During their military dictatorship (1964–85), the Brazilian government constructed the world’s largest hydroelectric dam on the Paraná River between Brazil and Paraguay. In the process, the project flooded 1,350 square kilometers of inhabited land to create the dam’s reservoir, displacing some forty thousand rural citizens. Jacob Blanc’s Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil shows how farmer, landless, and Indigenous opposition to the 1982 flood “functioned as a protest against dictatorship and a larger challenge to the marginalized status of rural Brazil” (3).
In the first three chapters, Blanc provides a chronological account of Itaipu’s creation up until the 1982 flood using newly available Itaipu binational archival documents. Chapter 1 reveals how Brazil used the binational Itaipu agreement to resolve century-old border conflicts with Paraguay and improve its international image. Yet, as chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate, a sizable Justice and Land Movement (MJT) emerged...
