Recomposição socioterritorial em contexto de mineração: Utopia e distopia do PAE Juruti Velho – Pará, Baixo Amazonas

Abstract

This work, from an informed perspective in the sociology of public action, challenges the complex relationships that took place between communities and the mining company Alcoa, from 2009, in Juruti Velho, district of Juruti (Baixo Amazonas). The research privileged observations about the Juruti Velho Agroextractivist Project, as an initiative inscribed in the developments in terms of the socio-territorial recomposition produced with the aluminum exploration venture, thus inaugurating, at the same time, a conflict arena involving traditional communities, publics agents, corporations, catholic Church and social movements, actors of different backgrounds and relevance. In this process, there are experiences of intense conflicts resulting from internal differences in the communities, somehow related to the presence of mining activities and interests in that territory. The data collected resulted from a methodological approach close to action research with involved riverside communities. Interviews, direct observations at meetings of the association to which 53 local communities are affiliated, as well as photographic records constitute the techniques by which the basis of data and information was built, in which it was identified as emblematic of the rupture of neighborhoods ties previously witnessed by the practice of puxiruns (group work aimed at completing a task more quickly). An important practice in a social recomposition of the territory, through local actions with which the communion of utopias was an agglutinating element. Thus, in Juruti Velho there will be an intense process of articulation and popular mobilization aiming at recognition as a traditional community and, through this recognition, the titling of their lands. As a result of this process, the management of royalties, paid as a counterpart to the bauxite mining rights, is now carried out by the communities in order to promote the sustainable development of the territory. It is through this management, here interpreted as territorial, and its dynamics in terms of utopias and dystopias, involving the representatives of the communities involved in the Juruti Velho Agroextractivist Project, as well as in the process of resignification of the puxiruns, which sought to understand the contradictory relations between the communities and the mining company, and in them what is projected as a future in relation to the territory, object in which, and around which, actors mobilize to reach a goal, in this case, the control of their management, according to with the demands of sustainable development. It is understood that the harnessing of royalties under the management of the Association of Riverside Juruti Velho (Acorjuve), while, at the same time, signifying achievements, integrated a territorial recomposition, bringing challenges faced with the resignification of traditional social practices such as puxirum, thus enabling new prospects for the future of the territory.