POWER DYNAMICS IN LARGE PROJECTS ON THE AMAZON FRONTIER

THEORETICAL INTERFACES BETWEEN GEOPOLITICS AND POLITICAL ECOLOGY IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE STATE OF PARÁ

Abstract

From a historical perspective, the Large Projects implemented in the Brazilian Amazon articulate themselves across multiple scales of power in which the State and capital maintain a structural alliance, resulting in the unequal distribution of socio-environmental damages and risks across the territories and configuring a persistent pattern of environmental inequality. This article aims to develop a critical reflection on the theoretical interfaces between geopolitics and political ecology in the analysis of Large Projects operating on the Amazonian frontier of the state of Pará, taking as reference the cases of mining, highways, and hydroelectric dams. The methodology is based on political ecology, which allows us to understand the asymmetrical power relations between social agents and the ways in which they (re)configure the territory according to economic, political and cultural interests, and, to support this analysis, exploratory-bibliographical methodological procedures were adopted. The results highlight the historical reproduction of environmental inequality, marked above all by the asymmetrical distribution of socio-environmental damages and risks that affect vulnerable social groups more intensely. This inequality is reinforced by the structural alliance between the State and capital, which sustains a development model based on Large Projects, a model that remains in force and is systematically reproduced even today. Therefore, as this productive rationality materializes in the territory of Pará, it redefines the Amazonian frontier as a strategic space of dispute and control, operating through logics of territorialization and selective appropriation of natural resources that deepen power asymmetries and socio-environmental vulnerabilities.