The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy by Raúl Zibechi

Author:Raúl Zibechi
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2014-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

Table 8: Direct investment abroad by Latin American countries

(2001–2010 in millions of dollars)

Source: CEPAL, “La inversión extranjera directa en América Latina y el Caribe,” 2009, 85; and 2010, 75.

7. The New Conquest of the Amazon

“This country is going to become a major economic power in the coming years. And it is thanks to the pre-salt, it is thanks to the Amazon, it is thanks to our biodiversity.”

—Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

On the afternoon of March 15, 2011, a violent dispute between a construction worker and a bus driver led to an uprising among a portion of the 20,000 workers constructing the Jirau dam on the Madeira River. Hundreds of workers set fire to the buses that take them from their barracks to the worksite. At least forty-five buses and fifteen vehicles were quickly burned, as were the offices of the construction firm, Camargo Corrêa, half the workers’ dormitories, and at least three bank ATMs. Some 8,000 workers went into the jungle to escape the violence. The police were overwhelmed, and only managed to protect the facilities where the explosives used to alter the course of the river were stored. Calm was only restored when the President Dilma Rousseff sent 600 military police troops to take control of the situation. But the workers went back to their places of origin rather than returning to work.1

At the nearby Santo Antonio construction site, a work stoppage began that involved 17,000 workers who were building yet another generating plant on the Madeira River—this one near Porto Velho, the capital of the state of Rondônia. In just one week, the wave of strikes spread through the huge worksites: 20,000 workers left their jobs at the Abreu e Lima refinery in Pernambuco, another 14,000 at the Saupe petrochemical plant in the same city, and another 5,000 in Pecém, in the state of Ceará. What these strikes have in common is that they all have taken place on the gigantic projects of the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), and they have challenged the biggest construction firms in the country, the Brazilian multinationals contracted by the national government.

The Madeira River is the Amazon’s main tributary. Starting at the convergence of the Beni and Mamoré rivers, near the city of Vila Bela on the border of Brazil and Bolivia, it is 4,207 km long—one of the twenty longest rivers in the world, and among the top ten in volume. It is fed by runoff from the Andes mountains in Bolivia and southern Peru, and thus has great potential for hydroelectric generation.

The Madeira River complex includes the construction of four hydroelectric dams, two of which have already begun, the Jirau and Santo Antônio, in the Brazilian section between the border and Porto Velho. The Jirau plant will produce 3,350 MW and Santo Antônio 3,150 MW. They are two priority PAC projects that will connect the two isolated systems in the states of Acre (neighboring Rondônia) and Maranhão (in the northeast) to the national electrical grid.2 The aim is to use Amazon

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