The Amazon: Development or Destruction?
Maurer, Harry
In the course of the 1970's-which, historically speaking, means almost overnight--the Brazilian Amazon has become a full-fledged frontier. Across an enormous crescent of country, reaching from...
...Venereal disease made its appearance...
...May to November is the time to clear the land of both forest and squatters...
...Dom Moacyr Grechi, Bishop of the Prelacy of Acre and Purus, has dozens of cases on file documenting the methods employed to "clean" the land...
...Assistance to the Indians, which should be as complete as possible, must not obstruct national development nor the axes of penetration for the integration of the Amazon," wrote the agency's president in 1971...
...Their way of life is communal...
...Ranches are highly efficient, however, when it comes to destroying forest...
...FUNAI made no attempt to precede the construction crews and prepare the InA Yanomamo child sports a T-shirt tracing the highway's route through tribal lands...
...Meggers, Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise (Chicago, 1971...
...It should be a good investment, he says, but in the meantime he is sick with longing for the cool weather and quasi-European amenities of Parana...
...Jari is also rich in gold and diamonds...
...The real victims of the speculative outburst are the descendents of Acre's original settlers...
...It illustrates the strength of the fledgling movement in defense of the Indians, led in many cases by activists in the Brazilian church...
...He is experimenting with soybeans, sugar cane, manioc, maize, dende palms (for palm oil) and with herds of water buffalo...
...His rice plantations have produced a yield nearly twice as high as the former world record...
...Cardoso and G. Muller, Amazonia: Expan...
...30MaylJune 1979 trade zone were turning the city into one vast Radio Shack, the attempt to create an industrial base was causing problems of its own...
...If they did not tame the jungle, they at least learned to live in it...
...Those who survive, stunned by the calamity, have no skills to cope with an alien new world...
...and the 300,000-acre ranch in Para acquired by Volkswagen...
...and when the agency finally established an outpost, in August 1974, its policy was to attract the Indians to the vicinity of the highway...
...And since INCRA cannot actual28MaylJune 1979 ly provide the services that might make the projects thrive, occupation tends to be unstable...
...Those who are forced from the land often return to it as peons on ranches owned by the paulistas...
...Watching the ranches spread, Amazonians mutter what is fast becoming a proverb in the region: "Onde o boi entra, o home sai...
...While the precise dimensions of his holdings are uncertain, Ludwig claims 3.7 million hectares along the Jari River east of Belem, an estate bigger than Connecticut and Massachusetts combined, the largest private landholding in the Western Hemisphere...
...This change in strategy coincided with the end of the Brazilian "miracle," and the onset of the worldwide recession...
...Five million colonists were expected by 1980, but no more than 50,000 came, and of those many gave up and went home...
...No one knows precisely how much of the southeastern Amazon has been devastated since the ranchers moved in, but the area is substantial...
...Yet government ballyhoo over the free zone had much to do with Manaus' amazing population growth, from some 220,000 in 1967 to over 600,000 today-in a city where much of the infrastructure dates from 1910...
...both Deforestation is destroying the Amazon's ecological balance...
...One man who has worked to organize the peasants was pessimistic: "The government wants large-scale ranches in Amazonia...
...But it is also the time when those doing the clearing may be ambushed...
...Field Marshall Humberto Castelo Branco, first in Brazil's line of military presidents, announced a development program that promised to revive the city...
...Houses and crops are burned...
...The landless peasant arrives in Rondonia and registers with INCRA...
...The result is a maelstrom of drifting peasants and violent frontier towns on the BR-364...
...Then the speculators arrived, wanting to rid the land of "squatters"- the laborers that had been there for decades, and some for a hundred years...
...They have chosen a style of development that enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor...
...Lately, they call the highway the "Trans-miseriana...
...Called Polamazonia, it established 15 development "poles" where financial resources would be concentrated, each involving massive industrial, mining or ranching projects...
...Unfortunately for the forest, one of those goods is meat...
...Instead, the agency promises to demarcate a reserve for the Indians, but then delays doing so, often for years...
...The grid of roads is expanding so fast that maps quickly become outdated...
