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Blood Wood (Cont.)


	Dixie bound: suspect mahogany is loaded onto a ship in Brazil's Atlantic port of Belém, headed for the U.S. (Seamus Murphy)

ADARIO HAS CONSISTENTLY CONFOUNDED those who try to guess his next move: No sooner had Greenpeace fought for the ban on mahogany exports than Adario turned around and started advocating the methods of two logging companies that used low-impact harvesting techniques on private lands. In the long run, keeping the forest intact could generate more revenue than logging it. But so far, aside from a few WWF and Body Shop demonstration projects, sustainable forestry is still only a nice theory when you're talking about a major cash crop like mahogany. Cooperating with (some) loggers, Adario believes, is necessary to move Greenpeace's Amazon campaign away from gringo utopianism and toward Latin American realism. He has forged a relationship, for example, with Cecilio Rego De Almeida, one of the wealthiest land barons in Brazil. Greenpeace doesn't make noise about his 30,000-square-mile claims in the Middle Land, and De Almeda lets Greenpeace use his airstrip to chase off freelance wood poachers. Politics makes for strange hammock mates.

Then again, Adario often won't work with groups that would seem to be his allies, which is why the Greenpeacers have headed to Belém. Adario can't resist a chance for political theater, and a three-day conference on "Sustainable Trade and Management of Mahogany" is the perfect stage.

The sprawling Amazon delta city is being lashed by the tail end of the rainy season, and people duck under colonial eaves and rush, soaking, into the Hilton Hotel, where the lobby is thick with American timber importers in slacks, Brazilian exporters in gold chains, and academics with pocket protectors from both countries. Adario's contingent have put on sport coats, but they don't blend in and are stopped at the door. Greenpeace wasn't invited.

It's not exactly a shoving match. A couple of hotel flacks keep the Greenies at bay while Adario protests—"Why are you afraid of?"—in rare mangled English. Security guards and eventually Pará state police are brought over, and finally Keister Evans, director of the Tropical Forest Foundation, comes out. Evans is a lean, gray-haired American, and his Virginia-based conservation group, which also represents machinery companies like Caterpillar, works with genteel green groups like The Nature Conservancy and the WWF. Familiar duelists, the two begin their usual finger-pointing ritual: Adario claims TFF's politics of compromise clear the way for deforestation; Evans sees blustery Greenpeace as beyond the pale. Adario fulminates about imminent banner-unfurling and street action, and then goes for his ultimate weapon—the media. When a Belém TV crew arrives, Adario bathes in the glow of a camera from TV Liberal, denouncing the "logging mafia" and protesting his exclusion. But Evans calmly surveys the reporters and the microphones, and outfoxes Adario by letting Greenpeace inside. Deprived of the advertised conflict, the journalists leave, and Adario puts on a name tag and takes notes with exaggerated seriousness. "I don't want to win," Adario, clearly frustrated, vents to his staff later. "I want to fight!"

Evans just wants him to go away. His foundation, he says, represents the legitimate players in the timber business, not the millionaire middlemen. "Mahogany," he says wistfully, "has become a lightning rod," at the expense of the legitimate trade. "In Brazil, mahogany is totally out of business. Totally."

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