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An important goal of regional development in the Brazilian Amazon was to enhance social welfare and alleviate dire poverty in other parts of the country by providing land to the poor. Nevertheless, both poverty and landlessness have persisted despite development policies that distributed billions of dollars on highway construction, loans, and outright subsidies. Inequitable land distribution has been held as a prime factor in land conflict across the country. Although episodes of conflict over land are common in Brazilian history, this paper focuses on agrarian issues that arose with the opening of the Amazon frontier in the 1970s. The paper presents a political economy approach that considers the role of hierarchical forces interacting across spatial scales, in creating conditions ripe for land conflict at the local level. The premise is that the Brazilian government, intending to bring about economic and social development, promoted contradictory strategies creating land scarcity. These strategies led to expansion of large ranching operations, creation of conservation units, and demarcation of indigenous reserves, which constrained the pool of land available for small farmer settlement. Empirical analysis employing regression and spatial statistics is used to test the proposed model, advancing previous efforts by applying spatial regression, incorporating improved indicators of conflict and explanatory variables generated by a Geographic Information System (GIS). The findings provide support for some elements of the argument, demonstrating statistically significant relationships between land conflict and land concentration, cattle ranching, and road construction. Finally, a case study analysis of a county in the heart of the land conflict zone is provided, illustrating the interaction of scalar forces, and the articulation of land conflict at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South of Pará, located in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, has become notorious for violent land struggle. Although land conflict has a long history in Brazil, and today impacts many parts of the country, violence is most severe and persistent here. The purpose of this article is to examine why. Specifically, we consider how a particular Amazonian place, the so-called South of Pará, has come to be known as Brazil's most dangerous badland. We begin by considering the predominant literature, which attributes land conflict to the frontier expansion process with intensified struggle emerging in the face of rising property values and demand for private property associated with capitalist development. From this discussion, we distill a concept of the frontier, based on notions of property rights evolution and locational rents. We then empirically test the persistence of place-based violence in the region, and assess the frontier movement through an analysis of transportation costs. Findings from the analyses indicate that the prevalent theorization of frontier violence in Amazônia does little to explain its persistent and pervasive nature in the South of Pará. To fill this gap in understanding, we develop an explanation based on the geographic conception of place, and we use contentious politics theory heuristically to elucidate the ways in which general processes interact with place-specific history to engender a landscape of violence. In so doing, we focus on environmental, cognitive, and relational mechanisms (and implicated structures), and attempt to deploy them in an explanatory framework that allows direct observation of the accumulating layers of the region's tragic history. We end by placing our discussion within a political ecological context, and consider the implications of the Amazon Land War for the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]