In this text, Leonel Olimpio analyzes the Brazilian policies and state programs that determine many aspects of human and non-human lives in the vast semi-arid region in the northeastern part of the country. He insists more particularly on the way this region is politically formed through a colonial framework that considers its ecosystem as something to fight against.
In 1995, the city of Jaguaribara in Brazil’s state of Ceará received news that would change the whole city and its thousands of inhabitants. The state, along with the National Department of Constructions against Droughts (DNOCS), decided to build a dam that would flood the whole city. The project of this dam gained traction in 1985, right after the people of Jaguaribara started to organize against the project. After several debates and recommendations from environmentalists to not build the dam, its construction was decreed. The name of the dam is Castanhão and is the biggest in Brazil with its water storage.
This is just one case of several that happened within this territory, today called the Brazilian Semi-arid (Semiárido Brasileiro). This is the region in Brazil that consists today of 1,477 cities, which is more than 14% of Brazil’s territory and is bigger than France and Germany combined. Its population is estimated at more than 31 million people, who are subjected to a range of state interventions. This area was radically transformed by a program created to act on ongoing droughts, an event characterized as part of the region’s intrinsic nature. Inspired by institutions from other countries, such as the United States Bureau of Reclamation created in 1902, this program was appointed as Obras contra as Secas (Constructions against Droughts) in 1909 by the creation of the Inspectorate of Constructions Against Droughts agency, implementing several infrastructures such as dams, roads, and irrigation systems. The occurrence of droughts causes multiple impacts on the territory. Beyond water scarcity itself, it unfolds into a range of phenomena, from the migration of people (and the state’s attempts to prevent their displacement) to numerous deaths, largely caused by hunger and disease resulting from the drought. Seen as the decisive program that would change the landscape and the scarcity of water in the Brazilian Semi-arid, this program still exists today.
This area is considered a “dryland” by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, that classifies and flattens the differences between arid and semi-arid territories. The UNCCD does not include desert spaces within this classification. The main criteria is the so-called aridity index, a calculation dividing the average annual rainfall (mm) by the annual potential evapotranspiration (mm). Usually, countries classify these spaces with specific criteria following their own understanding of the policies needed for the zone. In Brazil, the agency that creates the demarcations, Sudene (Superintendência de Desenvolvimento do Nordeste), uses four main criteria: 1) Average annual rainfall below 800 mm; 2) High aridity index, calculated by the water balance which relates rainfall and potential evapotranspiration; 3) Risk of drought greater than 60% 4) Territorial continuity (a city has to have its limits with other city considered from the area). But as with every demarcation of frontiers by nation states, what conflicts can we see from this event?
It is common that these spaces have a critical tension when mainly state agencies try to classify them. They confront their material lines with their climate frontiers, and in doing so, their territorial borders become not only a political point of demarcation but also a conflict between its climate and their configurations.
Does the climate or the state create borders? How are the people from these spaces affected by these policies?
The way that lines are drawn in the Brazilian Semi-arid represents how spatial conflicts are related directly to the state’s reading on what is a climate border or not. These stances were affected not only by meteorological ideas but also by political conflicts relating to land and resource ownership between agrarian elites and governments. This is a topic that is thoroughly written and spoken on by researchers and civil movements for decades: the necessity to have agrarian reform. We can note certain nuances with the researcher Diego Gadelha’s term “water latifundium,” a notion that gives consistency to how water is controlled in the region while also touching upon the relation between the land and water. For a long time, state agencies provided tax incentives and financial support from the state to encourage landowners to build dams in public-private partnerships. It is precisely through these state and capitalist relations of dominance that the territory’s population is controlled, managed, and deeply transformed.
It is quite common to see counterarguments on the project “Constructions against Droughts” in studies about the territory, which are typically framed as “Coexistence with the Semi-arid” or “Adaptation with the Semi-arid.” Mostly intensified in the 1990s, local people initiated movements to counter-create ways of speaking about the territory. Perhaps a document that effectively demonstrates this perspective is the so-called Declaration of the Semi-arid, published in 1999 by civil movements and the founding of the Articulação do Semiárido brasileiro (ASA, Articulation of the Brazilian Semi-arid). The document is a rich text that mixes a manifesto with a social-political program, which argues how the region cannot be tied to “reductive representations”; that “water is a necessary element, but far away from being the only and determinant factor on the Semi-arid”; that it is necessary to break “the monopoly on access to land, water and other means of production”; that people should see the region as a complex territory. The Declaration calls attention to the importance of how we name things. Naming and designing things is already a dangerous practice. Those who have the power to name the spaces severely impact on the lives of those who already live there despite what name the state thinks is the right one to describe it.
