The oil industry arrives in the regions where it intends to explore fossil fuels, promising worlds and funds. The narrative of wealth and development, with an abundance of jobs and income, advances and attracts thousands of people. In the end, reality prevails: the best, highly qualified jobs are limited and occupied by people from outside. Prices for products and services skyrocket. And those who arrived in search of a better life end up without formal employment, without decent housing, without basic services.
Oiapoque suffers from invasions before oil extraction in Foz do Amazonas
The oil industry arrives in the regions where it intends to explore fossil fuels, promising worlds and funds. The narrative of wealth and development, with an abundance of jobs and income, advances and attracts...
It was like this in the Urucu Oil Province, in Amazonas, shows the documentary “Unsustainable: the reality of oil in the Amazon”, by André Borges and Fernanda Ligabue. It was like this in Norte Fluminense, in Rio de Janeiro. And this is how it is happening in Oiapoque, in the extreme north of Amapá, with the exploration of oil and fossil gas in the FZA-M-59 block by Petrobras.
The drilling of the Morpho well in Block 59, which began in October last year and is scheduled for completion on August 7, has already changed the reality of the city of Amapá even before any sign of fossil fuel on a commercial scale, highlight Vinicius Sassine and Lalo de Almeida in Folha. At least seven invasions are expanding in the city, where a decree of financial and administrative calamity is in force for 180 days, due to an economic and political crisis.
These are the invasions taken into account by the city hall, which is looking for ways to eventually regularize land tenure, although there is a judicialization of the case. Occupations are expanding, with more and more forest areas being cut down, shacks being erected and simple houses being built.
The rampant invasion is due to two factors. One is the increase in housing and rent prices in consolidated neighborhoods of Oiapoque, which causes families to move to the squatters. The other is the intensification of migratory flows from other cities in Amapá and other states. Both are connected to the political propaganda of oil and the expectation of development in the region, if viability in Block 59 is confirmed.
Added to these factors are real estate speculation and the multiple occupation of land in invasions with the purpose of selling land even before any land regularization. All of this has driven the expansion of occupied areas, some of them close to the airport used as a base for helicopters serving the Petrobras probe on the high seas.
“The benefits of oil have not arrived, but the consequences have already”, says the city’s mayor, Inácio Maciel (PDT). “Properties in Oiapoque are more expensive than in the capital, Macapá.”
Source: ClimaInfo
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