Blood Wood (Cont.) | Outside Online

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Blood Wood (Cont.)


	If you build it, they will come: only the price of mahogany can finance a new road in the Amazon. (Seamus Murphy)

GIVEN THIS CLIMATE, an environmentalist has to have a certain defiant disdain for the odds. No one projects this more joyfully than Paulo Adario, the director of Greenpeace Amazonia, a division of Greenpeace International run out of Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state. Led by a Brazilian, and more committed to people than trees, this isn't your usual collection of rainbow warriors. For one thing, in Manaus, saving the rainforest means keeping some serious firepower in the back room.

Greenpeace headquarters sits atop a hill, surveying the sweaty gray buildings and noisy streets along the fat Rio Negro, where it flows into the Amazon. A bricklayer is busy when I arrive in early May, constructing a new guardhouse to go with the new security gate, the new razor wire, and the new electric fence across the roof. There's also a new set of security cameras both outside and inside the whitewashed three-story structure. Greenpeace HQ is starting to look a lot like Fort Apache.

Adario appears on the second-floor balcony, waving at the guard to buzz me in. He is wearing sandals, jeans, and a T-shirt. "This is the opposite of our projeto," he mutters. For Greenpeace, the projeto is supposed to mean openness and transparency, not walls and wire. But after Greenpeace Amazonia released a damning report on illegal mahogany in the fall of 2001, Adario received so many death threats that he and his family moved into the Greenpeace compound. Adario may be too effective for his own good.

Like Chico Mendes, Adario is an inheritor of the luta, Brazil's struggle for social justice, and, like Mendes, he uses the environment to fight for larger things. A former journalist from Rio de Janeiro, he spent the 1980s criticizing Brazil's military dictatorship and the corruption of its democratic successor. He joined Greenpeace Brazil when it was founded in 1992, and helped launch Greenpeace Amazonia in 1999. Since becoming director in 2000, Adario has combined international charisma with a homegrown sense of Latin realities, alternating between backwoods bushwhacking in Brazil and lecturing in careful English from Amsterdam to New Haven, where last spring he wowed the green intelligentsia at the Yale School of Forestry. Back home, he borrows freely from the Greenpeace playbook with endless propaganda stunts—sending his young volunteers out to crash forest-industry conferences or rappel down hotels unfurling banners.

"It's not about mahogany!" Adario tells his devoted crew at midnight strategy sessions. "At the end of the day, we are not discussing a tree in the forest! We are discussing democracy!" A 53-year-old man with curly salt-and-pepper hair, a short beard, and rimless spectacles, Adario fiddles with a can of Copenhagen tobacco as we wander through the building. The top floor has a video production suite, a lunchroom that serves as the main hangout for the dozen or so staff, and a kitchen, but every inch of surplus space is crowded with bunk beds and suitcases. Along with Adario and his family, Phil from England, Dave from Scotland, Merel from Holland, and Marcelo, Agnaldo, and Diego from Brazil have moved into the relative safety of Greenpeace HQ. The place has the fetid, untidy atmosphere of a college dorm during finals.

The second floor looks better. Here, in what Adario calls "the intelligence center," computers are used to crunch data, churn out propaganda, and analyze satellite images from Brazil's federal mapping agency for new roads or freshly cleared ranchland.

Downstairs, in the garage, gear is stacked everywhere: There are two speedboats; two dirt bikes for negotiating rainy-season logging roads; life vests for the Arctic Sunrise, the Greenpeace polar vessel that serves as mobile headquarters on investigative forays upriver; an industrial slide projector for throwing slogans onto the walls of banks and other capitalist command posts; an inflatable yellow chainsaw the size of a sofa, for mocking sawmill owners; and charts for the floatplane. Tucked in a cabinet, behind some paint cans, is a pistol-grip, high-intensity ultraviolet lantern.

The lantern is the source of Adario's current troubles. Greenpeace launches several long field expeditions each year, and in July 2000 Adario led a four-month investigation up the Xingu. Spotting illegally harvested mahogany logs stacked along the banks on Kayap- lands, Adario and his cohorts generously daubed the logs with invisible ultraviolet paint.

In the next few weeks, the team, accompanied by a film crew, raided several sawmills on the lower Xingu, scanning stacks of mahogany with the ultraviolet lantern. Bingo. The beam illuminated the brilliant purple flash of ultraviolet paint, proving for the cameras that these were the same trees stolen from the Kayapó. They found another large shipment of illegal timber in the yard of COMPENSA, a lumber company partly owned by a Chinese municipal government. When Greenpeace inflated its giant yellow chainsaw and picketed the COMPENSA yard, Adario was sued by the company for "invasion of property," a criminal offense with a penalty of up to two years in jail. Adario won the case.

In October 2001, after several more forays up the Xingu, Greenpeace Amazonia released a 20-page report, "Partners in Mahogany Crime," that named names all the way down the line, starting with two powerful Pará state businessmen, both connected to top politicians. The report described Moisés Carvalhos Pereira and Osmar Alves Ferreira as "kings of mahogany" who finance illegal logging, broker sales to sawmills, and arrange export through a mafia of shifting front companies. The two men control more than 80 percent of the mahogany that leaves Pará, Greenpeace alleged, and more than half that leaves Brazil. Both are now under federal indictment, and both have used their lawyers to avoid arrest. Moisés—so famous he is referred to by one name, like a soccer star—no longer leaves Redenção, the southeast Pará logging town he basically owns.

"Partners in Mahogany Crime" got big play on Brazil's dominant television network, TV Globo. It appeared in the midst of a congressional investigation into an Amazon development scheme that had funneled millions into the shell corporations of crooked politicians, and was released as the president of Brazil's senate resigned, under allegations that he was implicated in embezzlement and illegal-logging schemes. In the wake of the report, on October 22, 2001, Brazil announced its blanket mahogany moratorium, leaving the enforcement to IBAMA, an outfit then so broke that it typically deployed just two men to patrol an area the size of California. With helicopter fuel begged from Greenpeace, IBAMA was able to seize $7 million worth of mahogany in ten days.

The Greenpeace report also claimed to have traced illegal mahogany to such well-known furniture makers and retailers as Harrods and, in the U.S., Stickley & Sons, Ethan Allen, and Lane. At the same time, it cautioned that those companies were most likely unwitting consumers and that, unless the wood was certified by the international nonprofit Forest Stewardship Council, "there is no way of knowing whether the mahogany they sell is legal." Still, the report added, "odds are that it is not."

Even Queen Elizabeth II has been caught up in the confusion. In June, the London Guardian reported that the new Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace had used five kinds of threatened tropical hardwoods, including mahogany, from dubious sources in Africa and Brazil. Like the queen herself, the architects had a policy of buying wood from sustainable forests. But they had hired a contractor, who hired a subcontractor, who hired a supplier, who bought the wood from a middleman, who got it from dealers on the strength of export certificate "details," which are routinely faked.

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