Displacements and violations from Itaipu: hunger, cold, illness and targets achieved

Abstract

Itaipu Hydroelectric Dam’s construction was part of a conservative modernization took by brazilian business-military dictatorship. The official version, only underlined the construction of a “big Brazil”, even seeking to convince the involved ones they were part of a project “for everybody”. Our goal is to show the social impacts on affected regions, that have displacement thousands of people to the dam construction, and on the other hand, have expelled other thousands from their lands and houses. It was, therefore, a double historical movement, although it is not used to be problematize this form. Workers from all the country and others parts of the world moved to Foz do Iguaçu city and Puerto Stroessner city (Ciudad del Este) inflating them, and rural’s workers and indigenous people was displaced for several others locals in the country, in process that generated big conflicts and disputes of interests. From an internal point of view, inside of the construction site an apart world was built. Displaced’s people from divers point of the country, and beyond borders, were submitted to a naturally violent space, as a matter of transforming the nature, diverting a powerful river, constructing to barrage at 250 meters height, part of that subterranean, in the continuous process, hitting the goals, being stimulated to be “exemplar” and watched as if they were living in a prison, in a kind of “total institution”, quoting the historian Valdir Sessi (2015). Even stands out that, as part of a business-military’s project, the expansion for distant territories proposed a new colonization moment, extending their branches until brazilian’s Amazon. The focus of this analysis is the historical process involving that double moment.