...The Amazon project that has garnered most publicity recently is Jari Forestal e Agropecuaria, known as Jari, the stupendous enclave owned by the American shipping tycoon, Daniel Keith Ludwig...
...Every downtown block had new stores, windows bristling with gadgets, loudspeakers bellowing prices...
...However, instead of covering the proposed unified area of 22,700 square kilometers, FUNAI plans to create 16 separate mini-reserves, totaling 13,500 square kilometers...
...and while there is little reason to expect it will be abandoned, the simple fact of the regime's hesitation is significant...
...Ludwig is a one-man conglomerate, but Jari is his most extravagant venture to date...
...The Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI), founded by progressive clerics in 1972, has led the battle against FUNAI policies...
...Yet the Yanomamo's celebrity has not protected them from the encroaching frontier...
...And it's not only that it would make it harder to take their land...
...Fiscal incentives did attract hundreds of new enterprises, as evidenced by the newly-built Industrial District...
...Across an enormous crescent of country, reaching from the Bolivian border to the Atlantic Ocean, the southern rim of the Amazon Basin is being occupied by peasants fleeing the overcrowded northeast and south of Brazil, by land speculators out to make a quick killing, by foreign investors eager to exploit its vast resources, and by government officials in charge of easing the region's transition into modern-day capitalism...
...But with agriculture and ranching now a possibility, land has become a valuable commodity...
...decimated Indian tribes instead of protecting them...
...Between 1972 and 1974, they sold and re-sold an estimated two-thirds of all the lands in the state...
...For a decade, proposals languished in FUNAI files -until 1978, when the agency revealed that Yanomamo Indian land would soon be demarcated...
...The rationale, naturally, is that the wealth generated by this "development" will trickle down...
...According to her, many ranches have already been abandoned, their soils useless, their 34MaylJune 1979 fields smothered by weeds, only to repeat the process in newer ranching areas...
...In the lawless countryside, the provision would probably be ignored and the law's main result would be emancipation of the Indians from their patrimony...
...And recently, families from Boa Vista have taken to driving along the road for a picnic and a look at the "savages...
...The grileiro, or real estate swindler, has become one of Amazonia's classic characters...
...Not infrequently they are treated as prisoners, subject to beatings for infractions, with armed guards posted to prevent escape...
...Rather, the ruinous occupation of the world's greatest remaining natural reserve (other than the seas) is the product of conscious policies, implemented by a government that holds power in Brazil only by force of arms...
...Most importantly, the Indians themselves have been organizing, with tribal leaders gathering in a series of national assemblies...
...and from the rubber trees they extracted the milky liquid that built the cities of Manaus and Belem...
...Not a few ranches, in fact, are set up solely to siphon off fiscal incentives from SUDAM, a practice that has given rise to the shell-game known as the "tourist cow," whereby a herd of cattle is rented to occupy a phantom ranch on the day that SUDAM officials come to inspect...
...And so it did: during the next 45 years Indian landholdings dropped from 138 million acres to 48 million...
...27NACLA Report Peasants arrive by the thousands to escape conditions in the South...
...by 1974, according to official figures, more than 900 families were entering Rondonia every month...
...In this, it must be said, the generals are following a tradition of enslavement, massacre and despoilation already centuries old in Brazil...
...EMANCIPATION" Brazilian anthropologists have long urged the government to create a reserve that would at least give the Yanomamo legal tenure to their land...
...In this century, Brazil's Indian population has plummeted from an estimated one million to 100,000--a loss of more than 100,000 a year...
...The Indians are a challenge to the whole ideology of development...
...7. Charles Wagley, ed...
...Amazonians have sardonically dubbed these vehicles the "parrot's perch"-the name of one of the most notorious forms of torture perfected by the Brazilian military regime...
...The paulistas come in here with planes, tractors, defoliants, private armies, bank loans, subsidies...
...Their floppy, stained shirts, ragged trousers, shapeless straw hats and their silent, diffident manner identifies them as peasants...
...Brazil was experiencing 40% annual inflation rates, a growing balance-of-payments deficit and a mounting foreign debt of some $41 billion...
