THE BR-319 HIGHWAY (MANAUS-PORTO VELHO): THE DISCOURSE TO "RIDE BY CAR", THE ROAD ISOLATION OF A REGION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the speech of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, given at the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) of NGOs, as well as the speeches of the rapporteur of the CPI, Senator Plínio Valério, from Amazonas, and how these reverberated and were broadcast in Amazonian and national news portals and television media. The Environmental Impact Study (EIA), a technical document necessary to obtain the Preliminary License for the repaving of the "middle stretch" of BR-319, whose narratives are dissonant with the minister's speech, is also analyzed. The study is justified by the current importance of the debates on the repaving of the BR-319 highway (Manaus - Porto Velho), both in relation to environmental impacts and the need for improvements in transport infrastructure in the Amazon region. Of a qualitative nature, the methodology used in the exploratory study was bibliographic and documentary, based on the theorizations of discourse analysis by Michel Foucault (1993) and his scholars such as Veiga-Neto (2004), Saraiva (2015) and Lemke (2014). The findings indicate that the minister's speech problematizes the relationship between the reconstruction of the highway and the fight against environmental crimes, in addition to questioning the effectiveness of the social policies that would be implemented in the region after the work.