Rompendo o silêncio público: a formação histórica dos atingidos pelo Açude Castanhão (Ceará, 1985-2002)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the process of organization and formation of the people affected by the Castanhão Dam, in Ceará, between 1985 and 2002, emphasizing their constitution as a collective political subject and the rupture of the public silence that initially rendered them invisible. The research seeks to understand how historically marginalized populations—small farmers, vazanteiros (floodplain cultivators), day laborers, fishers, tenants, and landless peasants—especially women, who played a central role in community organization, developed instruments of struggle and built a common identity as “dam-affected people,” based on the experience of resistance against a state and corporate project that disregarded their rights. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative approach, combining documentary analysis, bibliographic research, and interviews with local leaders. It examined minutes and records of the Jaguaribara Residents’ Association, documents of the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB), issues of the newsletter Castanhão e o Povo, reports and records of the Multiparticipatory Group, and press articles, confronted with oral testimonies and collective memories. The theoretical framework is grounded in E. P. Thompson, James Scott, Ranajit Guha, Frederico de Castro Neves, and Ecléa Bosi, articulating concepts of class, identity, memory, and subaltern resistance. The results demonstrate that resistance was decisive in challenging the hegemonic project. The affected communities broke institutional silence through mobilizations, newsletters, marches, occupations, and negotiations, in which the presence and leadership of women were fundamental to give coherence to the struggles and to secure the right to rural resettlement for hundreds of families, despite strong state pressure to prioritize urban resettlement and relocation to the new city of Jaguaribara. This dispute revealed the central contradiction between two models of displacement: on the one hand, the urban resettlement, planned to concentrate the population in a space defined by the State; on the other, the rural resettlement, the result of organized struggle, which demanded land, agricultural production, and the continuity of community ties. In this confrontation, the affected communities asserted their political agency and challenged the modernizing discourse that justified the dam in the name of “progress.” The study shows that their public emergence was not limited to denouncing rights violations but consolidated insurgent practices and collective knowledge that redefined territory, social memory, and political struggle in the Jaguaribe Valley. It concludes that, by achieving rural resettlement, denouncing the inequalities imposed by urban resettlement, and highlighting women’s protagonism, the affected communities reconfigured their condition of subalternity, inscribing themselves as historical subjects and protagonists of their own history