Exposição a riscos químicos e desigualdade social: o caso do HCH (Hexaclorociclohexano) na Cidade dos Meninos, RJ

• Main Author: Selene Herculano
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal do Paraná 2002-01-01
• Series: Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente
• Subjects: environmental justice; chemical contamination; childhood
• Online Access: http://ojs.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs2/index.php/made/article/viewFile/22117/14481
• ISSN: 1518-952X; 2176-9109

The City of the Boys is a federal property located in Duque de Caxias, Baixada Fluminense, a lowland at the far end of Guanabara Bay, in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro. It occupies a beautiful and still empty area of 1,900 hectares in the very heart of a poor and highly dense ramshackle zone in the outskirts of the city of Rio de Janeiro. The City of the Boys was founded in the forties by the then-First Lady, Mrs. Darcy Vargas, to provide shelter, education and assistance to poor children. Few years after its foundation, the Ministry of Health settled there, inside its walls, a plant of pesticides to fight malaria, which was then endemic in that region. In the fifties the plant closed and tons of chemical materiais leftbehind spread throughout the soil, in a long process of contamination of people and environment.. unsolvable until today.. More than an isolated example of irresponsibility, institutional fragmentation,incompetence, lack of power of environmental organisms, this case illustrates the huge and permanent neglect towards poor children in Brazil as well as the way that chemical risks and any sort of pollution are normally put and accepted in the neighborhood of the poorer. It is also an interesting evidence on the disputes around scientitie truths: Is HCH harmful to humans? How far? How many tons of HCH were really lelt behind? What would be the best procedures to decontaminate the soil? The case of the City of the Boys is unique not only because the guilty agent of contamination is the very federal organism responsible for the Brazilians healter, but also because the affected population does not want to leave, as it has happened in similar cases related by sociological literature of other countries. Instead, they want to stay, what can be explained by the lack of access or the poor to the land in Brazil: Baixada Fluminense is mainly occupied by illegal plots where more than 2 million people live without adequate urban services.