The Brazilian state of Amapá: an introduction

By: Luciana Castro (MA)

A casual glance at a map of the Amazon region reveals a blank area where Amapá

is found, owing to its having the lowest rate of destruction of the original vegetation

cover of any Brazilian state.

Amapá has an area of 143,454 km2 and a population of almost half a million. Its

land is flat and in general rises no higher than three hundred meters above sea level.

Amapá is as far north and east as one can go in South America, bordering on the Amazon

River to the south, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, French Guiana to the north, Suriname

to the northwest and Pará to the southwest. Getting there is costly and difficult. Macapá,

the state capital, is a city on the edge of nowhere. Most visitors to the eastern part of the

Amazon basin do not travel further than Belém, in the bordering state of Pará.

In 1900, an international court in Switzerland decided, against numerous French

claims, that the area that today is Amapá belonged to Brazil. The region was incorporated

into the state of Pará and given the name of Araguari. Only in 1943 were the two states

officially separated. Many of the current inhabitants of Amapá migrated from Pará, and

these two states continue to share a great deal of culture.

President Getúlio Vargas created the Território Federal do Amapá (Federal

Territory of Amapá) in 1943, naming Macapá as its capital. True statehood for Amapá

was finally granted with the promulgation of the Constitution of 1988.

Macapá is the only Brazilian capital situated on the left bank of the Amazon River.

The equator passes through the city’s popular soccer stadium, Zerao. During the course

of a game there, a team can score goals in both the northern and the southern hemisphere.
 Dark Pebble

The year 1945 promised to bring epic changes around the world. The war had
left major power vacuums in Europe and Asia Europe but Latin America in
general and Brazil specifically had remained far from the combat and the
political elite confronted the postwar world optimistically (Skidmore: 1999).

In 1946, ICOMI (Mineral Industry and Commerce), a private Brazilian group

directed by Augusto Trajano de Azevedo Antunes, arrived in Amapá to study the

possibilities for manganese ore operations. A year later, in December of 1947, the

company was authorized by the government to begin prospecting and measuring the

reserve. The town of Macapá had only 2,500 inhabitants and the entire territory of Amapá

a total of 4,800 (ICOMI: 2002).

The prospecting group identified ten million tons of manganese ore and

negotiations with the government progressed. Now the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, a

United States company, provided funding. Ten years later, in 1957, the first shipment of

minerals left Amapá. The popular Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek for whom

manganese mining in Amapá was part of his “fifty years in five” development plan, was

present for the occasion.

An ICOMI document describes the construction of housing for its employees:

To house its employees, the company constructed two urban villages, one in Serra
do Navio and the other in Santana and equipped them with all the infrastructure
and services necessary to a healthy human community, introducing a new concept
of living in Amazonia (ICOMI: 2002).
A railroad was constructed capable of transporting up to one billion tons per year

of minerals plus 200,000 tons of general cargo for residents along the line. In the small
port town of Santana a larger port was installed to supply the needs of the new market.

The North Canal (Canal Norte) was opened and it became possible for ships of 42,000

tons to navigate, whereas previously the size of vessel passing through the South Canal

had been restricted to 7,000 tons. This development alone opened incredible new

horizons to navigation on the Amazon, opening a venue for a broader exchange of goods.

Hospitals, schools, movie theatres, churches and markets were built in the

villages. Public health policies were developed, preventive medical practices were put in

action and malaria was eradicated. The taxes the government of Amapá received from the

company made it possible to construct the first roads and the first hydroelectric plant in

the state.

The region played a global role in the decades following the end of Second World

War, providing manganese ore to the United States during the Cold War. This brought

the U.S. into parity with the Soviet Union, where manganese was found in abundance. In

1957, the year of Serra do Navio’s founding, the mine produced and exported 670,000

tons of manganese ore to the U.S. (ICOMI: 1992). Serra do Navio sat atop one of the two

largest manganese reserves in Brazil, the other being in Carajás, in the state of Pará.

In 2005 the contract for ICOMI to extract manganese in Serra do Navio came to its

official end. According to an article published by Jornal do Brasil in 2003, a judge was

left to decide who would be responsible for cleaning up Serra do Navio’s “legacy of

pollution.” The article mentions 78,000 tons of manganese contaminated with

carcinogenic material left stockpiled in Santana, thirty kilometers from Macapá:

 The contamination resulted in one of the largest environmental fines ever applied
in Brazil (R$ 52 million). The state government had proposed a transitional period
of twelve months before accepting responsibility for the mine, which consumed
nine hundred hectares of forest.1

The end of the rich manganese ore forced the state and federal authorities to look

for other economic alternatives for the region. The outcome of this search was the

creation by the Brazilian government of the Free Trading Area of Macapá/Santana in

1991 and, more recently, efforts to boost tourism in the region with the creation of the

The Tumucumaque Mountains National Park (Parque Nacional das Montanhas do

Tumucumaque) with an area of 38,670 km2 (3.86 hectares). The largest tropical forest

park in the world, Tumucumaque park is the source of the main rivers of Amapá, the

home of several indigenous groups, and the location of ancient stone ruins.

1“Serra do Navio leaves a legacy of pollution” Jornal do Brasil Online http://jbonline.terra.com.br/. May
7, 2003.