Emendas parlamentares e infraestrutura viária na Amazônia: impactos sobre a Consulta Livre, Prévia e Informada (CLPI)

Abstract

The expansion of mining, gas and oil projects and of the agricultural and livestock frontier in the Amazon has intensified socio-environmental pressure on the forest, Indigenous peoples and traditional communities. This scenario exposes multicultural antagonisms and social conflicts that characterize the region. The growth of these fronts is accompanied by the expansion of transport and logistics infrastructure, particularly road projects encroaching upon Indigenous Lands and environmentally sensitive areas. The allocation of funds through parliamentary budget amendments for the opening and paving of roads in the region has evidenced the temporal precedence and continuity of political spending decisions in relation to the effective participation of affected populations, shifting the right to free, prior and informed consultation, provided for in Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), to a stage after the road intervention has been defined. Against this background, this research analyzes the extent to which the decision-making chain governing parliamentary budget amendments for road infrastructure in the Amazon, from budgetary decisions to administrative acts and physical implementation, may operate as a vector of institutional distortion of the consultation requirement, while identifying the structural factors that weaken this right and proposing institutional safeguards aimed at strengthening its effectiveness. This dissertation is academically and socially relevant because it examines a still underexplored relationship in Brazilian legal scholarship, in which legislative budget allocations and the right to consultation rarely intersect, especially in a context marked by the expansion of such allocations in the financing of interventions with territorial impacts and by persistent participation deficits. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative approach, grounded in bibliographic and documentary research, with a descriptive-analytical procedure and hypothetico-deductive reasoning, operationalized through a multiple-case study design based on replication logic and analytic generalization. The first chapter reconstructs the historical trajectory of democracy, examining tensions between popular sovereignty and representation, the crisis of representative legitimacy, deliberative democracy, participatory and deliberative mechanisms incorporated by the 1988 Federal Constitution, and the evolution of parliamentary oversight of the public budget. The second chapter builds the analytical framework of the socio-environmental conflicts surrounding the right to consultation in the Amazon and traces its normative trajectory, from historical precedents and the assimilationist paradigm to Convention No. 169 and its incorporation into the Brazilian legal order. It also examines the criteria that distinguish substantive consultation from procedural simulation, as well as the role of autonomous consultation protocols as instruments of self-determination. The third chapter investigates, through selected cases, how these budget allocations affect compliance with the right to consultation, identifying structural vulnerabilities in the decision-making process and the use of institutional devices and participatory mechanisms as inadequate substitutes for this right. It concludes by formulating effectiveness criteria and institutional parameters aimed at strengthening decision-making transparency, budgetary oversight and self-determination. The findings indicate that the effectiveness of the right to free, prior and informed consultation in the Amazon depends on the interplay between budgetary oversight, substantive participation and respect for the autonomous consultation protocols developed by the peoples themselves. The dissertation thus offers theoretical and empirical contributions for incorporating the right to consultation as a condition of democratic validity in decisions concerning road infrastructure in the Amazon.