Calha Norte, a traditional Brazilian program, received more than R$3 billion in funding over the last seven years, which meant a deviation from the original purpose of strategic military action on the borders.
The billions of reais invested by federal deputies and senators in Calha Norte recently led the program to carry out paving and construction works, in addition to delivering machines, vehicles and equipment to electoral strongholds handpicked by congressmen.
The disfigurement led the federal government to announce that the program, about to turn 40 years old, will be transferred from the Ministry of Defense to the Ministry of Integration and Regional Development, which already has under its responsibility a state-owned company also converted into an endoduct, the .
There are several parallels in the recent trajectories of Calha Norte and Codevasf (Companhia de Desenvolvimento dos Vales do São Francisco e do Parnaíba), .
One of the ones that attracts the most attention is the territorial expansion in recent years to cover more municipalities of interest to deputies and senators.
Codevasf today runs from Legal to the Northeast coast, while Calha Norte even goes far from the border regions, reaching the state of Tocantins.
One of the biggest leaps in the military program occurred in 2022, in the last year of (‘s) administration, when the coverage area grew by 40%, going from 442 to 619 locations.
In the first year of the government (PT) there was a new increase, and now there are 783 municipalities in total. However, only about a fifth of them, 170, are within Brazilian borders.
Today, approximately 60% of the national territory is covered by Calha Norte, which reaches ten states: Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins.
The amounts of amendments allocated to the program began to increase significantly from 2017 onwards.
From that year to 2023, the last full year considered in the request for information made by Sheet to the ministry, the annual values of amendments carried out in Calha Norte jumped from R$ 266 million, in 2017 (values corrected for inflation), to R$ 688 million, in 2023, which corresponds to an increase of around 160% in the flow of annual public money.
In 2024, until October, the amount was R$572 million. In total, since 2017, there have been R$3.5 billion in amendments carried out under the program. Of this total, around 70% of the resources were allocated to works, equivalent to R$2.4 billion.
The list of engineering works and services carried out by Calha Norte is broad and includes paving and construction of schools, hospitals, municipal markets, squares, sports courts, stadiums, gymnasiums, barracks, police stations, prisons and cargo or passenger terminals.
Approximately R$1 billion in amendments was spent to deliver products, which included the distribution of 1,877 vehicles and 637 heavy machines since 2017.
The list of goods is quite varied: motorcycles, cars, pickup trucks, buses, ambulances, trucks, garbage compactors, backhoes, motor graders and bulldozers.
In September, the government announced that Calha Norte will be transferred from the Ministry of Defense to the Ministry of Integration and Regional Development starting this month.
At the time, the Minister of Defense, , justified the measure on the grounds that the department “had been doing work related to Regional Development, deviating from the purpose of our ministry”.
“The Armed Forces should work in their area, they should not do the work they were doing because that confused, mixed things up, disrupted our management,” he stated.
“We are failing to do what is not part of our ministry and we do not even have the knowledge to do so, and my desire is for the Armed Forces to return to their barracks to fulfill their obligations”, he added.
Mucio endorsed the assessment of the Armed Forces, especially the Army, that Calha Norte had turned into a festival of amendments for purposes other than military ones, such as the construction of squares, courts and sports spaces.
A series of such projects gives a vote, in the words of a member of the Army High Command. But, housed in the Defense portfolio, they gave the impression that they were funds for the Armed Forces.
Once the decision to transfer Calha Norte was taken, the military’s concern became how to ensure that, within a framework of , the essential part of the program to keep the border platoons in a strategic region for national defense is maintained.
The same was also thought about other projects that receive resources from Calha Norte, such as the Navy hospital ships that serve riverside populations in the northern portion of the Amazon basin.
The reallocation of these resources was yet to be considered from a bureaucratic point of view and, in December, there were fears among military personnel that it could postpone the transfer of Calha Norte to the Ministry of Integration.
A Sheet asked the Ministry of Defense about the current stage of the transfer and the increase in the values of amendments allocated to the program, but the ministry did not respond.
