Newspapers, theatre, film and music were censored and thousands of indigenous people killed as military rulers forcibly colonised the Amazon.
Hundreds of technicians, thousands of indigenous workers, and millions of pesos were marshaled to realize a complex system of canals, tunnels, dams, floodgates, and reservoirs.
We see only the oil and not the thousands of indigenous peoples that are displaced each year because oil was found in their communities.
Most unusual, however, was the group at the center of the drama thousands of indigenous people, historically the nation's poorest and most politically marginalized group.
Thus, the Lakota, as well as their Nakota and Dakota language "cousins" and many of the thousands of indigenous societies still extant around the globe, speak, for example, of deer peoples, or of the bird nations.
These two huge dams would displace thousands of indigenous families, flood large areas of rainforest, and alter the river so extensively that the migration of 750 species of fish would be affected, according to the dam watchdog group International Rivers.
In Laos, a series of relatively small dams and diversions has already forced the relocation of thousands of indigenous peoples to sites where there is insufficient land or water.
In 1968, when Derrick Pottle was 11 years old, he and his family moved from Rigolet to Happy Valley-Goose Bay under a federal government program that relocated thousands of indigenous Canadians from remote communities.
In 2008, Harper apologized in Parliament to the country's indigenous populations for an official government policy that saw tens of thousands of indigenous children taken from their families and resettled in boarding schools.
The country has previously repatriated remains to Namibia, where it killed tens of thousands of indigenous Herero and Nama people from 1904 to 1908.
The discovery of thousands of indigenous artefacts on a section of Sydney's new light rail line has prompted calls for construction at the site to be halted.
