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Voices from the 'Amazonias' ask to be heard

Thesis analyzes social movements and mobilization networks in the region, focusing on the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Plant

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“Showing that there are several voices in the Amazon, voices saying that there are different Amazons that need to be heard by the Brazilian population, and not just by the authorities”, is the contribution that Lucas Milhomens, journalist and professor at UFAM in Parintins, hopes to make with the thesis PhD “Social movements and mobilization networks in the Amazon: the case of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Plant”. He was guided by Maria da Glória Gohn, a professor at the Faculty of Education (FE) and one of the most renowned scholars of social movements in Latin America. “Brazilians need to take ownership of the region, not in the sense of having it for themselves, but of getting to know it and preserving it”, states the author. 

Lucas Milhomens brings a family history directly linked to major projects led by the military regime, experiencing in childhood and adolescence, albeit unconsciously, the impacts and conflicts generated by works such as Itaipu, Transamazônica and Tucuruí, taken by his father, a “stretch pawn” – an employee of trust that was then moved to these remote parts of the country. The chapter “Child of great projects: the reasons for research and the researcher” was a suggestion from the qualification committee. "ANDn many moments we identify not only with the actors involved, but also with the situations described and analyzed in light of the theoretical framework”, observes the journalist.

According to Lucas, the thesis, financed by the Amazonas State Research Support Foundation (Fapeam), analyzes the historical and sociocultural factors that enabled the emergence of a series of groups and organized social movements that operate in the Amazon, especially in cities like Altamira (PA), a municipality permeated by an overlap of social conflicts that date back to the beginning of the civil-military government in the 1960s. “In Altamira, large infrastructure projects were planned that generated a series of social, economic and environmental impacts, mainly affecting people traditional and indigenous populations – such as the construction of the Transamazônica highway in the 1970s and the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Plant opened in 2016.”

Photo: Scarpa
Journalist and professor Lucas Milhomens, author of the thesis: “The big problem in the Amazon, which comes from the colonization process, is that the region was designed to be usurped, extracted and abandoned”

The author's objective was to understand what these movements are, how they were historically constituted and how they articulate and organize themselves both to combat intervention projects and to minimize their impacts on communities. “The intervention of the civil-military government represented a new paradigm in the Amazon, which changed the dynamics of the population and generated a reaction from organized movements. In this reaction, I highlight the important presence of the Catholic Church linked to Liberation Theology – which politically and ideologically managed other organizations and social movements.”

A relevant issue for the researcher is that, when talking about the Amazon, it is put in the plural. “There are several Amazons, which comprise almost 60% of the national territory. Indigenous people have always been central characters, after all, the Xingu is an indigenous river, which runs from Mato Grosso to Pará, with dozens of indigenous communities living on its banks for millennia. But other characters are part of this process, such as the riverside dwellers and rural workers who migrated there long before the Transamazônica, attracted by government propaganda aimed at labor and greater occupation of the region.”

Lucas Milhomens observes that the migrants who remained there constituted equally Amazonian populations, with a very strong presence of northeasterners. “It is not possible to think of any place in the region without thinking of the Northeast, as migrants helped shape the culture of the Amazon since the first rubber booms. In the last 50 years, the presence of immigrants from Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná has also been notable; there are already two generations and there are cities where there are only blondes with blue eyes, with interior landscapes very similar to those of the South.”


Capital of the Transamazônica

The author of the thesis justifies the focus on Altamira due to its history of social conflicts involving the land and the Transamazônica itself, a military project to connect the Northeast to the North. “The main section of the highway is in Altamira, known as the 'capital of the Transamazônica'. The work brought an impact of proportions still studied by researchers, as it was not completed and the consequences are still felt today. I was on the highway during a dry period and some sections have craters the size of a bus; with the rains, traffic becomes unviable.”

Milhomens recalls that even the so-called democratic governments that followed after 1984, at the end of the dictatorship, maintained the same “development” policy for the Amazon. “Belo Monte itself was designed during the military regime and they tried to put it into practice at the end of the 80s, based on other experiences, such as Tucuruí. But there was a mobilization of social movements, especially indigenous people, with complaints to the UN and other international bodies. The reaction caused the World Bank to cancel the loan and the construction of the then-called Kakaraô Hydroelectric Plant ended up suspended. The discussion was resumed in the 2000s, with a new guise and the name Belo Monte.”

Photo: Disclosure
Demonstration against Belo Monte in the Pará city of Altamira

For the journalist, the activists' actions reflect the awareness that the Amazon must not only be preserved, but actually known by the population of Brazil and the planet. “It impresses me, having lived in the region for ten years, that people from other parts of the world study and talk about the Amazon with much more authority than Brazilians. The resistance of social movements contributed to the global dissemination of issues such as the impacts of hydroelectric plants – Belo Monte is the largest of them, but there is a project for around 40 plants spread throughout the Amazon, according to the Government's Ten-Year Energy Expansion Plan Federal for the coming years.”

