Dismantling of indigenous territories and conservation units in the new arc of deforestation in Rondônia/Brazil and Beni/Bolívia (2018-2020)

Abstract

The Amazon, as it becomes the scene for sacrifices that serve to solidify economic-political agreements, is the object of an asymmetric war due to new appropriations and capitalization. Our purpose was to demonstrate how the different fronts of dispossession in the Amazon Region advance and intertwine so that the practices of stigmatization and extermination that drive them are made explicit. Our objective was to map the new arc of deforestation in the Amazon, identifying a set of threats to the Conservation Corridor of the State of Rondônia and the border region with Bolivia, more specifically the region comprising the Guajará-Mirim State Park, the Jaci Paraná Extractive Reserve, and the Indigenous Lands Karipuna, Igarapé Ribeirão, Igarapé Lage. These are Conservation Units and Indigenous Territories severely affected by timber, mineral, and agricultural activities on both sides of the border. The Amazon Region has served to deepen the neo-extractive productive profile of Brazil and the Latin American continent, a profile that increasingly depends on the flexibility of territorial rights and the precariousness of the workforce. This regime of territorial simplification and political reduction comprises a) regulatory frameworks at the request of investors; b) discursive formations for the opening of borders against any environmental limit or social agreement; c) militarization (and paramilitarization) of territories in the process of appropriation. We elaborated social cartographies that provided a spatial understanding of the business strategies that converge for this region. In response to these strategies, we observed resistance processes in a context of “duplicate risk” to which indigenous and original peoples are subjected, considering the perversely different effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on them.