...and the immense basin is awakening from the slumber of physical isolation and economic depression...
...But the law, like so many others, is rarely enforced...
...Since the end of the rubber boom around 1912, the city had stagnated...
...subsidized ranches instead of finding more appropriate uses for the land...
...Even their capacity to generate employment is limited...
...They instinctively respect the ecology...
...And with the apparatus of justice notoriously for sale, the peons have little hope for redress...
...First the frontier expands, often by means of a new road (an "axis of penetration"), into the area occupied by a tribe...
...But in 1966...
...By and large, FUNAI agents have avoided the more egregious misdeeds of the SPI era, but the agency's basic policy has had the same devastating effect...
...In the United States, the Indian NonIntercourse Act of 1790, banning the sale of Indian land to whites without Congressional approval, went unenforced...
...What FUNAI's approach means in practice has been demonstrated in scores of cases that follow the same dismal pattern...
...In pursuit of the greatest immediate return, the generals have built ill-considered roads instead of improving river transport...
...During the Geisel administration, Ludwig was a regular visitor to the presidential palace...
...Since INCRA usually must go to court to have the titles declared invalid, and since the new "owners" may well be rich and powerful groups of paulistas, property questions are often settled by what one official politely called "extraofficial means...
...As anthropologist Shelton Davis points out in his excellent book on Amazonian Indians, Victims of the Miracle, the Indian Statute contradicts itself as regards control of mineral resources...
...And the local police, the judges, the soldiers--they look after the people who can pay the price...
...The military government of Brazil has been an active promoter of genocide...
...When the boom collapsed, those who had survived the unimaginably brutal conditions of the seringais (where the rubber trees grow wild and are dispersed in the jungle) stayed on, eking out a living by planting subsistence crops and tapping the trees on a more or less independent basis...
...He is assigned a plot, usually of 100 hectares, in one of the designated areas...
...One quarter of the Yanomamo living in three villages near the road soon perished of infectious diseases...
...GENOCIDE IN THE JUNGLE Amazonian "development" has had a particularly devastating effect on an entire race of human beings, the Amazonian Indians...
...And the new president, General Figueiredo, apparently plans to maintain the tradition...
...A typical example is Otavio Levanti, the grandson of Italians who emigrated to Brazil and settled in the fertile southern state of Parana...
...sao do Capitalismo (Sao Paulo, 1977...
...The tribe's cultural cohesion breaks down, and its members are driven to beggary, prostitution or at best rootless rural labor...
...But the Trans-Amazon was a failure...
...A century later came the Dawes Severalty Act, providing for the division of Indian land into individual plots as a way of teaching Indians "the habits of civilized life...
...The law flatly states that "native land cannot be the object of leasing or renting or any juridical act or negotiation that restricts the full exercise of direct possession by the native community (emphasis mine...
...Virtually everything Jari produces is destined for export...
...In the generals' eyes, what could be more subversive...
...The protest against the new decree was so sharp that it was shelved momentarily...
...This project was capped last year with a characteristically grandiose feat: Ludwig constructed a gigantic processing plant in Japan, placed it on barges, and had it towed 13,000 miles around South America and up the Amazon to Jari, where it will produce 750 tons of kraft paper each day...
...Despite warnings from scientists, who doubt the Amazon forest can withstand sustainedyield harvests, SUDAM plans to devote a full one-fifth of the Brazilian Amazon to lumber production...
...He has taken advantage of government fiscal incentives to buy 17,000 hectares of land.* As soon as the papers are processed he plans to return to Parana, leaving a partner to look after the Amazon land...
...Sophisticated consumer goods--appliances, watches, calculators and the like--flooded in from abroad...
...But whether the ranches are well-managed, ill-run or largely fictitious, they have the same effect on the forest...
...An American agronomist working for several ranches in Para described the modern system of clearing land: "They take two Caterpillar D-8 tractors, run a 24,000 kilogram chain between them, and just drag it through the forest...
...THE PIONEERS A visit to the Amazon immediately reveals that Amazonia is being occupied by two antagonistic groups: the paulistas (a word that literally means people from Sao Paulo, but in the Amazon has come to mean any investor from the South) and the peasants...
