Introduction

Frontiers are often associated with violent conflict over property rights to land. Battles between claim jumpers and miners and between cattle raisers and sheep herders are part of the mythology of the nineteenth-century American West. Similarly, popular accounts of settlement in the Brazilian Amazon point to widespread violence over land. Yet conflict in the assignment of property rights is not inevitable. Indeed, if tenure institutions are supplied smoothly as land values rise, then settlement of the frontier can be routine with few disputes over property rights. In contrast, where clearly defined tenure is not supplied in a timely manner as potential land values increase, then violent conflict is a possible outcome. Tenure services are supplied through the political process, and a variety of problems can arise to complicate delivery. These include overlapping government jurisdictions with competing land agencies assigning tenure to the same land: multiple land agencies within the same government with different constituents who are granted title to the same land! government subsidies and other infrastructure programs that unexpectedly and sharply raise land values, attracting new claimants! and insufficient agency budgets and staffs to process and police titles.

This chapter examines the development of property rights to land in two Brazilian frontiers: in the southern state of Parana during the coffee agricul- tural between 1940 and 1970 and in the Amazon state of Para during the period of rapid migration to the region after 1970.