Chapter 3 covers the period in the 1970s and 1980s when the military regime finished its big dams and their reservoirs filled. During this time, the rise of international environmentalism pressured the military government’s dam builders to undertake environmental impact studies and design environmental mitigation programs. This chapter argues that the environmentalism that the military regime’s energy sector practiced was deficient and narrowly organized around two goals. The first was protecting power plant infrastructure from environmental threats such as sedimentation. The second was to showcase environmental care without fundamentally altering project designs or slowing down construction. For example, the military regime funded environmental impact studies, but did so belatedly, after committing to particular high-impact dam sites, and followed the studies’ recommendations selectively. Most dramatically, the military regime carried out animal rescue missions, which it hoped would showcase its environmental consciousness. These actions were “pharaonic environmentalism”: protection measures designed to bolster the image of the military dictatorship as a regime that could build durable mega dams while simultaneously protecting the environment.

Chapter 1 sets the scene for this book, providing the requisite background for the chapters that follow. It begins with a short overview of the military regime, focusing on repression and the gradual restoration of democratic freedoms, highlighting the role the latter played in facilitating the country’s burgeoning environmental movement. It then turns to the dictatorship’s plans for industrial growth and energy production. The chapter closes with an overview of the symbolism that surrounds big dams and an introduction to the influential generals and engineers responsible for orchestrating the dictatorship’s dam-building campaign. This chapter also lays the groundwork for the book’s first argument, that political pressures encouraged the military regime to build big dams quickly and with little regard for their social and environmental impacts.

Chapter 2 covers the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Brazilian military government planned and began building its big dams. It argues that political pressures encouraged the military regime to build dams with giant reservoirs and to do so quickly and without regard to their social and environmental footprints. The dictatorship looked to hydropower projects as a means of powering industrial and economic growth that would legitimize military rule, and it wasted no time in starting construction because it takes a long time to build big dams, often the better part of a decade, and sometimes longer. The 1973 oil crisis added urgency, raising the price of imported petroleum and pushing the government to invest in alternative sources of energy. The crisis encouraged the military regime to double down on the big dams already under construction and to plan a host of new ones. Political pressures also made their way into debates about specific dam sites. The most prominent case was the binational Itaipu Dam (on the Brazilian-Paraguayan Border), where the military government had to weigh geopolitical considerations alongside other criteria. The result of all these political pressures combined was a firm commitment to building large reservoirs in environmentally sensitive areas without public debate and without completing thorough environmental impact studies.

Chapter 6 tells the story of the Balbina Dam. Built during the 1980s, it was the military regime’s last and most controversial dam, and it encapsulates this book’s main arguments. Political pressures were instrumental in the decision to build the dam, whose floodwaters inundated a large area of the Amazon Rainforest that was inhabited by the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous community. Instead of investing in meaningful environmental safeguards, the government planned an ostentatious greenwashing campaign. The result was social and ecological calamities on par with those at earlier dams. But there was one principal difference that made Balbina exceptional: timing. Balbina came on the heels of a spate of other controversial dam projects that had turned many Brazilians against big dams. Furthermore, the military regime stepped down in 1985, during construction, and the civilian government that replaced it finished the dam. The return to civilian rule emboldened dam critics to pressure the government for more effective safeguards, and though the civilian government did not suspend the project, it did implement better belated remediation programs than the military regime had done for its reservoirs. Balbina was thus the last of its kind and became a watershed moment in the history of Brazilian dams.