Verso, 266 pp., $24.95
Oxford University Press, 383
pp., $17.95 (paper)
The World Bank, 56 pp., $5.95
(paper)
Holt, 215 pp., $19.95
If 1989 was the year of revolution in
Some answers to these questions are provided by the
books under review, each of which deals with some aspect of the tragedy of the
Amazon. Another kind of answer is provided by the controversy over the murder
in December 1988 of Francisco "
The Amazon is a vast region; not all of it is
rainforest, nor is all of it Brazilian. As it was legally defined in 1953, the
Amazon region within
A marvelously comprehensive introduction to the
rainforest can be found in the thoughtful and readable The Last Rain
Forests: A World Conservation Atlas edited by Mark
Collins. It provides maps of the present distribution of forest worldwide and
helps to place the Amazon in a global context, while one can study some of the
extraordinary fauna of the region in the beautifully produced and illustrated Neotropical Rainforest Mammals: A Field Guide, the first such broad regional guide ever
produced.
The paradox of this "rich realm
of nature," as the early Portuguese adventurers called it, is that while
the soils of much of the Amazon region are extremely impoverished, they can
still sustain more than 250 metric tons of living material per acre. For many
years no one could explain how they did so. As Alexander Cockburn and Susanna
Hecht point out in The Fate of the Forest, a survey of the region and
its crisis, the beginning of an answer came in 1960, thanks to the cold war,
when the US Atomic Energy Commission sought to find out what would happen to
forests in the event of a nuclear war, stimulating the first interdisciplinary
study of the tropical forest.
Students discovered that whereas forests in the
temperate zone draw nutrients up from the soil, in tropical forests the
nutrients derive from an exchange within the living forest and are held in the
tissues of living organisms. The leathery leaves
characteristic of the Amazon plant life conserve nutrients as well as high
levels of secondary chemicals, which make tropical leaves tough or poisonous to
eat, deterring predators and also making them a rich source of drugs.
Latex, a substance that acts as a defensive membrane for the Brazilian rubber
tree, Hevea brasiliensis,
is just such an adaptation. The wild germ plasm of
the forest includes cacao, palm hearts, guarana,
Brazil nuts, rubber, chicle, babassu
oil, fish, manioc, cashews, and coca. As Hecht and Cockburn observe, the global
annual value of the Amazonian natural products may exceed one hundred billion
dollars a year.[1]
The assault on the tropical forests has a long
history, and so does the history of human habitation in the forest. The year
2000 will mark the fifth century since the landfall on the Brazilian coast by
the India-bound fleet of the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares
Cabral. It was a land "with great groves of trees," according to the
fleet's notary, Pero Vaz de
Caminha, who described it in a letter to the king of
Like the coastal forest, the Amazon rainforest
before the arrival of the Europeans sustained a large population—it is
virtually impossible to estimate how large.[3]
In two brilliant books, John Hemming, who is director and secretary of the
Royal Geographical Society of London, has heroically tried to reconstruct from
thousands of pages of travel accounts, official reports, diaries, and
archeological and anthropological research the lost history of the annihilated
peoples of
Hecht and Cockburn tell us that the degree of human
intervention in the forest ecosystem is much greater than we have realized.
Scholars have learned from demographic reconstructions of the catastrophic and precipiate population decline in the
Both greed and good intentions caused
the destruction of the native population. By the 1570s, the rich forests of the
coastal region, especially those of the flood plains around the great natural
harbors of
As the Indian populations of the coastlands died
out, Portuguese missionaries who had arrived to proselytize the native
population moved inland to gain new converts. The Franciscans established Belém (
The religious orders, especially the Jesuits,
sought to protect the Indian population from enslavement by organizing new
communities of would-be peasant farmers. Although these concentrations
initially led to an even more rapid spread of disease, the Jesuits in time were
able to establish a network of protected villages throughout the lower Amazon
to complement the great missions they organized on the plains along the
As Hemming shows, the
missions were eventually suppressed by jealous officials of the monarchy
abetted by the colonists' avarice. In the late seventeenth century gold was
discovered and prospectors flooded into the interior. The colonial government,
suspicious of the loyalty of the Jesuit missions that were strategically placed
along the river systems, sent teams of surveyors, soldiers, and administrators
to establish
During the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries these hidden peoples would slowly be "discovered." Natural
scientists arrived to study the teeming life of the forest. European
anthropologists were sent to study living societies but, more often than not,
and certainly unintentionally, their contacts with unknown groups of Indians
helped to bring about their rapid disintegration. The Indians were proselytized
by Protestant fundamentalist missionaries who brought with them values regarded
as simplistic and ignorant by many in the societies they themselves came from.
