Antagonismos entre territorialidades na Estrada de Ferro Carajás: águas, palmeiras-mães e os caminhos de resistência de uma comunidade à cobra de ferro na Baixada Maranhense

Abstract

In this dissertation I reflect on the outcomes of development megaprojects from the perspective and narratives of peasants, peoples, and traditional communities. These groups, which find themselves implicated in conflict situations between the State's initiative and Vale S.A.'s corporate strategies for the Carajás Railroad (Estrada de Ferro Carajás - EFC), are often ignored within those conflicts brought upon them. Understanding these conflicts as expressions of antagonisms between territorialities, I place special emphasis on the effects over the disputes of specific territories (ALMEIDA, 2013) from the points of view and narratives of the Mutum II community, located in Arari at Baixada Maranhense. My fieldwork included ethnographic research, analysis of public documents, reports, public hearings, meetings, wanderings, listening to cartographic narratives, and to the community’s collective memory. The circumstances of the research, especially the clash deriving from the anticipation of the renewal of Vale SA's lease of the Carajás railroad for another 30 years, revealed what Bourdieu (1989) calls a “classification struggle”, which stigmatize non-white bodies and territories and threaten to “erase them from the map”. From the social situation in Mutum II, I conclude that the strategies of the main powers led to a securitization of social, territorial and ecological conflict, through different modes of criminalization, surveillance, and social control, while greenwashing a business discourse, all of which forced a reconfiguration of the political territories and bodies, the community’s own ways of living, self-organizing and ecological thinking. As opposed to the systematic violence and threats of extermination, waters, mother earth and motherly palm trees reveal paths of struggle and resistance to the iron snake.