The first step towards opening up the vast interior of the Amazon was taken by Kubitschek, who built a dirt highway linking Brasília to Belém. But things really got going in 1970, when Médici realized that the Amazon could be used as a huge safety valve, releasing the pressure for agrarian reform in the Northeast. "Land without people for people without land!" became the slogan, and an ambitious programme of highway construction began that was to transform Amazônia. The main links were the Transamazônica , running west to the Peruvian border, the Cuiabá-Santarém highway into central Amazônia, and the Cuiabá-Porto Velho/Rio Branco highway, opening access to western Amazônia.

For the military, the Amazon was empty space, overdue for filling, and a national resource to be developed. They set up an elaborate network of tax breaks and incentives to encourage Brazilian and multinational firms to invest in the region, who also saw it as empty space and proceeded either to speculate with land or cut down forest to graze cattle. The one group that didn't perceive the Amazon as empty space was, naturally enough, the millions of people who already lived there. The immediate result was a spiralling land conflict, as ranchers, rubber tappers, Brazil-nut harvesters, gold-miners, smallholders, Indians, multinationals and Brazilian companies all tried to press their claims. The result was - and remains today - chaos.

By the late 1980s the situation in the Amazon was becoming an international controversy, with heated claims about the uncontrolled destruction of forest in huge annual burnings, and the invasion of Indian lands. Less internationally known was the land crisis , although a hundred people or more were dying in land conflicts in Amazônia every year. It took the assassination in 1988 of Chico Mendes , leader of the rubber tappers' union and eloquent defender of the forest, to bring it home. Media attention, as usual, has shed as much heat as light, but there are grounds for hope. Deforestation follows highways and there's unlikely to be a comparable highway building programme in the future, so the worst may well be about to come to an end. And for all the destruction, Amazônia is very large - there is still time for more sensible development to protect what remains.