Brazilian Blue Amazon
The Blue Amazon is the name given by the Brazilian Navy to Brazil's jurisdictional waters and continental shelf since 2004. The concept has a theoretical grounding in geopolitics and international relations and multiple facets — political-strategic, economic, environmental and scientific — with an emphasis in the first. It is a registered trademark and a central argument in the Navy's discourse for external and internal audiences, with additional usage by civilian sectors. More than an area, it is a propaganda discourse and a representation of the Brazilian perspective on the ocean's challenges and potentials, which are embedded in its analogy with the "Green" Amazon.
Its total claimed area covers 5.7 million square kilometers. Since the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force, Brazil has expanded its maritime jurisdiction by occupying the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago and surveying the South Atlantic seabed to justify extended continental shelf proposals submitted from 2004 to 2018 to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. These proposals, and thus, the country's ultimate maritime boundaries, have yet to become final and binding under international law. By publicizing the concept of a Blue Amazon, the Navy intends to recover a "maritime mentality" within Brazilian identity after the 20th century's focus on land borders and the continental interior.
Brazil has inherited from its colonial history a coastal-centered population and relies on the sea for most of its external trade and petroleum and natural gas production. Marine pollution and overfishing burden its diverse ecosystems. Proponents of the Blue Amazon see it as an important environmental concern and a potential engine for technology-driven economic growth. Public policies for this sector are brought together by the Interministerial Commission on Marine Resources, which is under the Navy's coordination. The Navy's mandate goes far beyond war: it is a coast guard, fields research vessels and scientific outposts, trains the merchant marine's officers and receives royalties from oil revenue.
In military thought, the "two Amazons" are resource-rich frontier zones where the state has a loose foothold, drawing in foreign greed which must be deterred by the Armed Forces. Perceived hypothetical threats are extraregional powers, which Brazilian strategists dream of keeping out of the South Atlantic, and unconventional threats such as international crime. By the 2010s, specialists agreed on the existence of shortcomings in naval combat and surveillance assets, but no conventional threat is felt in the short term. Newly discovered oil and gas reserves in the pre-salt layer encouraged ambitious naval re-equipment plans in the 2000s, but financial conditions deteriorated in the following decade and no political will was found to materialize the plans in their original form.
Context
Maritime consciousness
The concept of the Blue Amazon was launched to spread what the Navy calls a "maritime mentality" i.e. a conviction of the sea's importance to the nation, which needs to take root in the entire national community and not just the population employed in coastal and marine activities. According to the Navy's doctrines, Brazil has a neglected destiny in the ocean, a natural way forward dictated by its geographical heritage. Since the 1970s, naval intellectuals deplore the population's insufficient maritime mentality. The coastline of Brazil is the largest in the South Atlantic, but this has not by itself pointed the Brazilian polity towards the sea.Brazilian history begins with Portuguese colonization from the coast. The bandeirantes and other agents of continental expansionism tripled the territory given to the Portuguese Empire under the Treaty of Tordesillas, but the continental interior was a demographic vacuum. Friar Vicente do Salvador commented in 1627 that Portuguese movements in Brazil "scraped along the sea like crabs". The sea and the coast were central to the "imaginative geography" of colonial and imperial times. By Independence the merchant marine, ports and shipbuilding were relevant to the national economy, and naval power would remain a governmental priority until the beginning of the following century.
In the 20th century, the political elite's projects were set on land, such as the March to the West, the highway-centered road network to the detriment of coastal shipping, the construction of Brasília and South American regional integration. Mário Travassos, patron of national geopolitics, was an advocate of "continental projection". The priorities were development of the interior and assurance of national sovereignty in the remotest corners of the country. By the 21st century, agricultural and urban expansion towards the North and Center-West is still ongoing, and land borders are still not adequately controlled.
The sea never lost its importance. Most of the population, industrial output and energy consumption are still within 200 km of the coast, and external trade and oil and gas production are almost entirely conducted in the sea. Since the 1970s, the state and geopolitical debates have recovered their interest in the sea, but public consciousness has more of a continental character. Opinion polls held in 1997 and 2001 had 66% and 73% of interviewees agreeing the sea is importance. Their main reasons were food and leisure; this vision of the sea has a land and coastal bias. Maritime transport, oil production and international maritime law are unknown topics to the public at large. In another poll in 2014, 60% agreed the Navy had a major contribution to the country, but only 10% could cite examples of its actions.
