Development, mining and affected communities: the visible face of the socio environmental conflicts

Abstract

The transnational capital mining earns high status in the development plan of Brazilian state and the affected communities experience the hard cost of this progress. This article seeks to describe other expressive practices of injustice and the permanence of violations of human and environmental rights in the case of the Minas-Rio Project, in Conceição do Mato Dentro (CMD), Minas Gerais. The study of this case, resulting from the monitoring of the licensing and implementation processes of the large mine, reveals that the discourse of economic development, anchored and fomented by the public-private partnership, produces a practical condition that provokes the inability of the bureaucratic representations of the State Comply with the legal determinations that fall on the company in the process of environmental licensing. Among the consequences of the modus operandi established during the licensing process, identified through methodological techniques of action research and documentary analysis, are: breaking of social ties, violation of human and environmental rights, escalation of land conflicts, Economic displacement, the impossibility of livelihood through family and subsistence farming and the resettlement of families.