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Blood Wood (Cont.)


	Contested territory: Extrativistas on the Rio Jarauçu (Seamus Murphy)

"THE AMAZON HAS TWO FACES," Adario likes to say. "It's hard to tell what's real and what's mythology."

Out in the small logging towns of the rainforest, the mahogany shutdown is myth; the reality is still in shadows. Greenpeace can't be everywhere, though it helps organize and fund dozens of small local labor, religious, and indigenous-rights groups fighting for land reform. About 25 members of these grassroots groups are meeting in Pôrto do Moz, a sawmill town at the mouth of the Xingu, to drum up support for two planned sustainable-forest reserves. Adario suggests that I look them up before the pistoleiros do.

As the turboprop climbs up from the tarmac, the region appears to be in terrible shape, but the slashed clearings soon thin out and the roads disappear. From 10,000 feet, the rainforest looks placid and undisturbed, cut by curving channels that carry one-sixth of the flowing fresh water on earth. Great flocks of egrets move in V's below the plane, submerged savannas reflect the sky, and the smooth green carpet seems, falsely, like an infinite plain of trees.

The activists gathered in a tin-roofed shed on Pôrto do Moz's dismal main street are mostly fishermen, farmers, and members of a women's cooperative, but there are also three ordained ministers (Catholic, Methodist, and Evangelical, all wearing flip-flops). The only foreigner is Georg Roling, a German development worker with the lean frame of a malaria survivor. Beside him is 29-year-old Tarcisio Feitosa

Amazon chic has touched even the most remote of rainforest boomtowns: "You'll never guess who sat right in that seat," my cabdriver told me in Altamira. "Sting!"

da Silva, the Amazon's number-one fashion victim, dressed in white from baseball cap to shoes. A former colleague of Federicci's, Tarcisio has taken Dema's place as a thorn in the logging industry's side. There is also a representative from Brazil's leftist Worker's Party, Idalino Nunes de Assis, an older man with the lined face of an activist used to backwoods work. Both Brazilians are in danger: Idalino has received multiple threats, and the federal government has notified Tarcisio that his name is on a death list. By summer's end, both men will be in hiding.

The discussion centers on generating support for the two reserves, which would shut out corporate logging in favor of renewable uses like the harvest of palm fruit, nuts, and a few trees. One would be up in the Middle Land, west of the Xingu. The second would lie just across the river, south of the Trans-Amazon Highway. We set out on a day of forest revivals, spreading the eco-gospel up the Jarauçu, a Xingu tributary running through one proposed reserve. The current is narrow, fast, and brown, and Idalino steers over submerged fields to villages of stilt houses where fat, striped fish are visible through cracks in the floorboards. He regales the villagers with impassioned sermons: "The corporate groups are using you as beasts of burden!"

But many of the extrativistas will have none of Idalino's reserves: They are unregistered with any government; they've heard rumors that they won't be able to plant corn, or keep chickens, that they will be arrested. That night, on a ferry up the Xingu, watching the boat's wake as we rumble upstream to Altamira, Roling laments what he calls "conservation imperialism," the way foreigners' well-meaning solutions—land trusts that buy huge tracts, ice cream companies offering a square inch of forest per pint sold—don't take into account this overwhelming poverty. "Preservation," he says, "doesn't give you anything to eat." (Adario has said the same thing—with 20 million people in the region, "you can't put a bubble over the Amazon.")

Fear of outsiders plays into the hands of logging interests. When parts of the Amazon were declared World Heritage sites in 2000, Brazilian nationalists said foreigners were stealing part of the country. And loggers have circulated a pamphlet that calls Greenpeace the "Vanguard of the Global Monarchy," accusing it of colluding with the British and Dutch royal families to impoverish the Third World.

Black dolphins play in the Xingu after sunset, and we spend a long, surprisingly cold night packed in swaying hammocks, chugging past more than 80 sawmills, before reaching the falls at Belo Monte, where we catch a cab the last 25 miles to Altamira. The town where Dema Federicci was murdered is filthy and sprawling, full of trucks, chainsaw dealerships, whorehouses, and pro-logging sentiment. The activists are on eggshells here. Adario won't even visit the city. But posters of Federicci ("dema, your work is not forgotten") are everywhere. And Amazon chic has touched even this remote boomtown. "You'll never guess who sat right in that seat," a cabdriver told me. "Sting!"

In Altamira more activists greet us, eight of them on death lists of some kind. One is a T-shirted American nun in her seventies, Dorothy Stang from Dayton, Ohio. A member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Stang has lived in Brazil since 1966; she's used to the heat, the humidity, and the insects, but not the death threats. "The logging companies work with a threat logic," she says, describing the shadowy magic in which one day a company or rancher will complain about an activist, and the next he'll be gone. "They elaborate a list of leaders, and then a second movement appears to eliminate those people."

Stang says she received her most recent death threat just three days ago, after helping disarm three pistoleiros trying to evict farmers from land claimed by a wealthy rancher. "If I get a stray bullet," the sister says cheerily, "we know exactly who did it."

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