O vale das miragens: grandes projetos hídricos e a "redenção" do Baixo Açu (1910-1983)

Abstract

The present work focuses on the Açu Valley (Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil), taking this spatial clipping under a particular theme: large public water management projects. Throughout the twentieth century, the Valley was considered by many social agents (among them, technicians and politicians) as a fertile area of enormous agricultural potential, but with low productive capacity. This low productivity was due, according to technicians and engineers, to the susceptibility of this geography to the ambivalences of the local climate (droughts and floods); and the lack of modern work relations and agricultural techniques (such as systematic irrigation, for example). Thus, through the Inspetoria Federal de Obras Contra as Secas (IFOCS, “Inspection Office of Public Contracts Against Drought” in Portuguese), and later the Departamento Nacional de Obras Contra as Secas (DNOCS, “National Department of Public Contracts Against Drought”), the State implemented two major water projects aimed at tackling those problems, installing a modernity capable of overcoming the dramas imposed by nature and to dynamize the productive capacity, whose precariousness the technicians explained by the technical delay. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Oiticica Project was presented by the IFOCS as the solution to the Açu Valley, as the work that would regularize the water regime, bringing peace of mind to the local communities victimized by the periodic floods - the project, however, was abandoned after a while; in the 1970s, based on a series of new studies, DNOCS decided to invest in a new project called Baixo Açu Project, which resulted in the construction of the Armando Ribeiro Gonçalves Dam, inaugurated in 1983, the final limit of our temporal cut. Therefore, this research proposes to study the great water projects planned for the Açu Valley between the years of 1911, when the first systematic studies on local geography (from a particular concern, droughts) and the year 1983, when the first major engineering work was inaugurated.