The Paragominas Pilot Plan and the (re)construction of authorship mistakes

Abstract

In the Legal Amazon, the urbanization process and the Federal Government's developmental action have always gone hand in hand, challenging the limits of resilience of men and women in the region, as well as the survival capacity of the tropical forest. Policies associated with Brazilian developmentalism transform the “sertões” of the Amazon into an open space for directed colonization actions, especially from the 1960s onwards. For the purposes of this article, we seek to investigate the initial years of formation of Paragominas as a New City on the Highway Belém-Brasília, seeking to understand especially the context in which the city's Pilot Plan was drawn up. In the article, we seek to rectify a mistake regarding the authorship of the Paragominas Master Plan, reaffirming the role of engineer Joffre Mozart Parada as author of the project. At the same time, we understand that the mistakes regarding the authorship of the Plan, which appear in the city's historiography, are not casual and can be seen as reflections of a utopia condition of the modern city of Paragominas and the modernizing action of the Amazonian “green hell”.