Projeto salitre: o "desenvolvimento que se desenvolveu demais" - história, memórias e narrativas de agricultores em um contexto de descaso planejado

Abstract

In the early 1960s, the Salitre River Valley, located between the municipalities of Campo Formoso and Juazeiro, in the Salitre River basin (a tributary of the São Francisco River), in the northern portion of the state of Bahia, became integrated into the route of ideology and development policies of the Brazilian state. In collaboration with the UN/FAO and the World Bank, various agricultural feasibility studies were conducted in the region for the implementation of the Salitre Public Irrigation Project, officially inaugurated in 2010. Over more than 60 years, the inhabitants of the communities along the Salitre River, in the vicinity of the Irrigated Perimeter, maintained hope in the rewards promised by CODEVAS (the state agency managing the Project) to compensate for the socio-environmental and territorial losses caused by the various stages of Project implementation. However, these residents now face the effects of what they call the "cursed legacy" of the Salitre Project. Self-identifying as "salitreiros" as a way to reaffirm their identity with the river and as a form of resistance and confrontation against the State's action in the region, they demand: the total perennialization of the river; responsible water use, in accordance with Law 9.433/97, which prioritizes human consumption in situations of scarcity; and the distribution of promised benefits, such as the allocation of agricultural plots, currently concentrated in the hands of large agribusiness producers who exploit the land and water resources of the region. By conducting an ethnography of the narratives and stories of local populations, this study aims to make visible the silent violence embedded in the discourse and developmental practices of the Salitre Project, transforming the "redemption dream" of the salitreiros into a reality of exclusion, suffering, and indignation. This study, therefore, is characterized as an ethnography of the life of the salitreiro people, profoundly altered in the name of a development historically aligned with a Western social ideology of domination. From this perspective, and theoretically grounded in the concepts of planned neglect and administered violence elaborated by Parry Scott (2009), the thesis hypothesizes that the Salitre Project had a direct impact on the environment and the ways of life of local populations, resulting in a series of events marked by experiences of exclusion, territorial losses, waiting, suffering, insecurities, and marginalization of their needs and interests.