A ação da CODEMATO na colonização oficial de Mato Grosso: revisitando o Projeto Juina (1978 – 1997)

Abstract

The CODEMAT – Mato Grosso State Development Company S/A, created by the Mato Grosso state government in 1968 to promote economic development, is placed in Mato Grosso political scene as the official colonial state company in the late 1970s. At the time the country was under the aegis of an authoritarian state regime: a military dictatorship. Then, the "economic development" was understood by the State and its municipalities, and even more so by CODEMAT, as the power to sell and market the vacant lands owned by the MT state, within the limits of Mato Grosso Amazon frontier, which included the Northwest of Mato Grosso. These lands have gone mostly to the protection of the Union and the National Security Council. That's how it was implemented in MT, following the regime’s idealization of security and national integration; development poles such as POLOAMAZONIA, POLOCENTRO, POLONOROESTE served as tax incentives not for the development of projects related to the rural workers’ settlement, let alone to the small land owners; but rather to the interests of big agricultural enterprises and exploitation of mineral resources. The agrarian actions due to the Union were developed by INCRA, and those of the MT state government's responsibility, delivered to CODEMAT for the development of Juina Project. In order to be endorsed by the State and count on the resources/subsidies arising from federal programs for colonization in the Amazon, CODEMAT prepared and presented to the MT state government the Juina State Colonization Project Volume I. As the actions of CODEMAT are our object of research, it is done by questioning the State Program of Colonization; here understood as the act of "historicizing on". That means, it is the job of turning the matter into historiographical analysis, starting from the investigation of CODEMAT actions as a colonizing institution, and how much of the State Program of Colonization original purposes were fulfilled, or if the Program was merely a propaganda of CODEMAT actions for the actual colonization project intended, the Juina Project.