RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Ecologists sounded
the alarm: the Amazon rain forest is disappearing at the fastest rate in nearly
a decade. But the outcry left many Brazilians suspicious.
They say the protesters don't really care about saving the world's largest
wilderness -- they want to steal it from Brazil.
Sprawling over 4.1 million square kilometers (1.6 million square miles), the
Amazon covers nearly 60 percent of Brazil. Largely unexplored, it contains
one-fifth of the world's fresh water, oil, diamonds, gold and untold other
mineral and biological riches.
Last year, the Brazilian Amazon lost an area of 26,130 square kilometers (10,088
square miles) of rain forest, an area slightly smaller than Belgium.
Environmentalists estimate as much as 20 percent of the jungle already has been
cut down by ranchers, loggers, farmers and developers.
But the idea that the Amazon is important for the world's climate, its
biodiversity and a global heritage is seen as a smoke screen -- the rain forest
belongs to Brazil, and anyone who says different has ulterior motives.
"I am also convinced that the international attention to the recent news of
deforestation has much more to do with the internationalization of the Amazon
than with preservation of the rain forest," Gen. Claudio Barbosa de
Figueiredo, head of the Brazilian military's Amazon Military Command, said at a
seminar entitled, "The Amazon Brazilians Don't Know."
To outsiders, fear of an invasion by a more powerful country such as the United
States seems farfetched. Indeed, in other countries that have Amazon rain forest
within their borders -- Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Suriname, and French
and British Guyana -- people tend to fear more that Brazil will try to seize the
entire rain forest than that a superpower will invade.
But in Brazil, a recent poll sponsored by Renctas, a group that combats animal
trafficking, found that 75 percent of the people believe their country runs a
real risk of being invaded by a foreign power that covets the country's vast
natural riches.
"The strategic axis of confrontation has shifted from East-West to
North-South," Figueiredo said. "In other words, the rich countries of
the north are confronting the countries that want to develop in the south to
impede this in every possible way."
Figueiredo explained that Brazil's generals have developed a strategy of
"resistance" to deter a superior military power by employing guerrilla
tactics in the Amazon.
"There are military planners seriously engaged in this policy of
resistance. When I ask them who the superior power might be, they say 'the
United States' or 'the G-8,'" Celso Castro, a history professor at the
Getulio Vargas Foundation said at a seminar here. "Most of my students
believe foreign invasion is a real threat, too."
In recent years, the government has spent US$1.4 billion (euro1.15 billion) on a
sophisticated radar system to monitor air traffic over the Amazon region and has
bulked up troop strength along its porous jungle borders.
The conspiracy theorists say groups defending the environment or Indian rights
are merely fronts for interests to steal the region's riches and undermine
national sovereignty. Foreign military aircraft cruising in or near Brazilian
airspace are said to be attempting to map the region's vast mineral wealth.
Many Brazilians believe that grade school children in the United States are
taught the Amazon is part of an "international reserve."
"That's what people are raised to believe here. Most people believe in one
form or another that foreigners want to steal the rain forest," said Philip
Fearnside, a research professor for 29 years at the National Institute for
Research of the Amazon, in the jungle city of Manaus.
"There's a lot of suspicion of science or money coming from outside,"
Fearnside said. "It affects conservation. It prevents a lot of things from
happening that might be done."
Despite the great expectations for the rain forest, it remains mostly empty. The
Amazon is home to only about 10 million of Brazil's 183 million people -- most
Brazilians live far away, in the big cities of the south and the Atlantic coast.
For years, foreigners have tried and failed to strike it rich in what Brazilians
often call the "green hell."
In the 1920s and '30s, U.S. tycoon Henry Ford spent US$20 million (euro16.4
million) on a massive project to harvest rubber, only to see it fail when the
trees were ravaged by leaf blight.
In the 1980s, automaker Volkswagen undertook a project for large-scale cattle
ranching in Para state. It also failed, despite billions of dollars (euros) in
tax breaks, because of high operating costs and poor infrastructure.
Perhaps the most ambitious project was conceived by U.S. billionaire Daniel K.
Ludwig, who shipped a floating pulp mill and a factory all the way from Japan --
only to discover that the jungle was inhospitable to the huge monoculture of
gmelina trees planted to produce high-quality paper.
Ludwig turned the project over to a Brazilian consortium in 1981, which paid
nothing but assumed the project's massive debt.
Today the Amazon is being invaded by soybeans. Environmentalists say soybean
farming has driven up the price of deforested land, encouraging cattle ranchers
to sell their pastures and head deeper into the jungle, clearing forest and
selling the wood to loggers.
But Brazilian businessmen backing the soy expansion blame criticism on outside
meddling.
"Behind the environmental concerns are economic interests. They are trying
to impede or slow the growth of Brazilian production," Mato Grosso state
Gov. Blairo Maggi -- who is also one of the world's largest soybean producers --
said in 2003.
Albert Fishlow, director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia
University in New York, said that although the Amazon remains desperately poor,
Brazilians still see it as the land where millions of dollars (euros) can be
made and live in fear that someone other than Brazil will get that money.
Speaking in a telephone interview, Fishlow called the theory of a foreign
conspiracy politically convenient.
"These kinds of things have a way of emerging exactly when there's a
frustration," he said. "It lets people focus, lets them see that
Brazil is being saved from the rest of the world."
Source: Associated Press