One of the most important things that these movements outline is that no matter how the state tries to monopolize their control over climate and territory, people are still capable of questioning these borders and actively confront the way in which the state defines territory. They are able to create projects that do not see the region as a problem, but as a complex space with questions around sustainable coexistence as any other. While the frontiers and borders drawn by states are lines that materialize as jurisdictions, they do not prevent people from organizing themselves. Movements such as the Associação de Moradores de Jaguaribara (Jaguaribara Residents Association) and the ASA are collectives that represent the struggle against these projects.
It is possible to see, in these instances, what has occurred in Jaguaribara. The physical presence of the Castanhão Dam is so immense that the reservoir touches four municipal boundaries: Alto Santo, Jaguaretama, Jaguaribe and Jaguaribara (Nova Jaguaribara). The new structure of Jaguaribara was then built 60 kilometers from the original city, and its urban planning was structured for a city of 70,000 people, despite there being under 10,000 inhabitants at the time of transition.
According to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) in 2022, Jaguaribara’s population is estimated at 10,356. At the time the town was demolished, a key government plan and argument was that the town would benefit in terms of expansion and investment, and so there was a significant population growth projection. This is not what we have seen over the last twenty-four years. While the designed city followed the colonial process of establishing settlements inland, establishing similar houses as historical colonies and also making the whole inhabitants move from their original land, the urban design with modern infrastructures was a way of convincing people that their new area of living would be more “suitable” to a new era of investments. But what we often hear from the residents themselves is that the most prominent features of the city are “silence” and “emptiness.”.
Despite claims that building the Castanhão dam in Jaguaribara would improve the life of its inhabitants, the waters in the dam are used mainly as water supply for Fortaleza, the capital of the Ceará state, which is not officially in the Semi-arid territory. This context outlines something already historically recognized in the history of urbanism and in the state’s own approach to the city–countryside divide: the countryside as a space of sacrifice so that the city may “prosper.” The borders of the Semi-arid region thus become blurred, leading cities even outside its official boundaries to be directly affected by its constructions. The waters of the Semi-arid flow beyond its lines—but who created them? One of the most important points of criticism against the Program of Constructions against Droughts, as some researchers claim, is that it mainly serves to increase the concentration of land and water in the hands of capitalists, strengthening their political and economic interests. As “the benefits of these projects went to privileged groups with political and economic power in the region, who already had control of the land on which the dams were built and from then on also had the power to control the scarce social and natural element that was water.”
Nowadays, when the Castanhão Dam reservoir dries up, the demolished city reappears as ruins, from being submerged beneath the dam’s water. The houses, which were supposed to be homes for their inhabitants, now emerge as mere fragments beneath the water. The reappearance of the old city of Jaguaribara is striking, making it possible to argue that the Brazilian semi-arid region is, intrinsically, a space of conflict that displays state enforcement of how it thinks people within this territory should live.
And if these mechanisms that act through political forces operate as a colonial framework of visualizing the Brazilian Semi-arid region, it is important to remember that, as Frantz Fanon argues, “the colonized’s contestation of the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of opposing viewpoints” (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961). Movements organizing against this program are important, not only because they challenge state and capitalist domination over people and land, but also because they contest the political imaginary over human relationships to the environment, the capacity of imagining the transformation of the territories not to reduce representations.
The importance of knowing how to name things passes not only through acknowledging that the names of things matter but also that the power to nominate spaces is not something innocent for the state. Politicians know all too well that naming policies is not a mere detail, but a sign of its own power. Who controls the names and the borders of the Semi-arid?
The way these projects have unfolded throughout history, materialized through borders and their infrastructures, also demonstrates forces of control and management mobilized by the state not only to act upon the territory, but also to control how people could move within it.
The paths toward a different transformation of the semi-arid region are not guided by the magnitude of Obras contra as Secas perspective, but rather through another way of coexisting with and envisioning the environment. We need to transform the very ways in which we conceptualize and imagine borders within semi-arid regions. It is very important to comprehend the mechanisms and effects of these large programs when implemented, but our efforts cannot stop at simply describing it. If the policies in the territory are always conceived as if we need to be living “against” the Semi-arid, could we say that was always the state against the Brazilian Semi-arid? ■