“Só existia seringueiro, não tinha fazendeiro”: Atos de Estado e a devastação da Resex Jaci-Paraná (Rondônia)

Abstract

IDARON data calculated the presence of 216,047 heads of cattle within the Jaci- Paraná Extractive Reserve in September 2023. The expulsion of the extractivists was violent and there was no containment of the invasions by the institutions that were supposed to act on behalf of the state. By not preventing the invasions, the state demonstrated that it actively collaborated in ensuring that the Resex was devastated, as well as in the uprooting process that the extractivists went through. The participation of acts of the “State” in the process of devastation of the Jaci-Paraná Extractive Reserve was not immediately clear to me at first. However, with reflections during fieldwork, based on a relationship established with certain interlocutors, as well as monitoring discussions and documentary analyses, the State migrated from the periphery to a place of relevance in the description and interpretation of the devastation and violence committed against the extractivist population. Development projects are implemented in the Amazon with the justification of integration and improvements for local society and for the benefit of the Brazilian people. As I observed in my research, the effective invasion of public lands, land grabbing, theft and illegal transport of wood, as well as other crimes such as threats to traditional populations and murders, are covered up by the state's development discourse, which criminalizes traditional peoples and praises the “greatness” of those who produce “wealth” for Rondônia, affirming the state’s vocation for agribusiness, to the detriment of people who traditionally occupy the territory. Given the various elements that are present in this field of environmental conflict in Resex Jaci-Paraná, I found a viable interpretative key to be the analysis of a specific event that occurred in Porto Velho, during the pandemic and at a time of health restrictions. It was the public hearing, called without wide publicity, which took place in the auditorium of the Legislative Assembly of Rondônia and which proposed discussing a State Complementary Law Project that reduced the Resex Jaci-Paraná and created a series of other Conservation Units. I would like to say that the PL was approved as law and was later considered unconstitutional by the Federal Supreme Court. Different interest groups took turns speaking at the hearing, to demonstrate the irregularities of PL 80/2020, but some meanings about the territory are preferable and have more political and symbolic capital than others. The predominant discourse at the public hearing allowed us to perceive that maintaining order and a sense of justice, in the imagination constructed by the state of Rondônia, controlled by large rural producers, implies appropriation of land, even if illegally, and releasing it for a production model aimed at the international market. The extractivists who left the reserve, according to the reports I had access to, directly or indirectly, dispersed to different municipalities, in some cases they spent more than one stay, in a migration. This dispersion, caused by a process of forced destructuring of the social world, directly linked to the clashes of environmental conflict, resulted in the uprooting of extractivists.