“Elon Musk came to Brazil to sell his fish,” jokes the young Brazilian Air Force officer sitting at the entrance to the small aerospace museum in Alcántara, one of the world's most incongruous tourist attractions.
Alcántara, after all, is a city of colonial ruins, through which the lilting Caribbean reggae resonates, the reference music for its few inhabitants, mainly Afro-Brazilians. Life is slow here and many come and go to São Luiz, on the other side of the bay, on an old sailing catamaran.
Abandoned by Portuguese landowners after the collapse of the cotton plantations at the beginning of the 19th century, the city is surrounded by quilombos, communities of descendants of slaves, runaways or emancipated, who dedicate themselves to fishing and working the land.
So it is shocking to drive about 15 kilometers through dense palm forests, and find a security fence guarded by two soldiers with machine guns next to a sign announcing: Alcántara Launch Center. On the horizon the rocket launch tower is outlined.
It is the Brazilian space base built in the early eighties during the military dictatorship. At that time, the intention was to incorporate the emerging Latin American power into the space race, along with the US and the USSR. Now, the base prepares a new phase of expansion this time for the benefit of the global plutocrats the new era of privatized space.
After an agreement between the governments of Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump in 2019, necessary to use American technology and avoid problems with the hegemon to the north, the base is open to extra-planetary business. Richard Branson has already signed on for his Virgin Orbit satellite subsidiary. A handful of European, Canadian, American and Korean aerospace companies as well.
Musk, for his part, indicated his interest in the base for space exploration company Space X during a visit to Brazil in May. “Musk has Alcántara on his head,” said the Brazilian director of Innospace, the Korean company already installed at the base. "This is already the New Space, with the private sector ahead," he added in a conversation held a stone's throw from the Iglesia del Carmen where a drum band -mostly black women- set the frantic rhythm of the coconut dance. . In front, there is still a stone column to which slaves were tied to be whipped.
Branson, Musk and Bolsonaro understand the advantages in Alcántara over rival bases in the US. Located in the state of Maranhão in the far northeast of Brazil, the base is only two degrees latitude from the equator which, according to calculations, it reduces by 30% the fuel consumption necessary to reach the stratosphere. At the same time, the stable climate makes it possible to avoid hurricanes or electrical storms that sometimes shake the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
But for the inhabitants of the quilombos in Alcántara, the new space of Elon Musk and Richard Branson is quite reminiscent of the old one of the military. 300 families were displaced when the base opened 40 years ago. Now another 700 are threatened by expansion. “We have occupied these lands since before the abolition of slavery (1888),” explains Davilo Sereja, who was born in the Canelatiua quilombo adjacent to the base. "You can imagine how it feels now to lose your house so some rich guys can play astronaut."
If Elon Musk – whose personal wealth exceeds 180,000 million euros – manages to sell his metaphorical “fish” in Alcántara, this is not the case for the quilombolas. The expansion of the base will force the quilombo communities to move inland, depriving them of their main source of subsistence in the sea and in saltwater igarapés (streams) teeming with prawns, prawns, crabs, lobster and dozens of species of fish.
It already happened. In the eighties, the quilombolas of the coast were relocated to the interior in seven villages called agrovilas in square urbanizations built by the air forces. “We can no longer fish; and the plots do not give good results compared to the 'roça' we used to do in the quilombo on the coast,” said Marcos Pinho, a relocated quilombola, referring to the traditional system of cultivating in rotating plots. “They are called agrovilas but they have very little agriculture.”
Some 15 kilometers from the agro-vila, along a dirt road, it is clear why the displaced yearn for the past. In Mumuna, next to a spectacular beach with foaming waves with three or four fishing canoes moored on the sand, you can breathe the freedom of the historic quilombo. “There is no pousada here but stay to sleep and eat,” said one of the residents of the village made up of adobe houses with palm tree roofs. The young people of the town played soccer barefoot on a grass field. Everyone agrees that in the quilombos of the coast they produce abundant food while food insecurity lurks in the agrovilas of the interior
A space base – which can be used in an interplanetary search for mineral resources that cannot but be reminiscent of what has occurred in Brazil since colonial times – is not exactly a priority for the descendants of slaves. “Look, a rocket reaches space in a matter of seconds; but here it takes two and a half hours to go to the hospital in São Luiz in case of an emergency”, laments Pinho.
In the very modest aerospace museum that displays battered model rockets and yellowed newspaper clippings, an open book displays a photo of Brazilian astronaut Colonel Marcos Cesar Pontes, Bolsonaro's science minister and champion of Alcántara's new project.
But the show skips over the most dramatic chapter in the base's history: the tragic explosion of the first nationally designed and manufactured rocket in the summer of 2003.
The disaster put a sudden end to the space project of the Brazilian military state. Twenty-one technicians died, an entire generation of Brazilian space scientists. The base never raised its head again until the New Space of the global billionaires arrived.
During the first decade of the base's life, there were constant disagreements between the military and those responsible for civilian projects. For the military, the Alcántara base was understood as "part of a nationalist development drive and Brazil's entry into the First World," says Sean Mitchell, an American anthropologist who lived in Alcántara for several years to research his book Constellations of inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Many in the military even decided that the mysterious 2003 accident was due to US sabotage, a conspiracy theory, perhaps, but it was backed up by the cables from the foreign ministry in Brasilia leaked by Wikileaks in 2010 denouncing the constant US pressure against the Alcantara base.
When Fernando Henrique Cardoso –president of Brazil between 1995 and 2003– proposed an agreement with Bill Clinton to agree on joint management of the Alcántara base, the Brazilian military protested and Congress rejected the plan. Among those most opposed to the agreement at that time was the then congressman and former paratrooper captain Jair Bolsonaro.
However, once in power, the outgoing president quickly abandoned nationalism, beyond the yellow-green flags. The generals, many members of the government, too.
“The military has not maintained the nationalist resistance of the past to civilian and neoliberal projects,” Mitchell comments in a telephone interview.
Musk, who has participated in the contest to connect the Amazon to the internet through its Starlink satellites, was praised by Bolsonaro as "a legend of freedom."
Now it is the quilombolas – previously branded as sellouts due to the support of international NGOs for their cause – who defend Brazilian sovereignty. The 2019 agreement with Trump “only benefits the US; It is not known what Brazil will pocket and nothing is going to be manufactured here”, analyzes Danilo Serejo.
According to the Estado de São Paulo newspaper, the United States collected 260 billion euros in the first year of the agreement. The income for Brazil "has not been disclosed", it is stated in the newspaper, but it could be around 30 million euros per contract signed.
All of this will create an opportunity and a dilemma for the new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who will take office on January 1st. In 2003, the first government of the Workers' Party (PT) announced a commitment to settle the historical debt of the Brazilian state with the descendants of the four million slaves transported from Africa to Brazil between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Taking advantage of the 1988 constitution, Lula signed a presidential decree that authorized the recognition of the rights to title the collective property of the quilombos in the same way as was done with indigenous lands.
But all this collided with the PT's mega development projects –among them the Alcántara Launch Center– as well as its relationship with large agro-industrial companies. Only 139 quilombos were recognized throughout the country and none of those from Alcántara have achieved titles.
The PT governments "were sharply divided in those years," says Mitchell. The same divisions will surely affect a government coalition that is more politically diverse than then. “I think Lula will defend her basic values; To what extent this affects Alcántara will be a matter of the organization capacity of the quilombos”.
