Territórios de r-existência e mineração: a geopolítica ambiental em áreas protegidas no Amazonas em uma perspectiva anticolonial

Abstract

Mineral exploration in the Amazon is a complex and controversial topic. The incessant search for natural elements, such as gold, diamonds, bauxite, iron, manganese and others has brought major environmental and social problems to protected areas. This problem is worsened by the advance of illegal mining, which, due to difficulties in monitoring the competent public bodies and gaps in legislation, leaves the people and communities living in these territories of existence in a situation of legal insecurity and socio-environmental and territorial vulnerability, and systematically disrupting their socio-political organization and their connection with their territories. This research had the general objective of analyzing, geopolitically, the protected areas as territories that face mineral exploration, demonstrating the geopolitical importance of Amazonas in relation to the Amazon biome, highlighting the territorial conflicts and environmental impacts caused by mining, visualizing the main territories of r-existence such as the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Land and the Médio Juruá Resex/AM, in addition to the colonial geopolitical elements in mineral legislation and geopolitical elements decolonial studies based on the worldview and sociopolitical organization of ancestral peoples and communities. Its methodology was based on the principles of historical-dialectical materialism and Southern Epistemologies. This study showed as a thesis that epistemological and cosmological disagreements about the way in which territories are used are the main causes of the conflicts and pressures suffered by these people. Concluding, therefore, that epistemicides, territorial conflicts and all forms of insecurity and vulnerability suffered by these peoples and ancestral communities in their territories, occur because the principles that govern the laws and public policies on mineral exploration deny the rights to ancestry and the forms of use of the territory of indigenous peoples and traditional communities.