A redefinição espoliativa dos “caminhos das águas” e os conflitos hidroterritoriais no cariri cearense

Abstract

This thesis elected hydroterritorial conflicts as a key to understand the capitalist production process and its contradictions in the Brazilian agrarian space. It highlights the importance of the rivers in the Northeast since the region’s territorial formation process and demonstrates that the State was constituted as a fundamental agent in the transformations brought about in the field. In this theoretical-methodological path, the main legal changes promoted by the State are problematized in an attempt to answer not only how the main state actors behave, but also seeking to demonstrate their “alliance” with capital that materializes in different processes and scales. It is evident that this relationship is complex and multifaceted, but necessary to understand its impact on fractions of peasant territories. Hence the need to expand the analytical tools understanding the State as a broad entity that reflects the asymmetries of power and the interests of the capitalist order. Abstracting the discussion of the State in a reflective practical exercise, an interpretation of the historical-territorial metabolism is carried out here as an analytical tool that brings together and puts into permanent dialogue the social subjects of the countryside and the territories investigated. This dialogue takes place in movements of (dis)continuities, ruptures and irruptions that were delimited in four processes that update themselves, become more sophisticated and continue as a fusion of different times and spaces: invasion of territories; appropriation and expropriation of common goods; deterritorialization of the people of the countryside, forests and waters; commodification and privatization of water. In this manner, this research aims to analyze the hydroterritorial conflicts from the redefinition of waterways in the Cariri region of Ceará. Hydroterritorial conflicts are understood as the process of struggle for access and control of waters and lands, present since the colonial period, and which continues with a modern and extensive artificial network that redefines the paths and imprisons the waters. In order to analyze this process full of contradictions, the chosen method is historical-dialectical materialism, as it allows us to apprehend and understand the studied reality that is in permanent transformation. The concerns of these processes revealed the conversion of conflicts into political struggles that have their genesis in the resistance of the original folks and were passed on, converging to the struggle of the rural peasants who, in tune with their environment, were situated in their social place where the rivers and water are sources of existence and resistance. Therefore, it is in this context historically marked by violence that peasants feel the need to rise up, pointing out other paths and other possibilities for life and a relationship with nature.