The Manaus Free Trade Zone (ZFM) was established in 1967 by the Brazilian military dictatorship, within a nationalist discourse that presented the Amazon region as a strategic territory that was necessary to occupy and develop. The vision of the great empty area was not erased from the popular imagination. Since the 1970s, however, the perception of the forest as a biological and cultural heritage that must be preserved has gained strength. These changes in the broader discourse about the Amazon were accompanied by a shift of the discourse of legitimacy of the tax incentives enjoyed by the industries of Manaus, in a movement related to the construction of hegemony in the environmental field, marked by the emergence of the so-called ecological modernization. Using critical discourse analysis, this article shows how the argument that firms in Manaus protect the forest has emerged based on a story line of double threat: unemployment and deforestation. Data were collected through literature review, semi-structured interviews and direct observation at meetings and corporate events. There were also in the corpus of analysis: official transcripts of 64 plenary speeches of the three senators and eight deputies of Amazonas State in 2007, 125 articles published in the local newspaper A Crítica between January 1st and June 30th and four editions of the institutional magazine Suframa Hoje in the same year.
Ecological modernization; critical discourse analysis; Manaus Free Trade Zone; Amazon region; environmental discourses
