Abastecimento de água e esgotamento sanitário nas aldeias indígenas Paquiçamba e Guary-Duan, na área de influência da Usina Hidrelétrica Belo Monte, Pará

Abstract

Currently, hydropower sector expansion is being planned to the Amazon, which allied to its hydric availability is inhabited by several indigenous people. Certain practices that are tangent to their territory result in an environment that receives socio-environmental impacts, reflecting the difficulty of reconciling the current concept of development with the people rights. Belo Monte Hydropower Plant (HPP), located on the Xingu River, Pará, exemplifies this scenario since its area of influence has large socioenvironmental liabilities. This can be observed by the precarious health infrastructure of some indigenous villages, including Paquiçamba and Guary-Duan – where live the majority and respectively indians of the Juruna and Arara da Volta Grande do Xingu ethnic groups –, which has not been solved by public management and was therefore considered in the environmental licensing through mitigation and compensatory measures due to the plant construction. Thus, the thesis objective was to analyze the projects of water supply and sanitary sewage resulting from the environmental licensing of Belo Monte HPP with special attention to indigenous issues, licensing process and sanitation public policies applicable. The period between 2007 and 2018 was considered for the analysis adopting a qualitative and exploratory approach, supported by the following theoretical-conceptual framework: i) social participation; ii) ethnodevelopment; and iii) Public Policy Cycle. The methodological procedures consisted of survey of secondary data and collection of primary data through structured interviews and non-participant observation. Data was analyzed considering the framework proposal of Creswell (2014) integrated to the ideas of Bardin (2011) about thematic content analysis, using the ATLAS.ti software as an analytical support. It was verified that in the light of the evidences observed in this study, the involvement of indigenous people was made possible at some moments of the project's elaboration, however they did not participate in the final decision making. This demonstrates how important is to expand the arenas of debate in environmental licensing processes in order that indigenous people have not only participation as consultants but also deliberative participation, being protagonists in the conduction of their own development. On the other hand, despite the social and environmental negative impacts due to Belo Monte HPP construction in the Amazon region, projects related to water supply and sewage system have largely fulfilled their objective during licensing process, leading to sanitary improvements to the indigenous villages.