Garimpo ilegal no sul do Pará e facções criminosas na Amazônia: uma análise a partir da violência estrutural

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between criminal factions and illegal mining activities in southern Pará from the perspective of structural violence—issues that directly affect public security and the socio-environmental impacts in the region. The research begins with the observation that the significant increase in illegal mining activities over the past decades in the Amazon coincides with the territorial expansion of criminal organizations such as Comando Vermelho (CV) and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in the area. Through a multidisciplinary approach, literature review, and deductive method, the history of mining and the evolution of criminal factions in Brazil were analyzed to understand the mechanisms that may have enabled these organizations to infiltrate the illegal mining sector in the Amazon. The findings generated by the research demonstrate that illegal mining has become an important tool for money laundering of illicit businesses operated by criminal factions, facilitated by weaknesses in the State’s control systems. It was also found that these factions establish territorial dominance through coercion and cooptation, increasing the negative socio-environmental impacts caused by illegal mining and intensifying human rights violations in the region, especially against traditional populations. Finally, the historical analysis revealed that criminal organizations represent the most recent chapter in the long trajectory of predatory exploitation of the Amazon, as they are embedded in a context of structural violence present in the region. The study also concluded that effective public policies must go beyond purely repressive approaches by integrating intelligence strategies, institutional strengthening, and sustainable economic alternatives that provide necessary responses, while recognizing the value of traditional peoples and fundamentally confronting structural violence by rethinking the historically imposed predatory development model in the Amazon.