...how many are unregistered is anyone's guess...
...31NACLA Report Every American anthropology student reads Professor Napoleon Chagnon's classic, The Yanomamo: The Fierce People...
...5. Darcy Ribeiro, Os Indios e a Civilizacao (Rio de Janeiro, 1970...
...The hermetic quality of the operation is enhanced by Ludwig's passion for secrecy...
...To make matters worse, in 1975 Brazil announced the discovery of huge uranium and cassiterite deposits in the heart of Yanomamo country...
...He gives the example of one Romulo Bonalume, a paulista from Parana, who appeared on the BR-317 road in 1973, and told the 70 people living between kilometers 104 and 140 that he had bought all the property...
...Their forebears migrated from the blighted northeast to the Amazon during the rubber boom in the late nineteenth century, and it was their occupation of Acre, then part of Bolivia, that made possible Brazil's annexation of the area in 1903...
...In 1974, yet another military president, General Ernesto Geisel, bestowed still another plan on the Amazon-this one giving short shrift to the problem of poverty...
...The BR-364, precursor of a network of roads that has been feverishly cut through the forest, inaugurated the era of the truck in Amazonia-an event as significant as the great railroads were to the American West...
...He has cleared large areas of forest- nearly 250,000 acres so far, with another 250,000 to go - and planted stands of two fast-growing trees that will be harvested for cellulose, pulp, plywood and lumber...
...Another contingent of pioneers stands in small clusters outside the local headquarters of the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, or INCRA...
...Bibliography: 1. F.H...
...POLAMAZONIA The generals' concept of "development" has been through many stages...
...even government officials have been sent packing...
...This dismemberment, condemning the migratory Yanomamo to remain within small areas and allowing whites to occupy the land in between, amounts to nothing less than a death sentence...
...Operation Amazonia" called for the creation of a free trade zone in Manaus...
...DEVELOPMENT OR DESTRUCTION...
...To a large extent, the future shape of Amazonia lies in INCRA's hands...
...The large-scale grileiros, many of them lawyers, are more ambitious...
...Most of them are hoping to discover whether the state, as embodied by INCRA, will give them legal title to 100 hectares of forested land-land that in many cases they are already occupying...
...and industries would be encouraged to locate there by tax exemptions...
...As Professor Davis says, in Victims of the Miracle, "There is nothing inevitable about what is taking place in the Brazilian Amazon...
...But tourists, most of them Brazilian, still come to the heart of the Amazon to buy a Sony Trinitron or a Nikon FM...
...But the nucleus of Ludwig's plans for his kingdom lies in his conviction that world supplies of timber are running short...
...And SUDAM's own figures bear out the saying...
...Ludwig is said to be the richest American alive, worth more than $3 billion, a fortune founded in the 1940's on the success of his shipping company, National Bulk Carriers...
...A reasonable guess as to the present population of the Brazilian Amazon is about nine million, or less than four people per square mile in a region that accounts for 60% of Brazil's land area...
...They set up storefronts in town and deal in huge parcels of land on the basis of titles that at best are doubtful and at worst are printed for the occasion...
...THE SPECULATORS INCRA also has the job of unraveling a byzantine tangle of land tenure, since no one bothered to survey property boundaries in the Amazon for centuries...
...dians for the road's arrival...
...and in any case, he said, the Yanomamo are "physically and possibly intellectually decadent" as a result of "incestuous" practices, and therefore, he implied, not worth saving...
...According to Dom Moacyr, violence in the Amazon has an oddly seasonal character...
...But lower-echelon INCRA employees make no secret of the fact that the agency's resources don't remotely match the requirements of the situation...
...OPERATION AMAZONIA A very different aspect of Amazonian "development" is reflected in the city of Manaus, born as a Portuguese fort on the bluffs overlooking the Rio Negro near its confluence with the Amazon...
...Now trucks struggle up the dirt road by the hundreds, bringing migrants by the thousands: rural laborers thrown out of work by the mechanization of agriculture, or small farmers forced by drought or market collapse to sell out their ever-larger agribusiness competitors...
