Estado, território e mineração no Brasil: o caso do Projeto S11D/Vale em Canaã dos Carajás-Pa

Abstract

In 2012, the mining company Vale obtained the prior license by the State to start the installation of the largest iron project in its history, the S11D Project. In that period, there was already a financial crisis that opened in 2008, which had a negative impact on the international iron market, after the great boom of the first decade of the 21st century. Faced with this scenario, Vale responded with the need to increase the scale of production, to compensate for the drop in the price of ore, and to remain a competitive group within the oligopolized industrial mining market. The S11D project was a fundamental part of Vale's strategy, due to the volume and quality of the ore to be explored, enabling the extraction of greater mineral income and consequently more profit. For the operationalization of the project, the State's action had a central role. First as a legal agent for the country's mineral assets, it is who authorizes and supervises this exploitation. Second, it can affect the company's profit rate, by reducing the operational cost of the work, via public financing and infrastructural guarantees in the vicinity of the project. Third, as a mediator of social conflicts. During this period, although under a national government led by the Workers' Party, the commodities sector in general, and Vale in particular, acted strongly within the state power bloc, which resulted in a development model based on the income arising of these sectors, which was conventionally called, in the critical literature, neoextractivism. There was, therefore, a general sense of state policy due to the S11D project. On the other hand, local conflicts were identified around the agrarian and environmental issue, treated as territorial conflicts, which needed State mediation, this time within the framework of a complex bureaucratic apparatus and several institutional instances. In this sense, the main objective of the thesis was to unveil the concrete actions of the State in the face of the demands for territorialization of the Vale S11D Project, in order to understand how the conflicts arising from this demand entered the State and how they were treated by it. The thesis defends the centrality of the State for the institutionalization of the mining territory in Canãa dos Carajás.