Territorial sea and EEZ
The Blue Amazon is downstream of advancements in the regulation of maritime spaces and bases itself on maritime zones outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Brazilian diplomats were active in the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, which produced the UNCLOS. Brazil was one of the "territorialist" states, which would ally with the "zonists" and others to draft a legal regime favorable to coastal states in their nearby waters, in opposition to the interests of traditional maritime powers and geographically disadvantaged states. The UNCLOS came into force in 1994 and assures its parties a territorial sea, contiguous zone and exclusive economic zone in waters along their coast. In the territorial sea, which stretches from baselines along the coast to a distance of, a coastal state has full sovereignty over the airspace, waters, seabed and subsoil.When Brazil harmonized the UNCLOS with its legislation, it dropped its unilateral 1970 claim to a territorial sea. Other Latin American states backed this claim, but it was received with protests from traditional maritime powers, and the fleet in 1970 had no condition to patrol the entire claimed area. As a party to the UNCLOS, Brazil secured rights over natural resources in the EEZ from 12 to 200 nautical miles away from the baselines. Within the EEZ, it has additional jurisdiction to police activities within a contiguous zone from 12 to 24 miles. Waters beyond the 200-mile line are part of the high seas. After the Convention came into effect, Brazil occupied the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago so that it could be considered an inhabited island and formalized an EEZ claim around this landform in 2004.
Continental shelf
The seabed and subsoil's legal regime is distinct from that of the waters. Each coastal state has sovereign rights over natural resources in the submerged prolongation of its landmass, which is known as the continental shelf. Geologists and oceanographers call it the "legal continental shelf", as it is distinct from the continental shelf as identified by the natural sciences. The legal shelf's external boundary is the same 200-nautical mile line used by the EEZ, but it may be extended to greater distances with the consent of an international body, the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. For this to happen, the interest state must survey the seabed and scientifically prove the natural prolongation of its territory towards the claimed area.The continental shelf exists in Brazilian law since 1950, although under different terms and boundaries, and was the point of contention in the 1963 "Lobster War" against the French Navy. Even before the UNCLOS came into effect, the Brazilian government already sought to identify the outer boundaries of its shelf through the Brazilian Continental Shelf Survey Plan, formalized in 1989. Data collection lasted until 1996. Four Navy research vessels, together with specialists from Petrobras and the scientific community, gathered 330.000 km of seismic, bathymetric, magnetometric and gravimetric profiles along the entire Brazilian continental margin.
LEPLAC substantiated a proposal to extend the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles. Its scientific and technical aspects were supervised by a working group coordinated by the Navy's Directorate of Hydrography and Navigation, while political aspects were coordinated by a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The proposal was submitted to the CLCS on May 17, 2004. Diplomat Luiz Alberto Figueiredo describes the outer limit of the continental shelf as Brazil's last undefined legal boundary, as the problem of land borders has already been solved. The shelf, maritime zones surrounding oceanic islands and natural resources are the key points in Brazil's post-UNCLOS agenda for the ocean, which is particularly interested in the pre-salt layer's oil and natural gas reserves.
Definition
The term "Amazônia Azul" was first published on February 25, 2004, in an opinion column titled A outra Amazônia, which was published in the Folha de S. Paulo by admiral Roberto de Guimarães Carvalho, Commander of the Navy at the time. It is no coincidence that this happened in the same year of the extended continental shelf proposal. According to admiral Armando Amorim Ferreira Vidigal, the idea had its roots in the LEPLAC surveys. Since then, this term is strongly tied to the Navy's identity and is used in its discourses for internal and external audiences. In 2009 the National Institute of Industrial Property recognized the expression as the Navy's registered trademark for events and promotional material". Outside the institution, it has been used by geopolitical thinkers, research institutes, environmental conservation agencies and other entities.In his text, admiral Carvalho justified investments in the defense of "another Amazon, whose existence is still as ignored by much of the public as the other was for many centuries. It is the "blue Amazon"". The area he wrote of was the EEZ and the continental shelf as defined in the UNCLOS. The Navy's current formal definition for this space is "the region which comprises the ocean surface, waters overlying the seafloor, seabed and subsoil contained within the atlantic expanse projected from the coast to the outer limit of the Brazilian continental shelf". This is the same area as the Brazilian jurisdictional waters, which do have a legal definition and usage, whereas the Blue Amazon is a "less technical and more playful" term, with a "slight poetic touch", which has served as a blanket name for all maritime zones under Brazilian jurisdiction.
Under such definitions, the Blue Amazon is an area or space. Alternatively, it is the governance and challenges of using the ocean under Brazilian jurisdiction, an analytical tool, a "propaganda discourse to sensitize public opinion", an instrument of strategic communication, a "banner raised by the Navy" and/or a representation of the state's will. More than a brand, it expresses a strategy, with most of its theoretical basis in the fields of international relations and geopolitics, particularly in oceanopolitics.
The equivalence between the Blue Amazon and the AJB is done by multiple authors, although a more limited definition of only the EEZ and continental shelf would exclude waters overlying the extended shelf, which are not Brazilian waters. The water column beyond 200 nautical miles is part of the high seas, even when the underlying seabed and subsoil are part of a state's extended continental shelf. But it is also true that Brazilian legislation explicitly includes waters overlying the extended shelf in the concept of AJB. For some authors, this is a contradiction between national and international law which might be brought to an international court. Admiral Júlio Soares de Moura Neto, Commander of the Navy from 2007 to 2015, used the terms as synonyms by mentioning "our jurisdictional waters, which we usually call Blue Amazon".