Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA) in 2000, coordinated by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a new phase of geo-physical integration of South America began. In 2010, the member countries of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) took control of the all IIRSA projects and designated its South American Council for Infrastructure and Planning (COSIPLAN) to manage them. The most recent update of its Agenda of Priority Projects for Integration contained 544 projects having an estimated cost of 130 billion dollars. The rapid expansion of the Brazilian economy has generated a growing internal demand for electricity, which in turn has stimulated the Brazilian government to embark on an ambitious program of building hydroelectric dams throughout Amazonia. The Andean countries have also adopted a strategy to increase the generation of hydroelectricity and these policies have gained the interest of foreign investors, particularly from Brazil and China. A total of 17 large-scale hydroelectric dams with a generating capacity of over 1500 MW are currently projected for Amazonia, along with hundreds of mid-size dams. Underlying this wave of dam building lays the strategy of controlling the flow of water in a river from its source to its mouth through the construction of numerous dams along its course. Large-scale extractive projects are increasingly becoming a crucial part of the export and trade policies of Amazonian countries and one of the principal sources of government revenue. The expansion of the hydrocarbon industry in Amazonia is concentrated in the Andean countries, where 263 of the 327 petroleum concessions are located. Only 25% of this total is currently in the production phase, thereby
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Red Jurídica Amazónica RAMA
indicating the enormous potential for future expansion of this sector. The expansion of the mining sector has been even faster than that of the hydrocarbon sector and is dominated by a small number of large multinational corporations. The mining sector extracts a multiplicity of mineral resources – gold, silver, iron ore, copper, bauxite, tin, titanium, vanadium and kaolin, among others – and is much more disperse than the hydrocarbon sector, which has generated a greater number of micro-regional centers of impact. There are a total of 52,974 mining concessions in Amazonia which cover 1,628,850 km2 or 21% of the Amazon Basin. Brazil houses approximately 80% of these concessions, with Peru occupying second place at 11%. This study identifies four primary socioenvironmental impacts that mega-development projects are generating at a pan-Amazonian scale: 1) The forced industrialization of the jungle; 2) The territorial reorganization of Amazonia; 3) The loss of biodiversity and forest degradation; and 4) The potential collapse of the hydrological function of the basin. In addition to these pan-Amazonian impacts, one must add a series of others that are most readily expressed at the micro-regional scale: 5) Destruction of the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and traditional communities; 6) The damming of rivers and the structural changes in hydrological regimes that it provokes; and 7) Rapid and disarticulated urban growth which produces economic and social marginalization. The weight of these socioenvironmental impacts is distributed in an extremely unequal manner. The majority of the benefits derived from the construction of mega-