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This paper analyzes the discursive field of "Social Management" of populations resettled by large hydroelectric projects. The implementation of large development projects has been driving the processes of capitalist accumulation in Latin America. In the hydroelectric sector, such implementation usually implies the displacement and resettlement of populations and provokes multiple adverse consequences for them, such as affecting the bases necessary for their material and cultural reproduction, their social support networks, and sources of income, the modification of their ways of life, among others. The debate between 1970 and 2000 attributed the occurrence of these impacts to the absence of resettlement plans. However, we suggest that the existence of plans does not guarantee the absence of adverse effects and that they can rather exert renewed forms of social control that should be considered in order to understand the mechanisms that allow the persistence of conditions of social and environmental inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]