POLÍTICA DE AÇUDAGEM: UM ESTUDO À LUZ DO DIREITO À ÁGUA NA BACIA HIDROGRÁFICA PIRANHAS-AÇU

Abstract

Water is an essential environmental good for the maintenance of life and it is distributed irregularly along the earth's surface. In the semi-arid Northeastern region, there is a great shortage of this natural good, affecting the lives of thousands of people, be it in a social, economic or environmental way, corroborating with conflicts that are directly related to the dignity of the human person. The objective of the present work is to study the public policy of construction of dams in the light of the right to water, a policy that has been developed by the Brazilian State since the colonial period, mainly aimed at the construction of water reservoirs for water storage, aiming to propitiate water security to the Brazilian Northeast. As for the study area, this public policy was evaluated in the Piranhas-Açu Hydrographic Basin, located in the states of Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte, which elevates it to the category of a federal basin, which since 2011 has been affected for a long period of drought, especially influencing the life of the residents in it. For this purpose, the inductive method was used with methodological aids from a documentary, bibliographical and field research, from 2011 to 2018. Thus, aware of the great concentration of weirs and dams in the basin, it was analyzed whether the right to water is guaranteed to the population, a right that although not explicit in the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988, gains shelter through its interpretation, backed by constitutional principles. Also, we studied the policy of construction of dams investigating how it behaved in the course of time and how it influenced the concentration of power in the hands of large landowners who previously owned land and now own land and water, elements that a large part of the semiarid population do not. As a result of the large area of the basin, two conflicts were selected for study, that of the Mãe D'Água Community, in the municipality of Coremas-PB, and another from the construction of the Oiticica dam, in the municipality of Jucurutu-RN, Barra district of Santana. At the end of the study, it was concluded that the right to water is not democratically consolidated in the basin, especially with regard to its access, despite the large number of reservoirs in it, as well as the to pass the time, leaving the figure of the colonels to the great landowners of today, maintaining the power of the oligarchies that concentrate social and economic prestige, being, therefore, foment of social conflicts by the water.