Vozes institucionais e os discursos de dominação: análise dos grandes projetos hidrelétricos na Amazônia

Abstract

The Amazon is configured as a strategic asset of the country in this century, projecting interest in the region according to the geopolitical and economic conjuncture. At the same time that it can awaken the image of an emerging common environmental concern, it strengthens the stigma of colonialism, underdevelopment, and the need to adapt it to national and foreign interests. This research analyzes the official speeches of the Executive (1970-2010), which holds the communicative power of the debate on the Amazon, at a crossroads between the State and the exploitation of water resources in the region. The study is based on the Executive Branch's communication field, with 37 messages from six Presidents of the Republic, sent to the National Congress in determinant periods of Brazilian politics - analyzing how they shape the great hydroelectric projects for the Amazon and how the political representations, economic and social over the region, using a hybrid methodology that adds critical discourse analysis, content analysis and text mining. The research shows that, in different political periods, the Amazon is also a strategic discursive instrument of power, subjugated to decisions exogenous to its reality in discourses with meanings sometimes expressed clearly now silenced or erased. The analysis materializes reductionist institutional voices that situate the region as an emptiness that needs to be occupied and unfolded in the name of an integrative and developmentalist project, or, in a clothing of sustainability, silencing not to raise questions