Chapter 4 is about the fate of the families whose land the military regime’s big reservoirs flooded. It covers the twenty-year period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when reservoir floodwaters expelled farmers and Indigenous communities from their homes, sending them to uncertain fates. This chapter argues that the military government mostly ignored the social costs of its big dams because it felt pressure to build them quickly and cheaply and becuase it believed its pharaonic environmentalism would satisfy its critics. The military regime provided scant resources to help displaced communities transition to new homes and unfamiliar subsistence practices, and many were left to start anew with almost no financial compensation. For the generals, it helped that most of these people were poor and from racially marginalized groups that had little political clout. Nevertheless, organizations and community leaders associated with the Catholic Church – then under the influence of liberation theology – helped organize dispossessed communities, some of whom succeeded in earning more just compensation.

Chapter 7 covers the changing nature of dam building in Brazil during the 1990s–2010s. It argues that during this period, mobilization for social and environmental justice among dam-affected communities began to play a greater role in the county’s dam-building program and that the movement’s priorities and achievements were not uniform. Brazil’s anti-dam movement has succeeded in modifying many new dams or blocking them outright, especially in the Amazon Rainforest, but has done little to achieve justice for the still-uncompensated Indigenous communities that were displaced by the dictatorship’s reservoirs. More than thirty years after being displaced, the Avá Guarani and the Tuxá, the Indigenous communities dispossessed by Itaipu and Itaparica, respectively, are still fighting for the land the government owes them. Climate-related challenges have been a second defining element of this period. Since the late 1990s, the Brazilian hydropower sector has endured at least three significant droughts that lowered reservoir levels, curtailing output and leading to rolling blackouts. Such episodes could become more common and severe under anthropogenic global warming. Thus, while the Brazilian hydropower sector has done much to mitigate carbon emissions, the impacts of anthropogenic warming threaten to curtail the degree to which reservoirs can produce such valuable low-carbon energy.