Political participation and community building in the central Amazon

Abstract

The conflict between new forms of political participation and old forms of client-patron political relationships in areas on and beyond the advancing frontier in the central Amazon are analysed. First, the change from pre-modern patronage based on the products of the forest to modern patronage based on conventional economic-regional development policy is examined. Then, the rise of an alternative network of alternative politics of «postmodernist» socio-environmental nature in the 1990s is treated. This network involves political alliances between previously marginalised Amerindians, rubber tapers and frontier peasants on one hand and national and international environmental, labour and religious organisations on the other. Strong political pressure is applied simultaneously through multiple-scale alliances, «bottom-up» from the community level and «top-down» from the national and international levels. However, the retreat of the federal government from regional planning, the permanence of authoritarian political relationships at the state level and the top-down nature of decision-making in the new socio-environmental sector have stymied significant significant horizontal political mobilisation beyond the municipal level.