This articulation, says the researcher, generates other campaigns, such as the one currently being filed against a Canadian multinational, also in Altamira. “In addition to the hydroelectric plant, there is a major threat called Belo Sun, which is implementing the largest gold mining company in Brazil, 10 km from the dam. Absurd impacts will come with the extraction of another, in which products that are highly harmful to the environment are used. And the biggest impacts are again the indigenous people, who have already been displaced. In an interview with journalist Eliane Brum, the public prosecutor in Altamira, Thais Santi, used the anthropological term that best characterizes what happened in the region with Belo Monte: ethnocide, a crime for which the Brazilian State is being denounced by the Federal Public Ministry. ”
 

Mobilization networks

The thesis also analyzes mobilization networks, articulated between social movements and partner entities that use the internet and other digital media in a systematic and organic way. “These networks are a topic worked on by urban groups, but not in the Amazon. It involves the production of texts, audiovisual material, documentaries and even fiction to promote its flags. The technological structure is a bottleneck – fiber optics are not enough in many places – but even so, in the last five years, Belo Monte has been one of the most discussed topics in the country, due to these social actors. The internet is fundamental because conventional media does not approach these issues from the same perspective as the movements.”

Lucas notes that this entire process of resistance also generates education, in the sense of learning. “The action itself generates knowledge that will be used later or during the process, movements learn from their mistakes. For example: despite the hydroelectric plant having been inaugurated, the struggle continues, as the government has not carried out even 5% of the mitigation actions it is responsible for. There are people who still have nowhere to live, poorly constructed resettlement houses, the environmental impacts with the river standing still and rotting, the fish dying... All of this remains under discussion.”

Photo: Disclosure
Indigenous person speaks at demonstration against the installation of the Belo Monte plant

Resettlement is a condition related to indigenous people, but the journalist highlights that one of the government actions to make Belo Monte viable was to dismantle them with mechanisms against mobilization. “One mechanism was the so-called 'emergency plan', in which the government granted R$30 a month to each indigenous leader – there are 19 ethnic groups in the region. The money attracted other leaders and there was an increase from 20 to almost 60 villages. The indigenous people ended up divided over money, which was not used for the benefit of the community, with reports of purchasing pickup trucks in villages that did not have roads, as well as numerous perishable foods that had no nutritional value for the indigenous people, such as bales of refrigerator."

Milhomens states that during the plan cases of illness, alcoholism and violence increased, justifying the accusation against the State for ethnocide against the indigenous peoples of the Xingu. “Redistributing indigenous people geographically, settling them where the impact of the work does not reach them, is one of the issues. The other is to ensure that these people have their cultures respected. The Aarara, specifically, were one of the people who suffered most from the impacts: they lived on a kind of island in the Xingu, where they fished and maintained their farms, and ended up displaced to an area without access to the river and, therefore, without the means to survive. ”

The riverside people, according to the author of the thesis, lead similar lives and suffered the same impacts, but anonymously, since they do not have the same protection network as the indigenous people. “If it weren’t for social movements, riverside dwellers would be completely helpless. I interviewed people like Dona Raimunda, who gave me a very strong story: 'Belo Monte took away the ground I walk on and almost killed me, it just didn't kill me because I'm very strong'. She was a farmer and fisherman, on land on an island in the Xingu that was flooded. With an insignificant compensation, Dona Raimunda went to the city and, when she saw the water hitting the door of her house again, she had to be relocated: she was hit twice.”


New threats

The author of the thesis considers that today the scenario is the worst possible, in every sense. “The Amazon has never been attacked so much, with measures such as restricting the environmental protection area in Pará, which the government backed down on. There is a lobby of the ruralist group in the National Congress, which is very powerful and directly affects legislation. Issues that we thought were guaranteed in relation to the Amazon are no longer there, including the demarcation of indigenous lands, which today is the responsibility of the Executive, but they want the Legislature to start granting or withdrawing concessions.”

One effort of his research, concludes Lucas Milhomens, is to show that social movements in the Amazon exist and are fundamental for resistance against threats ranging from projects undertaken by the State and large companies, such as miners and loggers. “The big problem in the Amazon, which dates back to the colonization process, is that the region was designed to be usurped, extracted and abandoned. Even today, the Amazon continues to be thought of as a territory to be merely explored. Therefore, the importance of these actors and social movements in combating these countless threats.”

 

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Audio description: Aerial, panoramic image of an immense dam, with a river in the background, with a bridge that connects, horizontally, one bank of the dam to the other. Around it there is various equipment used in the construction sector such as cranes and tractors, warehouses and also several stretches of forest. Image 1 of 1.

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