The Indians were victimized by free-lance miners, adventurers, and trappers,
who were seeking gold, booty, or natural forest products, such as Brazil nuts
and rubber. These pioneers were both fearful of the native forest dwellers and
all too willing to exploit or kill them.
John Hemming has very little use for either the
Christian missionaries or the slavers, or for their modern counterparts. Amid
the relentless destruction of the indigenous population, his heroes are those
Indians who were uncompromising in their opposition to the white man. In fact,
he sometimes implies that the only good white man is a dead white man. There is
a special poignancy and irony to this view. During an expedition out of Cachimbo near the geographical center of Brazil in 1961,
then a crude airstrip in the forest, members of Kreen-Akrore
tribe had ambushed and killed Richard Mason, a young Englishman, among whose
companions was John Hemming.
But the killing of whites, when it occurred, never
did the Indians any good. The whites always had more guns and more resources—an
inexhaustible supply. They also brought the invisible influenza and other
viruses that could cause mass destruction of the Indians. The fatal power of
such infection was something that the closed Indian societies never
comprehended when they came into contact with Europeans. Along the river banks
throughout
In 1835, this population exploded in
the most violent and revolutionary of all nineteenth-century Brazilian
rebellions, the Cabanagem revolt, named after the
migrants' cabana huts on the flood plains near Belém.
Led by priests, rubber workers, and mutinous soldiers, the revolt was a mass
popular uprising of the caboclos
and large numbers of Indians against property owners and government officials.
The rebellion was put down with great ferocity. Some thirty thousand lives were
lost, a fifth of the population of the region. The rise in world demand for
rubber brought new settlers and new international attention at the end of the
century. The rubber tappers pushed far up into the
tributaries of the Amazon and toward the border
But Brazilian rubber could not compete with the new
plantations in Asia, and the region once more sank back into relative
obscurity, though not before more wild schemes and ambitions had been consumed
by the jungle, including the infamous and corruption-ridden construction of the
Madeira Mamoré railroad in the early part of the
century, the failed attempts at industrialized plantation agriculture by Henry
Ford in the 1930s and the billionaire Daniel K. Ludwig in the 1960s, all
well-known tales of greed, naiveté, and ecological ignorance, which are
described with verve by Hecht and Cockburn and others in what is sure to be a
new wave of travelers' tales of horror and disaster provoked by the growing
interest in the Amazon.[8] A more
realistic perspective was provided in the 1920s by Kenneth Grubb, a missionary
who wrote, in a sad reflection of the destruction of Indian communities, that
it was possible to travel from Belém to
without
seeing a distinctly tribal Indian. These rivers are silent today, except for
the lap of the waters along some deserted beach, the hoarse cry of the parrots
or the call of the inambu. The past has gone, with
its peoples, in central
The decimation of the Amazonian Indians, leaving a
population of no more than 200,000 today, is only part of the story of the
destruction of the rainforest. Just as destruction of the forest itself brings
with it the destruction of millions of unrecorded plants and creatures, so the
destruction of the Amazon Indians destroys knowledge of the forest acquired
over millennia. What is new since the 1980s is the scale of encroachment in the
last redoubt of the Amazon's native people.
