“A beira do rio é o nosso lugar”: os efeitos da usina hidrelétrica de estreito (MA) e a vida ribeirinha no acampamento Coragem em Palmeiras do Tocantins (TO)

Abstract

The energy production generated by the hydroelectric plants constitutes the Brazilian energetic model to promote the national economy. The construction of those achievements has occasioned irreversible effects on the social environment, peoples and traditional communities, causing some changes in the social, cultural, and economic ambiance of innumerable populations that suffer the deterritorialization effects. Those achievements are the fundamental axes of the State promotion and the entrepreneurs that divulge the developmental and progressive discourse that points out that the implantation of dams emerges for the development of the country. Estreito Hydroelectric Plant (UHEE) is a distinction between those projects that emerge with the impulse of the national economy. It was built in 2007 and since that, it is causing irreversible effects to the affected populations such as the riverine community of Acampamento Coragem that with the emergence of the plant, was deterritorialized. Fishermen/fisherwomen form a group that, nowadays, occupy territory in Palmeiras do Tocantins (TO) as a form of claiming its denied rights by Consórcio Estreito Energia (CESTE). The community is compound by thirty-six families, having one hundred camped that are disputing judicially the land that occupies today, struggling against the entrepreneurs of the plant. This research aims to investigate the perceptions of Acampamento Coragem inhabitants in relation to the effects of the UHE of Estreito achievement on its community. The main object of this study was to analyze the effects and conflicts according to UHE de Estreito in the riverine community of Acampamento Coragem. For achieving those objectives was employed the qualitative inquiry as methodology using oral life history, permeating the phenomenology perception as focus of the discussion study. In addition, there was the application of some interviews to 12 families between July and September 2019. They had 40 questions about identification and history of inhabitants, memory of the place, UHEE impact, perspectives and expropriation process and socio-spatial impact of the affected people of Acampamento Coragem. The data instruments were the participant observation in the community and social mapping of the occupied territory, which contributed to the elaboration of interdisciplinary research. Before that, the practices made by the inhabitants of the community evidence that, since the installation of the plant, the population has been against that project and struggled for the rights that the entrepreneurs violated. We point out the riverine culture as a resistance mode either because the rights, occupation, planting, producing and collecting that are cultural ways of continuing their professional practices. We emphasize the community suffering from the effects in fish production that drastically decayed because of the plant building, which evidences the ways that the dam still generates effects on the affected population after its building.