Preservation or development? Brazil’s Amazon at a crossroads

TRAIRAO, Brazil — Night falls in Brazil’s Amazon and two logging trucks without license plates emerge from the jungle. They rumble over dirt roads that lead away from a national forest, carrying trunks of trees hundreds of years old.

After pulling onto a darkened highway, the truckers chug to their turnoff into the woods, where they deliver their ancient cargo. By morning, the trunks are laid out for hewing at the remote sawmill, its corrugated metal roof hardly visible from the highway.

The highway known as BR-163 stretches from soybean fields to a riverside export terminal. The loggers were just south of the road’s juncture with BR-230, known as the Trans-Amazon. Together the highways cover more than 5,000 miles, crossing the world’s fifth-biggest country in the state of Para.

Carved through jungle during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, the roads were built to bend nature to man’s will in the vast hinterland. Four decades later, there’s development taking shape, but also worsening deforestation — and locals harbor concerns that progress may pass them by.

The highways first meet in the city of Ruropolis, where the military government promised land to lure people to the planned agricultural village. One 53-year-old man, Hilquias Soares, remembers a state agent in his hometown yelling, “Who wants to go to Para?”

His family took the chance, arriving just after President Emilio Medici, a general, inaugurated the town. Archival footage shows Medici unveiling a plaque reading: “The Brazilian people respond to the challenge of history, occupying the heart of the Amazon.”

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, a former Army captain, won last year’s election with support from farmers, truckers and miners by resurrecting the dictatorship-era desire to develop the world’s largest...