The World: Transamazonia: The Last Frontier

THE noise is not yet loud enough to disturb the sloths munching on the leaves of the cecropia trees, or the river terns that wing lazily over the Amazon's mighty waters, or the secretive Indian tribes that live deep within the jungle. But along the tributaries of the world's largest river the sound is plainly discernible, like a low rumble of thunder in the distance. It is the dull, grinding roar of bulldozers cutting naked red strips through the vast Amazon rain forest.

Brazil's Transamazonian Highway, begun a year ago last week, has another three years and about 8,000 miles to go before it is finished. The $500 million, 9,000-mile highway network will provide the first land link between Brazil's Atlantic seaboard ports of Belem and Recife and the Bolivian and Peruvian borders-and perhaps eventually the Pacific. Other roads will reach out to Surinam, French Guiana, Colombia and Venezuela to the north, and to Brazil's industrialized states in the south.

Work of the Century. Already, the first families of settlers are moving into the clearings left in the bulldozers' wake. Small backwater towns of the Amazon like Altamira and Maraba (see map) have turned overnight into construction boom towns where disputes are often settled with a gun. In gold-mining Itaituba, for instance, marijuana is literally worth its weight in gold; an ounce of one buys an ounce of the other.

Running 200 miles south of the Amazon River, and almost parallel to it, the Transamazonian Highway project is already being billed by President Emilio G. Medici's military regime as the work of the century. Not since the feverish 1950s, when former President Juscelino Kubitschek built the city of Brasilia and had the 1,350-mile Belem-Brasilia highway carved out of the jungle, have Brazilians responded with such a display of national pride to the challenge of conquering their last natural frontier.

The challenge is born of the necessity of easing the poverty and political unrest of the Northeast, where nearly a quarter of the 30 million people live on the edge of starvation. The government's high hopes are that the highway will open up the natural wealth of the entire 2,700,000-sq.-mi. Amazon basin-an area almost the size of the continental U.S.-and provide vast new resettlement lands for 500,000 homesteaders over the next five years. Says Transport Minister Mario Andreazza: "We have to conquer Brazil completely, and this will do it. Transamazonia will be the dorsal spine of Brazil."

Escapist Psychology. The project is a politically popular one, at least in part because of recurrent rumors among Brazilian nationalists that the U.S. plans to take over the region for military purposes, or as a home for blacks or a refuge in the event of nuclear attack. Not everyone is enthusiastic about the highway, though. For one thing, most of the money is coming from funds that had been allocated to build impressive new industrial plants in the Northeast. For another, some Brazilians fear that the highway will merely aid large U.S. companies like U.S. Steel and Union Carbide to exploit the area's mineral riches, which include the world's largest deposit of iron ore, estimated at 8 billion tons.