Blood Wood (Cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Online

Page:

Blood Wood (Cont.)


	Rainforest warrior: For Greenpeace Amazonia director Paulo Adario, the environment is just one more part of the luta, Brazil's struggle for social justice. (Seamus Murphy)

IN DECEMBER 1988, WHEN CHICO MENDES WAS shot down by an assassin in the western Amazon village of Xapuri, his murder galvanized a global movement to save the rainforest. Governments protested. Pop stars wrote songs. A thousand T-shirts bloomed. Books and films memorialized the uneducated rubber tapper who died defending the forest.

But the murder of activist Ademir Alfeu Federicci in Altamira in August 2001 echoed barely louder than the gunshot that killed him. Federicci, 42, was the leader of a group called the Movement for the Development of the Transamazon and Xingu; he was merely the most visible of countless rural Brazilian activists—social, religious, or labor leaders first, and environmentalists only by necessity, as they fight to preserve the rainforest for the indigenous people and poor farmers who live there. Dema, as Federicci was known, had loudly denounced the crooked middlemen and tree cutters taking mahogany out of the Middle Land, denounced the politicians who abetted them, and denounced the judges who looked the other way. Not long before he was killed, he had denounced the planned construction of a huge hydroelectric dam at the Xingu's Belo Monte falls, a federal boondoggle that would largely benefit sitting politicians, if Brazil's history of massive kickbacks was any guide. Federicci had been denouncing things his entire adult life. He was famous only among his enemies.

On the night of August 25, 2001, Federicci and his wife, Maria, went to bed in their hilltop home in Altamira, near the town's lightning-rod monument commemorating the arrival of electricity, in 1998. The Federiccis had electricity, but couldn't afford a fan, so they slept with the door open. At 1:30 a.m., two men approached the house; there was a struggle, a shot was fired; Dema Federicci died on the floor, with his wife and children looking on. The police said the killing was a botched attempt to steal the family's television and VCR, just another robbery gone wrong in violent Brazil. But the Federiccis didn't own a VCR. And a wealthy logger had reportedly joked that Dema would soon need some wood himself, for a coffin.

Perhaps you thought the Amazon was no longer a battlefield—it would be easy to assume that the warnings of the eighties and nineties gave way to a lasting solution. We were told that the rainforest was burning, vanishing at up to 3 percent a year, and that 40,000 species would go extinct in a generation. Those figures turned out to be a bit too apocalyptic. More realistic estimates suggest that the rainforest, a vast ecological storehouse encompassing a Western EuropeÐsize swath of northern Brazil and portions of Boliva, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, is shrinking at an annual rate of 0.9 percent. The extinction rate, though alarming, is also lower than projected. Still, it's a mistake to succumb to eco-fatigue, to think that media attention made everything OK, that Sting and Rainforest Crunch healed all wounds. The majority of the Amazon's 2.3 million square miles—80 to 85 percent—is still wilderness. But it is disappearing all the same.

The most immediate crisis in the Amazon today is that of violence—violence fueled chiefly by a chain of illegal trade that begins with big-leaf mahogany. The tree, which once ranged from southern Mexico to Bolivia, now exists largely in a swath of lonely, slow-growing timber stretching from Brazil into Bolivia and Peru. Its close American cousins were logged out of the Caribbean centuries ago, and are nearing commercial extinction in Central America; other mahoganies—the African genus Khaya, the Philippine Shorea—are still found in tropical forests worldwide, but are not as valuable as big-leaf, prized for its color and durability. According to TRAFFIC, a joint program of the World Wildlife Fund and The World Conservation Union, Brazil exports more than half the big-leaf mahogany on the world market—68,000 cubic meters in 1999, or $70 million worth—much of it from Pará state. Peru and Bolivia split the rest.

Mahogany is merely the wedge that opens the door to a whole cycle of deforestation: The Brazilian government no longer builds roads into the interior, so now poachers ransack the forest for the big trees, because only mahogany brings enough to pay for equipment, or a barge, or a private road. Once a road is built, less valuable woods—cedar, jatoba, and ipe, a rotproof hardwood used for suburban decks—become commercially viable. Plywood makers buy up the soft junk trees. Charcoal makers burn what's left. The roads draw poor farmers, unregistered extrativistas who plant yucca, scratching a living from the thin soil. Speculators from elsewhere in Brazil, along with an increasing number of Asian investors, buy up huge tracts, often on Indian or public lands no one has a right to sell. They hire pistoleiros to "clean" the land of the farmers who opened it. Cattle ranches and soy plantations follow.

In theory, Brazil does sanction mahogany logging on public lands; companies apply for permits for harvest, transport, and export. But there's been a moratorium on new logging permits since 1996, and an emergency ban on all harvest, transport, and export since October 2001. Despite these safeguards, a massive illegal harvest has taken place under cover of the legitimate one. Legal and contraband logs float downstream together, into the same sawmills and ports. Paperwork is forged, management plans from one forest used to disguise another. Most Brazilian wood ends up in the United States, which, according to TRAFFIC, imported 36,000 cubic meters of Brazilian mahogany in 2001, $44 million worth. Total U.S. big-leaf imports that year were 85,000 cubic meters.

Like any threatened species, big-leaf mahogany is traded under the rules of the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES). And like any illicit trade, it is notoriously difficult to quantify. In 1997, estimates claimed that as much as 80 percent of Brazil's mahogany was illegal. No way, says the country's environmental enforcement agency, the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Renewable Resources (IBAMA). While mahogany was indeed stolen from Indian lands, the agency says, the vast majority was legal, and today the trade is kaput. But Greenpeace, using IBAMA figures, counters that half the mahogany logged between 1999 and 2001 was taken illegally.

In the future, it should be possible to get more detailed pictures of the problem, thanks to the Amazon Surveillance System (SIVAM), a $1.4 billion project financed largely by the U.S. Export-Import Bank that uses upgraded satellite images and new ground sensors to track illegal activities—including drug smuggling and deforestation—across 1.9 million square miles of the Amazon. But for now, the illegal trade remains a splendid racket, a multimillion-dollar business concentrated in the hands of a few. And as activists like Federicci rise up in the footsteps of Chico Mendes, protesting this racket, they are laid low with dispatch.

The Pastoral Land Commission, a nongovernmental organization linked to the Catholic Church, estimates that in Pará alone, 475 activists have been assassinated since 1985. In 2001, at least ten Pará social leaders were killed. Most, including Federicci, had signed a letter against government corruption. In October 2001, a list of 24 more Pará leaders who were "marcados para morrer," or marked for death, was published by the Human Rights Commission of Brazil's House of Representatives. It is difficult to track the killings, and dangerous: Leônidas Martins, an Altamira lay worker for the Pastoral Land Commission who collected statistics on Pará killings, was himself threatened with death, as was Zé Geraldo, a political deputy who investigated the crimes.

Meanwhile, the murders get grislier: On July 22, 2002, the body of Bartolemeu Morais da Silva, an activist from the Altamira Rural Workers Union, was discovered beside a highway, with both legs broken and 12 gunshot wounds to the head. It was the second assassination in a month.

In Brazil these deaths have become routine. And in the rest of the world, they have gone unnoticed, as silent as the felling of one more giant in the Middle Land.

Page: