Before the Flood

During their military dictatorship (1964–85), the Brazilian government constructed the world’s largest hydroelectric dam on the Paraná River between Brazil and Paraguay. In the process, the project flooded 1,350 square kilometers of inhabited land to create the dam’s reservoir, displacing some forty thousand rural citizens. Jacob Blanc’s Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil shows how farmer, landless, and Indigenous opposition to the 1982 flood “functioned as a protest against dictatorship and a larger challenge to the marginalized status of rural Brazil” (3).In the first three chapters, Blanc provides a chronological account of Itaipu’s creation up until the 1982 flood using newly available Itaipu binational archival documents. Chapter 1 reveals how Brazil used the binational Itaipu agreement to resolve century-old border conflicts with Paraguay and improve its international image. Yet, as chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate, a sizable Justice and Land Movement (MJT) emerged through the slow relaxation of political repression to challenge government expropriation of soon-to-be-flooded lands. In their successful campaign for better compensation for their individual lands, the MJT both threatened the government’s positive image of Itaipu and enflamed long-standing debates about rural political and agrarian rights that undermined the dictatorship’s very legitimacy (54–55). Despite its success, the mostly white elite farmer-led campaign excluded the needs of more diverse Indigenous and landless groups also affected. Thus, the MJT’s history exposes the inequalities that define Brazilian rural citizenship.Relying on oral testimonies and archival sources, the next four chapters explore the experience of these varied communities after the flood. Chapter 4 examines how the Avá-Guarani Indigenous community led a parallel campaign to win compensation for their cultural and economic livelihood lost with the flooding of their land (139). Conversely, chapter 5 uses the political imprisonment of an outspoken Itaipu critic to expose the way elites struggled to relinquish the privileges they enjoyed under the dictatorship during the slow political opening (156). Crossing borders and regions, chapter 6 and 7 illustrate how the flooding promoted Brazilian migration to Paraguay and allowed government officials to move landless inhabitants to the less populated Amazon and Northeast through agrarian colonization programs (170). These landless victims met violent repression as they mobilized to defend their right to collective land use in the Landless Farmers Movement of Western Paraná (MASTRO) (198).Blanc’s compelling social history of the rural experiences of Itaipu’s flooding also makes a very important contribution to energy studies. Blanc interrogates the space between government narrative about energy development and the lived experience of diversifying an energy infrastructure. Although narrowly focused on Itaipu, his research moves beyond policy makers and engineers to bring to light a layered, complex set of actors often ignored in energy studies. In the process, Blanc demonstrates specific costs that marginalized peoples paid in a much-celebrated, non-carbon-centered national energy plan. The book decenters unionized laborers common in fossil fuel histories to focus on nonindustrial, marginalized groups in the Brazilian dictatorship’s energy agenda. By situating these peoples as actors and not just collateral costs of development, Before the Flood expands the limits of a growing field in an exciting way

Archaeology · Citizenship · Democracy · Dictatorship · Elite · Expropriation · Flood myth · Geography · Government (linguistics) · Hydroelectricity · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Law