Map of the Amazon River basin in South America. Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.
Brazil's current crisis cannot be reduced to an isolated, merely political or economic phenomenon. Its origins, its roots should be sought both in the near and remote historical past, and in the spatial and geographical layout of its territorial expansionism, its internal colonialism, and its misappropriation of political representation and business management.
This historical past is a determining factor of the current crisis, and should not be reduced exclusively to the Brazilian borders, because it involves all its neighbors in the Chaco-Amazon basin too. There is therefore a spatial dimension to its historical matrix which calls into question the inability or unwillingness of South-American nationalism and chauvinism to carry out the necessary water infrastructure works to connect the inland basins. These basins, however, have been exploited by water dams to extract electricity to be forwarded to seacoast centres. In the specific case of Brazil, this water overexploitation has been detrimental to the environment and the inland waterways, and the authorities have made willful omissions which should be punishable by Brazilian justice.
