Indigenous Resistance To Silly Dam Project In Brazil

18/11/2008
Peo­ple Pow­er Fucks Up Con­struc­tion

Juruena Dam construction site trashed 1Juruena Dam construction site trashed 218/11/2008
Peo­ple Pow­er Fucks Up Con­struc­tion

One hun­dred and twen­ty mem­bers of the Enawene Nawe tribe trashed a con­struc­tion site of a hydro elec­tric dam on the Juru­e­na riv­er in west­ern Brazil on 11th of last month. Trucks, offices, hous­ing for work­ers were all destroyed and or torched in a $1 mil­lion sur­vival spree.

“They came armed with axes and pieces of wood, ban­ished the employ­ees and lat­er set fire to every­thing” said Fred­eri­co Muller, a coor­di­na­tor work­ing at the site. At least 12 trucks were destroyed, along with a num­ber of offices and hous­ing units.

Sur­vival because the tribes all over the Ama­zon basin rely on the rivers for fish­ing, one of the eas­i­est, most reli­able ways to get food. There are 77 such dams planned for the area but the destruc­tion is very wide­ly spread: one Brazil­ian super dam project – the Belo Monte – will dis­place 16,000 peo­ple.

Some back­ground to this cri­sis: Brazil’s spi­ralling ener­gy needs are the result of the den­tal­ly inim­itable pro indus­try fuck­wit Lula de Sil­va’s (or should that be the IMF etc’s) poli­cies of growth at any cost. Demand has out­stripped sup­ply in recent years and a long drought in 2001 brought mat­ters to a head. With no water even the best dams can pro­duce no pow­er so rationing was com­menced – down to one fifth of nor­mal sup­ply. The deci­sion was made at this time to increase Brazil’s hydro capac­i­ty by 75% and thus we have the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of mass forced dis­place­ment of indige­nous peo­ples.

But the dams are not even a sure thing either eco­nom­i­cal­ly or prac­ti­cal­ly (except­ing the con­struc­tion com­pa­nies, financiers, bribees etc.). Pre­dic­tions of low water for 3 – 5 months of the year make the projects look ridicu­lous. How­ev­er if you include geno­cide as a wel­come part of your busi­ness mod­el then the fig­ures are any­thing but. As one fucked up white ele­phant dam is com­plet­ed it requires more upstream stor­age capac­i­ty to be built and hence more dis­place­ment. This is the real­i­ty of ‘eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment’ in Brazil.