Malha Regional Sudeste e Barra do Piraí : a gestão privatizante da ferrovia e a sujeição do território

Abstract

In light of the Critique of Political Economy, this research addresses Brazilian railways by understanding them as autonomous fixed capital, highlighting the relationship between railway infrastructure management and capital accumulation and its unfolding in the territory. It investigates the implications of transport production on these railways in the twenty-first century and indicates the role of logistics as a science that organizes railway operations in Brazil and the territories along their infrastructure within an unsustainable model of socio-political-territorial development. The study examines, debates, and questions the privatizing management of the Southeast Regional Network (Malha Regional Sudeste), which corresponds to the first 30 years of concession of this infrastructure (1996–2026), focusing on the process of early concession renewal authorized in 2022, whose related investments have 2026 as their deadline. Based on literature review and multiple research approaches—including documentary research, in loco observation, action research, and participant observation—it investigates how public authorities have restricted their role in relation to railway infrastructure and its territories of influence. The research also questions the hegemonic principles shaping socio-spatial configurations in these territories, disputing the railway as a potentially emancipatory infrastructure. The case of Barra do Piraí (Rio de Janeiro), a key railway junction, illustrates the local impacts of this management model, revealing conflicts arising from the territorial control exercised along the railway line. The findings indicate that infrastructure management has produced conditions of deregulation that intensify with the concession renewal process, reflecting broader dynamics of financialization and the regionalization of infrastructure investments aimed at attracting private capital. In this context, the management model conditions territorial governance and contributes to the subordination of the local scale to the global one.