Infrastructure projects, disasters and notes for new disasters in Barcarena, Pará, Brazil

Abstract

The global context today is shaped by a strong connection and integration of regions, countries and institutions to the game of inclusion of spaces to a process of “modernization and spatial selectivity” (productive and speculative specialization) in order to contribute to the hyperfluidity of goods , money, capital, workforce and people, information and speculation. In this global, geopolitical and financialization configuration of the world economy is inserted the municipality of Barcarena (northeast of the state of Pará), the state of Pará and the Amazon. Considering that discussion the article aims to present in a synthetic and analytical way: 1) Barcarena's role in the global network of goods production; 2) the new infrastructure projects (and the old ones) and the planned ones (and the structuring agents); and 3) how new infrastructures are indicatives for the production of new disasters. The timeframe of the research was from 2015 to 2019, with observations, interviews, dialogues with social leaders and analysis of official documents about materialized and planned projects. Barcarena is a nodal point and flow cell and a real configuration of a new agricultural commodity export corridor (soybean and corn), whose main disasters are: 1) expropriations / expulsions; 2) degradation and environmental pollution; 3) violation of human and ethnic rights of traditional peoples. The new infrastructures (mainly ports) are indicatives, by synergy of enterprises, to new disasters and environmental crimes.

Keywords: Barcarena. Logístic. Amazon. Disasters. Accumulation by dispossession.