The construction of the Hydroelectric Plant of Belo Monte, on the Xingu river, in Amazônia has to be seen as energy production and security of the country, without doubt. But it is far from being something restricted to evaluation by engineers, economists and administrators of energy policy. It appears an emblematic symbol of where the country is headed. In the end, what country are we constructing?

 

Belo Monte, as well as Santo Antônio and Jirau, on the Madeira river, are hydroelectrics considered as part of the project “Brasil Grande” of the military dictatorship, during the 1970s. But thirty years later, such projects are resumed and, once again, presented as inevitable for development and energy security. Contributing to this is awareness of the enormous risk of climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels. The hydroelectrics signify clean energy.

 

Even with significant technical changes – of great reservoirs, typical to Itaipu, on the Paraná river, for smaller reservoirs with turbo turbines – and substantive improvement in the evaluation of environmental impact, we continue with the same vision on energy and energy security of the era of the dictatorship.

 

Does there not exist another way of seeing and resolving the essential problems of energy? I do not believe in the authoritarianism contained in the technocratic vision that we impose on this type of solution. I see, to the contrary, the difficulty of the development model that turns entire regions of the country, like Amazônia and the Mid West into mere zones of reserves of natural resources. That is a development, in essence, concentrated on riches and destructive of the natural base.

 

The controversy over Belo Monte is not yet ended, despite the environmental license being recently granted by IBAMA. The “whiners” continue to resist: originary indigenous peoples, communities of fishermen, small scale extractivists and agriculturalists, all those who have much to lose and nothing to gain, not even electric energy, in the name of the development of Brazil. What Brazil? For whom? To those who resist in the place activist human rights allies and environmentalists of various currents. And there are also the insistent attorneys attacked by the Attorney General himself for doing their job.

 

It advances  nothing to allege that all the rites [of holding public hearings] were conducted and that 40 demands of IBAMA should be attended to for the work not to be embargoed. The fact is that the decision of using the Xingu river as energy resource attends to the interests of the great contractors and investors, great industrial consumers of electrical energy (aluminum and others). Such decisions have already been made, lacking only shaping of the environmental and other conditions. The rite was not for changing a decision, but for legitimating it.

 

Why more of this aggression on the peoples of the forest and Amazônia? Are we not capable of freeing ourselves from obsolete ideas of development that lead us to practice a species of internal colonialism, which conquers so-called free zones and from expansion, exploits natural resources, destroys and concentrates wealth?

 

The justification of the clean energy matrix does not improve the image of a development opposed to the future of the peoples who make up our Brazilian diversity. Other options, many other options exist. One of these is the more efficient use of the energy we already have. In addition to this, we can and should convert to solar and wind electricity gifted to us by nature. Why insist on the great power plant, on costly investments of production and transmission of energy for distant places, and not small and localized, where the need for electric energy exists and the possibility to satisfy it?

 

The debate on the Hydroelectric of Belo Monte is, above all, a debate on the Brazil that we want – sustainable, in solidarity and democratic – , in which power and economy relocate, nearer to the citizen and are controlled by him/her.

 

Candido Grzybowski

Sociologist, director of IBASE

(Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis)