ALTAMIRA, Brazil—Paulo de Oliveira drives a taxi in the northern Brazilian city of Altamira, but only when he is out of work in what he considers his true profession: Operator of heavy vehicles like trucks, mixers or tractor loaders.
For the past few months he has been driving a friend’s taxi at night, while waiting for a job on the construction site of the Belo Monte dam—a giant hydroelectric plant on the Xingú river in the Amazon rain forest which has given rise to sharply divided opinions in Brazil.
Oliveira, whose small stature contrasts with the enormous vehicles he drives, has lived in many different parts of the Amazon jungle. “I started in the Air Force, a civilian among military personnel, building airports, barracks and roads in Itaituba, Jacareacanga, Oriximiná, Humaitá and other municipalities,” he told Inter Press Service (IPS).
His sister’s death in a traffic accident brought him back to Altamira, where he became a garimpeiro or informal miner. “I was buried once in a tunnel 10 meters below ground,” he said. He survived this and other risks, and earned a lot of money mining gold and ferrying miners—who paid him a fortune—in a taxi back and forth from the city to the illegal mine.
“But I spent it all on women,” he confessed. After bouncing between jobs on different construction sites, at the age of 50, Oliveira found himself back in Altamira, a city of 140,000 people 55 kilometer from Belo Monte, where he already worked in 2013 and is trying to get a job again. But things are difficult, because the amount of work there is in decline, as construction of the cement structures is winding up. And it is possible that workers like him, specialized in heavy construction, no longer have a future in building large hydroelectric dams.
The controversy triggered by Belo Monte will make it hard for the country to carry out similar projects after this.
The final assessment of the Belo Monte experience will determine the fate of the government’s plans to harness the energy of the Amazon rivers, the only ones that still have a strong enough flow to offer large-scale hydropower potential, which has been exhausted on rivers elsewhere in Brazil. A study by the non-governmental Socioenvironmental Institute states that, if the government’s construction plans for the 2005-2030 period are implemented, the hydropower dams in the Amazon will account for 67.5 percent of the new power generation in this country of 203 million people. The next project of this magnitude, the São Luiz dam on the Tapajós river to the west of the Xingú river, is facing an apparently insurmountable obstacle: It would flood indigenous territory, which is protected by the constitution.
Belo Monte, whose original plan was modified to avoid flooding indigenous land, has drawn fierce criticism for affecting the way of life of native and riverbank communities. The public prosecutor’s office accuses the company that is building the dam, Norte Energía, of ethnocide and of failing to live up to requirements regarding indigenous communities, who, in protest, occupied and damaged some of the dam’s installations on several occasions. São Luiz, designed to generate 8,040 megawatts, and other hydropower dams planned on the Tapajós River, are facing potentially more effective resistance, led by a large indigenous community that lives in the river basin—the Munduruku, who number around 12,000.
Just over 6,000 indigenous people belonging to nine different ethnic groups live in the Belo Monte area of influence, with nearly half of them living in towns and cities, Francisco Brasil de Moraes, in charge of the middle stretch of the Xingú river in Brazil’s national indigenous affairs agency, Funai, told IPS.
Another battle, for local development, has had less international repercussions than the indigenous question. But it could also be decisive when it comes to overcoming resistance to future hydroelectric dams in the Amazon. Norte Energía, a consortium of 10 public and private companies and investment funds, has channeled some $1.1 billion into activities aimed at mitigating and compensating for social and environmental impacts in 11 municipalities surrounding the megaproject.
This sum, unprecedented in a project of this kind, is equivalent to 12 percent of the total investment.
The company resettled 4,100 families displaced from their homes by the construction project and reservoir, and indemnified thousands more. It rebuilt part of Altamira and the town of Vitoria de Xingú, including basic sanitation works, and built or remodeled six hospitals, 30 health centers and 270 classrooms.
IPS
Image credits: Mario Osava/IPS