuminates forces of power and protest mobilized against a useful but predatory, and thus unsustainable, form of green-energy infrastructure—the hydroelectric dam. This subject has regional and global relevance today. Blanc’s fascinating and illuminating book is itself a form of protest, a scholarly performance that makes the hinterlands visible and the complications of history readable.