...In just a few years, Manaus was transformed into a bizarre emporium, a town gone retail-mad...
...rather it would serve as a satellite region, charged with furnishing raw materials for the modern area of Brazil, the center-south, and with earning 33NACLA Report Yanomamo Indians travel the Northern Perimeter Highway...
...In Rondonia, INCRA's role is particularly crucial...
...though agroindustrial projects absorbed half the subsidies distributed by SUDAM between 1966 and 1976, they created only 17,000 of the total 70,000 jobs...
...By 1976, many of the peasants had succumbed and fled...
...Cambridge University Press, 1977...
...Equally often the contractor vanishes at the end of the season, without paying his men...
...6. William Denevan, "Development of the Imminent Demise of the Amazon Rainforest," The Professional Geographer, 25 (1973...
...FUNAI, however, seems to be moving in the opposite direction-from "rapid integration" to what the agency calls "emancipation...
...When the rains stop, the shooting starts...
...INCRA provides financing, infrastructure, health care, education, technical assistance, marketing facilities-all this is theory...
...Ludwig owns bauxite deposits in the Trombetas region and plans to build an aluminum plant that would produce 300,000 tons annually...
...As the commercial provisions of the free i: AMAZON REGION Amazonia covers 60% of Brazil's total land area...
...A $100-per-person limit on goods that could be taken out of Manaus only made the city a nest of smugglers...
...The organ that governs Indian affairs today is the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI...
...Through SUDAM's fiscal incentives, the government (and therefore, indirectly, the Brazilian public) has subsidized the creation of hundreds of cattle ranches...
...They arrive in ramshackle pick-ups or panel trucks, several families riding in the back sheltered only by tarpaulins...
...INCRA and other agencies ignored the protests of those who stayed...
...Amsterdam, 1975...
...Bonalume then hired gunslingers to intimidate them, at the same time offering 3,000 cruzeiros (about $300) to anyone who would sell out...
...The peasants had legal rights to the land they had occupied and developed, and refused to leave...
...Bonalume's lawyer convinced the police to visit the site and arrest the "squatters" they had accused of leading the "agitation...
...At each intersection, a thicket of arrow-shaped signs points the way to the likes of General Electric, Philco, Gillette and Honda...
...Man in the Amazon (Gainesville, Florida, 1974...
...As an arm of the Ministry of the Interior, whose main goal is to spur economic growth, FUNAI clearly regards Indian interests as secondary to those of groups that want to "develop" the resources theoretically controlled by the tribes...
...One of the most urgent cases of dispossession concerns the Yanomamo Indians, who inhabit an area on the border of Brazil and Venezuela, north of Manaus...
...The consequences of destroying so much forest and of planting uniform stands of trees in the Amazon are unpredictable at best, whereas pulp mills of the sort he has anchored on the Jari River are known to be among the most polluting of all factories...
...There is a cruel irony in the mortal threat now facing the Yanomamo, since the tribe's large size (15,000 members, at least 6,000 in Brazil) and customs have made it the most intensively studied group of Indians in Latin America...
...Journalists in particular are non gratae...
...Goodland and H.S...
...Today only a few hang on...
...For a period of 30 years, foreign imports into the city would be free of tariffs...
...The Amazon was no longer seen as worthy of development for its own sake...
...in 1960 with the completion of a rudimentary highway from Cuiaba to Porto Velho...
...The Amazon would have to make its contribution to the drive to raise exports, by producing goods in demand on world markets...
...When details of a proposed decree to regulate "emancipation" were leaked to the press, the plan was roundly denounced by Indians and their defenders...
...Petty grileiros prey on the peasants...
...The Brazilian Constitution and the Indian Statute of 1973 give Indians asolute right to the lands they inhabit, but FUNAI determines the boundaries of those lands, and the government may override Indian sovereignty in order to "carry out public works of interest to national development...
...3. R.J.A...
...It takes few workers to run a large ranch...
...Emancipated Indians would be almost identical, in legal terms, to other Brazilians...
...winked at illegal deforestation by tractor, fire and herbicide...
...Belatedly, INCRA moved to channel this massive influx into orderly "colonization" projects...
