{"id":26428,"date":"2009-04-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisaclone.fapesp.br\/2009\/04\/01\/divide-and-rule\/"},"modified":"2012-12-19T10:32:47","modified_gmt":"2012-12-19T12:32:47","slug":"divide-and-rule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/divide-and-rule\/","title":{"rendered":"Divide and rule"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\" IBGE<\/span>

F\u00e1bio Guimar\u00e3es IBGE<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Brazil’s regional division into five major geographic regions was officially adopted in 1942 and has since contributed to the organization and management of our national territory. In 1945, a subdivision was instituted and micro-regions were created (called physiographic zones at the time). The latter are clusters of towns with shared characteristics. Both were the work of engineer and geographer F\u00e1bio de Macedo Soares Guimar\u00e3es (1906-1979), from Rio de Janeiro, one of the pioneering researchers of IBGE, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.<\/p>\n

“To this day, government planning is carried out based on geographical divisions, with their macro and micro regions, which shows how the Treasury’s resources should be distributed to each area,” says Roberto Schmidt Almeida, a geographer and retired professor of the State University of Rio de Janeiro, as well as a student of the history of Brazilian geography. “And F\u00e1bio Guimar\u00e3es was the Brazilian researcher that understood the most about these division processes.” His study was published in Revista Brasileira de Geografia<\/em>, in its April-June 1941 edition, and was implemented one year later.<\/p>\n

The division Guimar\u00e3es proposed separated the 21 states and the Federal District at that time into North (Amazonas and Par\u00e1), Northeast (Maranh\u00e3o, Piau\u00ed, Cear\u00e1, Rio Grande do Norte, Para\u00edba, Pernambuco and Alagoas), East (Sergipe, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Esp\u00edrito Santo, Rio de Janeiro and Federal District), South (S\u00e3o Paulo, Santa Catarina, Paran\u00e1 and Rio Grande do Sul) and Midwest (Mato Grosso and Goi\u00e1s). There were also five territories, attached to the major regions.<\/p>\n

By 1969, almost 30 years later, it had become necessary to rearrange the national territory. The country’s economic center had become a triangle, the three points of which were the capital cities of Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and S\u00e3o Paulo. Therefore, the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and S\u00e3o Paulo, besides Esp\u00edrito Santo, were grouped into a new region, the Southeast. The East Region was eliminated, Bahia and Sergipe being transferred to the Northeast. Brasilia was already in the Midwest. Territories were promoted to states and attached to the macro-regions based on proximity and characteristics. This updating of the territory was not conducted by Guimar\u00e3es, who by then had left IBGE and was teaching at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro (PUC\/RJ).<\/p>\n

The geographer’s contributions, however, were not limited to the country’s division. There were many others, most of which arose in the 1940’s. Guimar\u00e3es mathematically determined Brazil’s precise center. Contrary to what people thought at the time, it lies in the northeast of the state of Mato Grosso, rather than in the state of Goi\u00e1s. In 1947, he headed one of two expeditions to the Planalto Central plateau, to better examine the best sites for the country’s future capital, along with one of the most important and influential geographers of those times, Leo Weibel, a German established in the United States, who had been hired as a consultant.<\/p>\n

Orlando Valverde, an IBGE geographer, in a text written in connection with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Guimar\u00e3es, in 2006, recalled that the latter carried out a famous technical analysis of the issue of the border between the states of Esp\u00edrito Santo and Minas Gerais. “He showed, with numerous examples from Brazil and abroad, that a line of mountain peaks does not always coincide with a watershed; that a river can cross a mountain range through gorges; and that a major watershed can be found within a valley,” wrote Valverde. “In other words, he clarified a very common mistake of students of international law.”<\/p>\n

Guimar\u00e3es worked for IBGE for 30 years. After 1969, he dedicated himself only to teaching the ideas that he had developed at the institute and had learnt in his field research throughout Brazil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sixty-seven years ago Brazil adopted a regional division proposed by geographer F\u00e1bio Guimar\u00e3es","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[],"coauthors":[104],"class_list":["post-26428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospect"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26428"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=26428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}