Comentadora: Carla Gomes (ICS-UL) | Moderador: Roberto Sciarelli (CES) 


Resumo

This essay analyzes corruption as a recurrent element in environmental decision-making during the last decade, associated to strategies of capital accumulation of urbanization or so-called ‘development’ in Puerto Rico. Mobilizing theories of “urban growth machines” and “environmental colonialism”, it focuses on the corruption in the process of ‘de-conservation’ of protected areas. It situates the deepening of this corruption in the last decades in the expansion of a colonial neoliberal politics and its model of corporate government and a deepening of the colonial permanent “state of emergency”. This joins a hegemonic but empty speech of 'that equals progress' with construction and corporate ‘investment’, and which presents environmental and human rights as ‘barriers’, or as a strategy of 'greenwashing' where anything counts as green (even a methane gas pipeline). The paper also discusses how the disasters generated by the same mafia, the recession, the debt and hurricane Maria, have opened new opportunities of corruption, increased the pressures on our colonial territory to turn it into a 'paradise' for the rich: paradise of tax benefits and opportunities of investment, of hotels and luxurious housing developments, an economy of (and for) the 'visitor'. The analysis pays particular attention to actors and strategies used in corruption schemes, the structures that facilitate and reproduce these, as well as the resistance movements that counter them.

Esta oficina integra o Grupo de Leitura de Ecologia Política 2020-2021 da Oficina de Ecologia e Sociedade (ECOSOC). Se pretender receber uma cópia do artigo, por favor, envie email para ecosoc@ces.uc.pt

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