O Grito dos silenciados contra a devastação neoliberal na BR-163

Abstract

The research aims to analyze the current capitalist accumulation's phase from the intensification of social conflicts in Itaituba, in the Brazilian Amazon, due to the socio economic impact generated by neoliberalism. The municipality's strategic location on the Santarém-Cuiabá highway (BR-163), into the banks of the Tapajós River, in western Pará, it has extraordinary mining reserves it owns, that long has been attracting transnational corporationsinterestslinked to agribusiness, mineral exploring, and construction of large infrastructure work. During the analysis period, from 2007 to 2017, there was a vertiginous growth in the activities linked to these interests, wherein the large public and private investments on the banks of the highway that has shown the neoliberal capitalism's dynamism in recent decades, marked by the association of large capitals around the world, denationalization of state public assets, and economy's financialization. Mainly, are targeted countries and regions that, like Brazil and the Amazon, have a rich natural heritage, weak environmental management, flexible rules and legislation, in a historical context aggravated by fragile democracy and disrespect for social and ethnic rights. Moreover, the highway is a part of a major axis of agricultural production to circulate commodities, which led to the construction of large port structures, in a multimodal transport logistics to enable the shipment of production to world markets. More, the agricultural and mineral neo-extractivism practiced without limits in the region also requires large infrastructures for energy production, which implies the construction of hydroelectric plants. Thus, if the Tapajós's Hydroelectric Complex mega-project is carried out by the federal government, the lives and work of thousands of people will be rendered unfeasible, and the surrounding nature will be destroyed, causing immeasurable proportions of socio- environmental damages. These are the priorities of the neoliberal agenda that reinforce Brazil's subordinate position in world geopolitics, as a producer of raw materials to serve the industrialized countries at the center of capitalism. International laws and agreements signed by the country have been systematically violated to favor the accumulation of the region's wealth. In this sense, the Brazilian State acts as a participant in the power games controlled by the dominant countries worldwide, leading the region to disastrous impasses. Such dynamism overlaps and enhances structural and historical problems, such as the grabbing of public lands, lack of environmental control, violence, arbitrariness, and disinvestment in smallholder production, producing more and more concentration of wealth, which generates poverty and misery to life and work of most of the populations from the region. From this, the theoretical- methodological perspective of the research combines the propositions from Bourdieu (1983; 1989; 1997) and Foucault (1999), and has a qualitative perspective, by using semi-structured interviews with different social actors in the region, combining also a documentary analysis. The investigation purposes to identify as has been the organization of the counter-reactions to neocolonialism domination, under the leadership of indigenous people, traditional communities, social movements, and workers, together with the investigation that leads understanding the importance of 'the locality' to provoke displacement of power and impose the recognition of territorial and socio-cultural rights. The results point to the strengthening of resistance networks, which urgently demand the aggregation of other political forces from the counter-hegemonic field.