...In 1974, the government began to build the Northern Perimeter Highway, which is designed to run from the mouth of the Amazon to the Colombian border, roughly parallel to the river-and directly through Yanomamo territory...
...The Amazon, too, has become an arena of social struggle and yet another testing ground for the dictatorship's style of "economic development...
...35NACLA Report seem to sprout superlatives...
...Once he assembles his herd, the peons are driven or flown to the ranch, often deep in the forest, to do backbreaking labor for ten hours a day or more...
...Through February 1978, the new industrial projects employed 33,884 workers, with plants to employ 12,000 more under construction or planned...
...Figures from the Brazilian Institute for Forestry Development (IBDF), the agency responsible for protection of the ecology, show that in the state of Para alone, between 1973 and 1977, the government authorized the clearing of some 4.5 million acres of forest...
...In response to an advertising campaign in southern Brazil, concocted by the governor, a horde of speculators descended on the state of Acre...
...Such apparent short-sightedness reflects the investment mentality of the Amazon, where the goal is to make a quick killing and get out...
...FUNAI, aware of the effect the road will have, does nothing to prevent its construction...
...But other clauses give FUNAI the right to lease subsoil resources of native land to third parties and to administer the proceeds-all for the good of the Indians, of course...
...It is not the result of incompetence nor the inevitable product of economic progress...
...By 1978, the legal status of 12,000 colonizing families in Rondonia had been "regularized," with 16,000 more registered and waiting...
...These assembly plants use relatively unskilled labor and contribute little to the creation of a solid economic base...
...The agency's exercise of this power in the past has led to invasion of supposedly inviolable reserves by such powerful multinationals as the W.R...
...Among these are the King Ranch, a 180,000-acre spread in Para...
...A series of laws has placed ownership of the bulk of Brazil's Amazon with the government and INCRA administers the distribution of that land...
...In explaining the idea, the 32MaylJune 1979 general in charge of Amazonian Indian policy, Democrito de Oliveira, stated that the larger reserve would take up too much valuable land...
...Genocide is a word much overused, but it describes without hyperbole what is taking place in Brazil today...
...THE UGLY AMERICAN Other Polamazonia projects focus on the estimated $1 trillion worth of comercially valuable timber in the Amazon region...
...No one visits Jari without permission, which is rarely granted...
...That's what frightens the generals-the possibility of a united front among the tribes," says Dom Tomas Balduino, Bishop of Goias and head of CIMI...
...Generally, they are hired by a labor contractor, whose stock in trade features 29NACLA Report tempting promises about pay and working conditions...
...At the beginning of the dry season they will burn off the forest, plant pasture and bring in cattle from Mato Grosso...
...Grace Company and the Patino Tin Mining Company...
...The colonists received so little of the financial and technical help they had been promised that many Brazilians now wonder if the plan was meant to fail...
...The rain forest is receding before powers stronger than itself...
...They are destitute, often illiterate...
...Investors now own about 80% of the state, much of it concentrated in the hands of Sao Paulo companies like the Grupo Atlantico/Boa Vista and the Grupo Atalla, who together hold title to nearly two million hectares...
...The victim is slung over a bar, head down, and then beaten, shocked or raped...
...Five such projects are now under way in Rondonia and in theory, they exemplify simplicity and social justice in action...
...4. BettyJ...
...foreign currency through exports...
...Yanomamo men began to beg and Yanomamo women attached themselves to workers' camps...
...they trek a mile or two into the forest, clear a plot, build a hut and then, claiming ownership, sell out to one or more gullible newcomers...
...But the pace of development is dizzying...
...There was particular skepticism about the clause stating that Indian lands would remain permanently inalienable...
...Barbed wire is strung...
...that is, they would not be subject to FUNAI's tutelage and protection, such as it is...
...FUNAI was established in 1968 after an investigation of its predecessor agency, the Indian Protection Service (SPI), revealed, as the New York Times put it, "evidence of widespread corruption and sadism, ranging from the massacre of whole tribes by dynamite, machine guns and sugar laced with arsenic, to the removal of an 11-year-old girl from school to serve as a slave to an official of the Service...
