Corporate territorialization and geographies of exception: Mining and the bio/necropolitical governance of territory in the Amazon

Abstract

This article problematizes the large mining projects in the Amazon, treating them as processes of corporate territorialization, which, in order to realize their corporate rationality, need to suspend/violate other dynamics of life realization, and other territorialities. Based on bibliographic and documental research and analysis, as well as cartographic production, this article aims to analyze the corporate strategies for appropriating the spaces necessary for the implementation of large mining projects in the Brazilian Amazon, demonstrating how large corporations manage the populations surrounding their enterprises. By analyzing the paradigmatic expression of this process in Brazil: the dynamics of iron exploitation in Carajás by the company Vale S.A., we think of the large mining projects not only as mechanisms for draining matter and energy, defined by unequal geopolitics of natural resources but also as producers of ruins that make possible the use of violence as a process of accumulation by dispossession, making the sacrifice of peoples, the destruction of nature and death as naturalized paths of what is established colonially as progress.

Keywords: Corporate territorialization; Geographies of exception; Large projects; Mining; The Amazon.