The fourth chapter deals with the complicated history of public land in Brazil. Weak federal control of public land before the 1960s allowed the illegal settlement of hundreds of families inside the Brazilian Iguaçu National Park. In the 1970s, however, Brazilian park officials had decided to evict all the 2,500 settlers. The shift was partly a reaction to the same international discourse that had influenced Argentine park authorities, as discussed in Chapter 3. However, in Brazil, the early 1970s eviction coincided with the harshest years of the military dictatorship that ruled the country for two decades. The generals were obsessed with suppressing political dissent and feared the settlers living inside the Iguaçu national park could fall prey to left-wing radicalism. The Iguaçu evictions anticipated the authoritarian agrarian reform and population resettlement programs later implemented further north in Amazonia, designed by the military to remedy peasant unrest.

This chapter recounts the founding of the Iguazú National Park in Argentina in 1934. It shows how the goal of securing and occupying Argentina’s border zone through the use of a national park overcame the conservationist belief that the park’s mission was limited to the protection of flora and fauna. After the settlement of the Argentine border disputes with Brazil and Chile in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the country witnessed a proliferation of plans for the development of its borderlands. The chapter describes how, with the failure of the initial border colonization plans, local politicians and businesspeople began proposing national parks as an alternative tool for the settlement of the borderlands. This chapter and the next (Chapter 2), ultimately demonstrate how geopolitics and the drive to occupy what was seen as an empty borderland led to the establishment of national parks at the Argentine-Brazilian border in the 1930s.

The third chapter provides an account of the Argentine Iguazú National Park’s first forty years. Initially conceived as an instrument to foster border colonization, the park included urban settlements inside its protected area, which set Argentine national parks apart internationally. Park directors attracted settlers from other regions of Argentina with promises of cheap lots and jobs in infrastructure projects and sought to transform them into a model border population. Throughout the years, life scientists at the Argentine national park agency criticized this policy of settlements inside national parks. At the same time, members of international bodies such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) proposed a redefinition of the idea of national park, one which excluded the presence of humans. This debate ultimately informed changes in conservation policy in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s. Scientists and park officials began advocating abroad for a more restrictive definition to influence policymakers at home. By the 1970s, the conservationists in the agency prevailed, adopting the international discourse of strict nature conservation, retracing park boundaries, and evicting settlers.

The second chapter traces the Brazilian reaction to the developments across the border in Argentina, which led federal politicians and local park boosters to establish a protected area of their own, the Iguaçu National Park in 1939. The Brazilian government created Iguaçu in the context of the “March to the West,” the 1940s federal campaign to occupy Brazil’s hinterland as a solution for an underdeveloped frontier. But the park’s creation also reveals the crucial role of local politicians and other intermediary agents in pushing for policies of territorial development. Park proponents, including state governors and local politicians, were aware of the national park being established in Argentina and used it as leverage for pushing for a national park on the Brazilian side of the Iguazu Falls. Their activism proved decisive in the establishment of the park in Brazil. The dialogue between local actors and the seat of power in Rio de Janeiro shows how territorial control is never exclusively a top-down process.

This section first introduces the Iguazu Falls, the binational cataracts shared between Brazil and Argentina and a major tourist destination in the two countries. It also presents the two national parks each country established in the 1930s at the falls: Iguazú National Park (Argentina, 1934) and Iguaçu National Park (Brazil, 1939). The introduction discusses the uniqueness of the two national parks, conceived since their inception as tools for the incorporation and nationalization of borderland areas, and compares them to other national park examples throughout the Americas. The section also situates the case of the two parks within recent literature on borders to understand the process of border creation that constituted the parks as spaces of nature. Finally, it proposes moving the geographical center of the history of the destruction of the Atlantic forest, the biome that played a central role in Brazil's history. This book shifts the historian's gaze from Brazil's coast to the borderland, arguing the forest is also part of the history of Argentina and Paraguay.