Based on 15 years of research in Brazil, this book is an interdisciplinary documentation and analysis of the process of frontier change in one region of the Brazilian Amazon, the southern region of the state of Para. The authors' analysis was based on the idea that what they documented in the field - deforestation, settlement patterns, and the intensity of rural violence, for example - were the outcomes of the competition for resources among social groups capable of mobilizing varying degrees of power. The analysis of these contests illustrates how national and international factors often shaped events at the local level, thereby propelling the story of frontier expansion in different and unexpected directions. The story told in this book is about an unlikely cast of characters (ranchers, peasants, loggers, Indians, goldminers, rubber farmers, and various bureaucrats and investors) who set in motion a sequence of events that forever changed the social and physical landscape of the Brazilian Amazon. The authors show how deforestation, m settlement patterns and the intensity of rural violence were out-comes of the competition for resources among social groups capable of mobilizing varying degrees of power.