Infrastructural works within the context of the South-American Integration

The Brazilian energetic matrix is mainly supported by the petrol byproducts (38.4%),
followed by hydroelectricity (15%), sugar cane (13.9%) and wood and other biomass (13.1%). The natural gas accounts for 9.3% and the mineral coal 6.4%. Moreover, about 45% of the Brazilian energetic matrix comes from renewable sources. The water source to generate electric power is considered the main competitive advantage of Brazil, with great potential for expansion. Hydro energy now accounts for 85.4% of the electric power produced in Brazil, and estimated potential to generate 260 GW. Of that estimated potential, according to official data from the Ministry of Mines and Energy, only 28% are used nowadays.

Our contribution to the debate posed by this publication is to call the attention to
the importance of adopting and developing a multi-scale view when analyzing the
big infrastructure works. That because the “development projects” like those
considered herein can only be duly understood if one considers the determinations
and interactions among different levels of the political and economic power –
international, national, regional and local. Regardless the ideology that guides
them in the planning process, what can be observed is that they have been
production means bound to an economic system that is characterized by the
expanded production and reproduction of capital. A system guided by the
(hegemonic) paradigm of integral of all peoples and cultures in a worldwide capitalist
system.

In an analysis of the changes occurred in the Brazilian electric power sector in the
last 25 years, Carlos Vainer (2007) observes that despite the efforts made by the
civil society and environmentalists to make the sector incorporate the social and
environmental affairs to its agenda, the rivers, populations and whole regions are
delivered to some few big corporations – national and international ones – of the
mineral, metallurgy and energy sector, to favor a development whose costs and
benefits have not been dully measured, neither their distribution.
We seem to be experience the reproduction of (remolded) ideas and practices of
the old development model, where the big infrastructure works are the main
fosterers of promotion and induction to the political and economic frontier of the
capitalism (private and state), to regions that used to be somehow isolated
(“marginal”). Moreover, we seem to be in times of redefining how to occupy and
exploit territories that were, in the past, object of projects on the productive
processes’ development or modernization.