Energy Appetite Fuels Building Spree in Amazon Rain Forest — Futile Indian Protests Can’t Stop Hydro Dams
By Alan Clendenning
ALONG THE XINGU RIVER, Brazil – Indians fish from canoes along the curves of this Amazon tributary and tend manioc crops near the site of a proposed dam talked about for decades – but now pushing forward under Brazil’s multi-billion-dollar construction spree.
The Belo Monte dam will swallow thick rain forest and harm rare fish, as well as the livelihoods and homes of roughly 15,000 people who live in this remote area of northeastern Para state, critics say.
Flush with cash from its roaring economy, Brazil is spending $296 billion in the next two years alone on huge hydroelectric dams, transcontinental roads and other infrastructure to expand industry, boost exports, create jobs and help speed the emergence of Latin America’s largest country as a world economic power.
But at a time when the world is focused on climate change and Amazon rain forest destruction, Brazil’s boom means paving, flooding and stringing power lines through thousands of miles of pristine jungle.
Edivaldo Juruna, a subsistence farmer and fisherman who lives in a ramshackle wooden house on a sandbar, worries when he hears the dam will flood 170 square miles of Amazon basin and turn a 90-mile stretch of the river into stagnant puddles.
“Up there near the city it’s going to flood, but down here it’s going to dry up,” said Juruna, an Indian whose last name is the same as his tribe. “Everyone’s talking about the jobs that will come and that there will be energy for Brazil. But no one’s talking about the bad side.”
Tensions are climbing. Some 1,000 Indians gathered in nearby Altamira last week to fight the proposed $6.7 billion dam, planned as the world’s third-largest power producer behind China’s Three Gorges and Itaipu on the border between Brazil and Paraguay.
On Tuesday, painted and feathered protesters attacked a national electric company official with machetes and clubs after he spoke to the group; he left shirtless and bloody from a gash in his shoulder.
Friday, Hundreds of Amazon Indians capped their protest against the construction of a multibillion dollar dam by swimming in the river they say it will destroy.
“Xingu, alive and free forever!” sang the crowd as feathered and painted women bathed their children in the half-mile wide river.
Indians and environmentalists thought they had beaten the dam in 1989, when a similar protest drew the rock star Sting and international condemnation.
But now Brazil has the money for such projects without needing outside help, and the dam is scheduled for bids next year.
The country’s boom-and-bust cycles are long gone. It paid off its foreign debt last year and this month was declared a safe place for foreign investors to park money, with a debt upgrade from the Standard & Poor’s ratings agency.
Critics say the pro-development forces in President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government have taken control, the reason cited for famed Amazon preservationist Marina Silva’s resignation as Brazil’s environment minister this month.
The Brazilian leader already is battling a spike in rain forest destruction and has sent federal police and environmental workers to crack down on illegal logging.
He argues the mega-projects are needed to create jobs in desperately poor regions and to share the country’s new wealth. Half of all Brazilians get by on $500 a month or less.
“We shouldn’t think of the Amazon as a sanctuary,” Silva said in a speech earlier this month.
The government’s coordinator for Amazon policy defended the plan, saying that despite the environmental concerns, “we must remember that water-based energy is the cleanest form of energy.”
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Nation on the move
Brazil’s most ambitious construction projects:
BELO MONTE DAM: $6.7 billion project in the Amazon state of Para will supply an estimated 11,000 megawatts of power by 2014, or 6.3 percent of Brazil’s electricity needs. Critics say it will harm fish stocks vital to 14 tribes that inhabit the Xingu National Park down river.
SANTO ANTONIO DAM: $5.3 billion project on the Madeira River in western Rondonia state will provide some 3,150 megawatts of energy, or about 4 percent of Brazil’s electricity needs by 2012. Critics say it will require thousands of miles of transmission lines through the western Amazon.
JIRAU DAM: $5.2 billion project, also on the Madeira River, will provide another 4 percent of Brazil’s electricity needs by 2013. Critics say flooding from the dam could cover twice the anticipated space and extend into Bolivia.
SAO FRANCISCO RIVER DIVERSION PROJECT: $2 billion project would divert Brazil’s fourth-largest river, the Sao Francisco, to irrigate several of the country’s poorest and most drought-ridden states. Critics say the project will cause the already degraded Sao Francisco River to dry up.
HIGHWAY TO THE PACIFIC: $810 million highway would link Acre state in the western Amazon with Peru, providing Brazil’s first road link to Pacific ports and cheaper transport for soybeans, iron and other commodities to Asian markets. Critics say the new road would increase deforestation and draw more people to the fragile Amazon rain forest.
– Associated Press
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Originally published by Alan Clendenning Associated Press .
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