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The Brazilian state has mapped, defended, and exploited the landscape of the Amazon basin through the design of regional infrastructure since the late eighteenth century; these efforts were paralleled by ecological studies and provoked environmentalist movements. The colonial Brazilian naturalist Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira mapped the fluvial routes of the Amazon River and its tributaries from 1783-1792. In 1906, shortly after the 1889 declaration of the First Brazilian Republic, the Comissão Rondon was initiated by the Ministry of War with the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce. With the objective to implement a telegraph line and a series of telegraph stations between the cities of Cuiabá, Mato Grosso and Porto Velho, Amazonas, the project connected the farthest reaches of the hinterland to the coast. Yet it also served as a significant scientific research mission. During the military dictatorship that began in 1964, the newly-defined “Amazônia Legal” was considered an unfortunate “grande vazio demográfico.” In 1967, President Humberto Castelo Branco launched Operation Amazon, an effort to penetrate the forest with the Transamazonian Highway. His successor, President Emílio Médici, initiated the National Integration Program in 1970, a plan to implement social and economic infrastructures in the Amazon region by developing agricultural and grazing plantation projects. Noted landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx attacked this developmentalist trajectory with a testimony to the Federal Senate in 1976. Citing the rapacious deforestation practices of Volkswagen do Brasil at its experimental cattle ranch in the Amazon, nationalist discourse shifted toward an alternative movement in support of environmental protection.