THE COLONIAL NARRATIVE FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF HYDROELECTRIC POWER PLANTS IN AMAPÁ

Abstract

In the Amazon, the persistence of a colonial project, which triggered the appropriation of the territory for the implementation of hydroelectric plants, has been reproducing damage and disasters and causing, for decades, a series of socio-environmental conflicts. From this perspective, the objective of this article is to analyze the dynamics of the implementation of mitigation and compensation measures, as an instrument of Environmental Policy, in communities of artisanal fishermen and family farmers in the Brazilian Amazon, specifically in the State of Amapá, which are subject to disasters caused by hydroelectric dams on the Araguari River. In the conjuncture, even in the face of the persistence of social and environmental damages and disasters, there is a discourse of the inevitability of hydroelectric plants, under the allegation that the consequences can be mitigated or compensated. However, guided by Decolonial Epistemology, after documentary analysis of Ten-Year Energy Expansion Plans (2006-2021), public civil actions, TACs and interviews, which comprise information collected from fishermen and family farmers on the Araguari River, State of Amapá, it was found that the implementation of mitigating and compensatory measures proved to be illusory. From a participatory research, it was possible to observe the destructuring of an environment that was the basis for the survival of secular communities. In view of this, it is necessary to break with this exclusionary and unequal rationality through resistance movements and to embark on an epistemological disobedience necessary to confront the relations of domination and power present in capitalist projects, such as hydroelectric plants.