“Look at the jaguar on his hat”: the Amazon and the jungle warriors of the Brazilian Army

Abstract

The paper analyzes the constitutive aspects of daily life in military barracks and the military presence in the Amazon, especially with regard to the Jungle Warfare Training Center. Throughout this work, through a qualitative analysis of uniforms, objects and songs, as well as the ways in which military bases are named and what the military calls the “mystique” of jungle warriors, I seek to answer two questions: how is the military presence in the Amazon symbolically constructed by the Brazilian Army? And what does this symbolic production reveal about military thinking on that part of the country and its populations? Frequently, in formulating that only by becoming like the “jungle” are the military able to control it, jungle warriors, in particular, and the Army, in general, make use of various “captures” and “mirrorings” of what they understand to be the “jungle”. Thus, the central argument of this article is that a significant portion of the uses the military makes of jaguars — and of a whole range of elements appropriated from indigenous populations in the Amazon — can be viewed as ways of controlling their expression in relation to the “other.” Thus, for example, in the case of the Munduruku, “honored” in the naming of training bases, in songs, and even in internal competitions at the Jungle Warfare Training Center, they evoke an image of a “warrior people” whose characteristics must mirror those of soldiers in the Amazon. In short, it is a military worldview that uses the colonial past as the core of its presence in the Amazon.