Population, territory and sustainable development

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Chapter V
THE SETTLEMENT OF SPARSELY POPULATED AREAS IN LATIN AMERICA
A. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
A glance at the map of Latin America shows a very uneven settlement pattern, with densely populated
areas mostly on or near the coasts and huge swathes of sparsely populated areas, both at the heart of South
America (the Amazon rainforest, which spans several national borders, and the Chaco region in Paraguay)
and in the far south (Patagonia). Throughout the region there are other low-population-density areas that
share one defining characteristic: extreme environmental conditions. These include deserts, for example,
in the north of Mexico and the Atacama Desert in Chile, rainforest and marshland, such as the Darien Gap
which lies across southern Panama and the northern tip of Colombia, and ice fields in the Aysén and
Magallanes regions of Chile.
Disparities in terms of population density started to even out in the second half of the twentieth
century, as shown in maps V.1 and V.2. This did not happen by chance, but was rather the result of
economic incentives and deliberate action taken to attract settlers to areas of low population density,
which were also mistermed “empty spaces”. This chapter presents a brief account of the process of
deliberate settlement of sparsely populated areas.
Between 1950 and 1970, public policy in the region typically promoted productive development,
territorial, economic and social integration, and demographic consolidation (that is, settlement) of
sparsely populated regions. These objectives and policies actually predated those two decades, with “to
govern is to populate” 1 and similar philosophies being long established. However, it was Brazil’s decision
in the 1950s to change its capital from Rio de Janeiro to an entirely new location, to be built from scratch
and named Brasilia, chosen precisely because it was unpopulated, close to the demographic frontier and
far from the historical centres of economic, political and social power, that led countries to embark upon
initiatives promoting the development and settlement of sparsely populated areas that were considered of
strategic value.
The idea of settling low-population-density areas, particularly in the Amazon, was already
familiar in Brazil, but now it became a pillar of the national construct, first through developmentalist
projects, then through nationalist agendas. This objective lost favour both as a subject of political
discourse and as a focus of policies and programmes, however, with the return of democracy in the 1980s,
as will be discussed later in this chapter. Nevertheless, recent studies show that people, organizations,
companies and even the State continue to gravitate towards the Amazon region (see box V.1).
1
The dictum of Juan Bautista Alberdi in the mid-nineteenth century in Argentina was, precisely, “En América,
gobernar es poblar” (In America, to govern is to populate), specifically by encouraging immigration from
Europe. See Alberdi (n/d).