Mining and territorialization of exception in the Amazon

Big-Projects geography in ruins

Abstract

The development trails by way of the big mining projects in the Amazon, beyond the discourse that put them in a success path, have transformed human lives into object, have put worlds of life in danger and risk, turning both peoples and traditional communities into political and epistemic constraints. These mega projects, constituted by the modernity signs, created and still createindifference zonesanderased spaces of the functional cartography to the development. This paper’s task is to turn the memory space of the big mining projects in the Amazon  into a territory in dispute so that one can notice the ruins where only big buildings are seen; to think that the territorialization processes of these projects carry clear racial and ethnic clippings which turn territories other than theirs to life expressions politically prone to be killed and territorially invisible and dispensable.