Name: ISABELA SILVEIRA BERNARDES
Publication date: 07/10/2024
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ANA CAROLINA GONÇALVES LEITE | Examinador Externo |
| CARLOS DE ALMEIDA TOLEDO | Examinador Externo |
| CASSIO ARRUDA BOECHAT | Presidente |
Summary: From the beginning, the research intended to study the history of Vale by creating a dialogue
with labor mobility. This is a concept that has a double meaning: it involves both the
processes that free the worker from the land, the expropriation itself, and the rationalization of
work processes that will imply their multiplication and the social division of labor. We
interpret mining in Brazil as part of a long process of Brazilian laggard modernization which,
as far as this sector is concerned, remained slow throughout the 19th century. There were
attempts to develop steelmaking throughout this century. The politicians involved with the
regencies had the highest level of training acquired in Coimbra. From 1876 onwards,
engineers who graduated from the Escola de Minas de Ouro Preto began to take the lead in
sporadic initiatives in steelmaking and mineral research, this however gained importance and
became State policy in the same period in which European countries began to create his first
geological map of the continent. The results of the mineral research were widely publicized,
especially at the 11th Geology Congress, held in Sweden, in which a comprehensive report
estimating and locating the deposits of Minas Gerais was presented by Orville Derby,
president of the SGMB. As a result, all mining reserves were purchased by foreigners of
various nationalities, including the English and American-owned Itabira Iron Ore project,
which acquired an area equivalent to 1 billion tons of the 3 billion tons estimated for Minas
Gerais by the report. The outcry against the venture, along with the first war and the Great
Depression, delayed the railroad's work for twenty years. Only with the creation of Vale in
1942, when the contribution of foreign capital became definitive, duly authorized and
mediated by the Estado Novo, was the first shipment of ore made through the Port of Vitória.
The nationalization of the industry by Vargas in no way involved a speech nationalist, on the
contrary, it was about a growing rapprochement between Brazil and the USA that began there,
and with it our technicians learned how to plan. The person who represented in Espírito
Santo the ideal of regional planning, put into practice for the first time by Roosevelt's New
Deal, was Jones dos Santos Neves, an intervener in the Estado Novo who brought
modernization to the Rio Doce Valley, a region considered unhealthy, backward, hostile,
“empty” and not the target of attention from politicians linked to the paternalistic coffee
industry in Cachoeiro de Itapemirim and Vitória. Jones' rise represents an important turning
point in Espírito Santo politics. He is the last technician, planner and politician who
personifies Vale's interests in this story that I am trying to tell here. How this governor acted
to assert his interests is the question that this research intends to try to answer later.