...But here, too, the consumer electronics industry predominates, and most of the plants simply assemble components imported duty-free from abroad...
...Many anthropologists agree with FUNAI that tribes like the Yanomamo must eventually become integrated into the dominant culture, but they argue that the only hope for the Indians lies in extremely gradual adjustment...
...More arrests were made in 1977...
...Meanwhile, the Indians, exposed to frequent contact with whites, immediately suffer deadly epidemics of diseases to which they have no immunity: colds, flu, measles, tuberculosis...
...In Jari, the development strategy of the generals reaches an extreme, but a logical one...
...He heads the Pastoral Commission on the Land, which studies problems of land tenure and distribution...
...According to a 1946 United Nations convention, which Brazil signed, genocide involves, among other things, the "intentional" subjection of a national, racial, religious or ethnic group to "conditions of existence that necessarily brings about its total or partial physical destruction...
...the Suia-Missu Ranch in Mato Grosso, which covers over a million acres and is owned by the Italian firm Liquigas...
...The government presents this as the pinnacle of achievement for the Indians...
...Soon afterwards came another plan, President Medici's dream of a Trans-Amazonian Highway, a 3,000-mile road to run from the Atlantic coast to the Peruvian border, largely through virgin forest...
...Brazilian law governing deforestation forbids any proprietor to clear more than 50% of the land and requires payment for the reforestation of an equivalent area...
...But to the populace of the appalling favelas, Operation Amazonia must seem less than a success...
...The Amazon and Ludwig are well suited to each other...
...Ludwig, of course, realizes that such measures have made him unpopular and judiciously has purchased one of Belem's daily papers and a radio station to help polish Jari's image...
...in either case, they search out some attractive land, clear the forest and pray to obtain legal title someday...
...In 1975, Brazil's balance-of-payments problems led the government to restrict imports, causing a minor retail recession in Manaus...
...The project is under absolute foreign command-to be specific, the command of an 82-year-old American with no apparent heirs...
...In the hotels of Porto Velho, a city in the Federal Territory of Rondonia that has doubled in size to 70,000 during the last decade, the paulistas sit and wait for a deal to close, for a bribe to reach the right hands, for the local bureacracy to budge...
...Irwin, Amazon Jungle: Green Hell to Red Desert...
...2. Shelton Davis, Victims of the Miracle: Development and the Indians of Brazil...
...The pattern is repeated throughout Amazonia...
...The territory contains large tracts of extraordinarily good soil for Amazonia, which suddenly became accessible *One hectare is about 2.5 acres...
...But the political support most important to Ludwig comes from the highest levels of the regime...
...Upon this forest kingdom Ludwig has lavished capital estimated at between $500 million and $1 billion...
...To the companies the influx is not unwelcome, since it assures a steady supply of very cheap labor...
...And that is only the expanse cleared with government permission...
...What actually happens, in a typical case, is that a peasant family arrives and may or may not register with INCRA...
...The rush up the BR-364 began in earnest in 1972...
...It pulls up everything by the roots...
...Where cattle enter, man exits...
...First came Operation Amazonia in 1966: the free trade zone, the creation of SUDAM- a giant agency to direct the flow of investment projects-and fiscal incentives...
...They sponsor capital-intensive export enclaves and encourage the concentration of land into huge fiefdoms, but they offer peasants and rural laborers little material support and virtually no legal protection...
...Benedito Tavares, an Acre landowner who was among the very few ever brought to trial for conditions amounting to slavery on his ranch, boasted publicly that he could buy any local policeman in the state for five dollars...
...Many of the subsidized ranches are enormous, adding to the concentration of landholdings in Brazil, and many are owned by foreigners...
...he has publicly declared that Jari should serve as a model for the occupation of the Amazon...
...Medici predicted that peasants would pour into the Amazon and build prosperous farms, towns and cities along the highway, thus narrowing the gulf between Brazil's modernizing south and its poverty-stricken north...
...In the meantime, which has already lasted 15 years, the guardians of public order do their best to crush any serious resistance...
Vol. 13 • May 1979 • No. 3
