Grotesque modernization and capitalist accumulation in the Amazon: the case of Carajas region

The article demonstrates that, in the Amazonian region of Carajas, the ideal of transformation through modernization has driven several developmental strategies whose results differ from expectations. In cities, there is a subsumption of the logic of ordering the urban space to a rationality closely linked to the mercantile valuation of the land. In the sphere of production, an institutional environment was formed in which the most relevant economic agents sponsor environmentally harmful practices and hinder the implementation of technological paradigms with a greater perspective of environmental and social sustainability. Among other failed hopes, there is a growing occupation of spaces in the political sphere by the religious field. It is concluded that such developments do not delegitimize or make unfeasible the social intervention aimed at the search for economic efficiency, social equity and ecological prudence, but require a deep knowledge of the regional reality and the organization of new institutions in harmony with the complex and territorialized perspective of the development on sustainable bases.