Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border

Abstract

In their present form, the two national parks straddling the famous Iguazu waterfalls (spelled Iguaçu in Brazil and Iguazú in Argentina) represent the world's largest contiguous stretch of old-growth Atlantic Forest. At the start of European colonization, the Mata Atlântica biome occupied over 1,000,000 square kilometers, extending from the northeastern coastline of Brazil to the neighboring territories of Paraguay and Argentina. Today, less than 10 percent of the preconquest Atlantic Forest still stands, much of it in the two Iguazu parks. But as Frederico Freitas reveals in a magisterial new book, the history of the two parks is not a simple tale of conservation—the parks as a heroic refuge—nor is it a reductionist account of how society destroyed a once pristine environment. Informed by exhaustive archival and geospatial research, Freitas argues that “competition between Argentina and Brazil led the two countries to use the parks as instruments for border nationalization” (p. 8).Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border traces the twentieth-century history of the two parks. Located in a forested borderland far from the capitals of Brazil and Argentina, the resplendent falls and their environs provide a fascinating case study for Freitas's spatial analysis of how nations demarcate and project meaning onto landscapes. For both Brazil and Argentina, an initial impetus of parks as development (to establish a national presence in a contested frontier zone) gave way to an ecologically oriented goal of parks as conservation (to showcase a globally aware, technocratic vision). This transformation was contingent not only on the changing whims of politicians and government planners but also on the transnational flow of ideas, what Freitas calls “national park paradigms” (p. 16). Freitas's book is an exemplary work of environmental history, and his innovative use of mapping is a call for all scholars to pay closer attention to the mutually constitutive histories of space and nation.Argentina was the first to create its national park, in 1934, and Brazil followed suit five years later. Initially, both governments saw their parks as a way to attract settlers and bring infrastructure, tourism, and the nation-state's tangible presence. That many of the early settlers were European descendants was an added bonus for governments eager to modernize a region long inhabited by Indigenous communities belonging to the Tupi-Guarani and Macro-Gê sublinguistic groups. In their early decades, the parks were opened not only to visitors wishing to see the waterfalls but to the settlers as well, and several thousand farmers and workers lived within the boundaries of the parks. But when planning priorities shifted in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settler communities within the parks were either evicted or forced to live furtively within park boundaries. New conservation sensibilities further complicated the lives of those still living in the parks: many of the same groups that had been initially championed as patriotic settler-citizens were now punished for refusing to leave. As international environmental norms changed, farmers living within the parks were rebranded as squatters, hunters became poachers, and, aside from tourist conglomerates and park wardens, human life in the parks became a blight to be removed. As long as a limited human presence conformed to—and financed—an emerging conservation ethos, certain marks of development were allowed.The shift from development to conservation took place most decidedly during the period when Brazil and Argentina were each governed by repressive military regimes. Freitas deftly explores the implications of how violent dictatorships adopted new ecological policies as a way to shore up legitimacy both domestically and abroad. In Brazil, for example, the dictatorship's ability to evict farmers and appropriate public land was the result of its 1964 Land Statute—one of the first major pieces of legislation enacted after the coup d’état that brought the dictatorship to power. In the throes of the Cold War and a national security state, the control of territory became a powerful tool of countersubversion.A puzzle, perhaps, is why Freitas's excellent final chapter did not come earlier in the book. Not only does it include his impressive use of aerial photography and mapping, but it is also where he most closely examines the history of Indigenous people. Although early government planners claimed that there were no Indigenous communities living within the park borders, Freitas combines oral history interviews with aerial mapping to show the probable location of Indigenous settlements. Moving this section earlier would better signal its importance to readers and also help guarantee that it would not be misperceived as a discussion of Indigenous history tacked on at the end of the book.Questions of structure aside, Nationalizing Nature is an innovative and enjoyable read. It poses new questions—and answers them through new methods—relating to the environment, borders, and the territorial projects that shape nation-states.