World Resources, 1990–1991: A
Guide to the Global Environment, a marvelously comprehensive, well-produced
handbook, cautiously estimates the yearly loss of tropical rainforest in
Cockburn and Hecht blame the generals
who ran
The approach of Kubitschek
to development during the mid-1950s had very grave consequences that the books
under review fail to assess, partly because they are excessively concerned to
establish continuity with the exploitative Portuguese past. But Kubitschek and the military geostrategists
who took power after 1964, such as the éminence
grise of the military regime, General Golbery do Couto e Silva, did something radically new; they pressed for a
network of roads linking the northeast to the center and south of the country
to the Amazon basin. The credits and the special favors granted to southern
businessmen were intended at first to encourage them to invest in a region in
which they saw few prospects for profit. But the roads to the south undermined
the assumption that had dominated all previous thinking about the Amazon—the
central importance of the rivers. Now land routes were to have preference over riverine communication, forest clearance over forest
extraction, and water was to be considered a source of energy and not of life.
The dirt road to Belém
was soon paved, and between 1960 and 1970 some 300,000 migrants went to seek
their fortune along the highway. The Transamazonian
highway, intended to link the northeast and
As the huge road-building
programs opened up the region, government-sponsored projects to build new
settlements attracted migrants from
Businessmen from the south of
Overstocked, compacted, leached, and
degraded, these lands will require at least one hundred years to recover. Since government credits had been used by the
proprietors to offset their expenses elsewhere in
All of this is described in absorbing detail by Anthony Hall in his splendid book, Developing Amazonia. Hall convincingly demonstrates that
the notion of
In his more journalistic book, Adrian Cowell, who in the early 1980s was filming the onslaught of
settlers, jobseekers, entrepreneurs, and speculators in Rondônia
for a British TV documentary unit, describes how he became increasingly
appalled by the scale and senselessness of this new phase of Amazonian
development:
The history of
The Amazon frontier soon reproduced the large
landowning (latifundia) pattern of the
northeast and south of
At the same time the exploration of the Amazon
lands created a vast army of landless, temporary wage laborers who migrate to
the urban centers, and take jobs as seasonal workers or try to make a living as
independent prospectors for gold (garimpeiros).
Small farmers still produce 80 percent of the basic food crops and provide 82
percent of jobs in the eastern Amazon, but the concentration of landownership
between 1985 and 1988 has caused the output of such basic staples as beans and
cassava to fall by 8 percent and 14 percent respectively.
In the eastern Amazon, and especially in the Araguaia-Tocantins region, the expansion of settlement and
ranching followed the highway, and was accompanied by violent struggles over
land. Until the 1950s, the economy was based on the harvest of Brazil nuts (castanhas) and other forest products, and controlled
by a few powerful families, who shipped the nuts north to Belém.
Between 1969 and 1975 the Maoist offshoot of the Brazilian Communist party
established a guerrilla campaign in the region which fought sporadically with
the Brazilian army. The guerrillas were eventually suppressed by thousands of
troops.
Two other major factors came into
play here, each no less dangerous to the ecology—one set in motion by mining
for iron ore and the other by gold. These processes of mineral extraction and
their ecological and social consequences are the subject of Anthony Hall's Developing
Amazonia, which examines the vast complex for
mining iron ore and other minerals called the Carajás
project, and of David Cleary in his Anatomy of the Amazon Gold Rush.
Both books, like Adrian Cowell's Decade of
Destruction, have the great advantage of avoiding the hyperbole that
characterizes so much writing about
Amazonian iron and gold could hardly have produced
two more different kinds of organizations. Carajás is
a huge state enterprise, regional in scope, mainly concerned with producing
iron for export. To carry on the mining it has been provided with dams,
hydroelectric power, railroads, and port facilities, and it has the benefit of
large capital infusions from national and international investors. Prospecting
for gold, by contrast, is generally an independent and uncontrolled activity,
called garimpagem in
Only a small portion of the gold is sold to the
state, and accurate production figures, as always in the Amazon, are impossible
to come by. Cleary estimates that there are hundreds of thousands of garimpeiros. The gold they produce was estimated in
the late 1980s to be worth over one billion dollars annually. Gold mining
technology is cheap, and it is easy to run, the most complex machinery needed
being a small internal combustion engine. According to Cleary, in 1987 mining
professionals estimated that the garimpos were
producing around 120 metric tons of gold annually—which would place Brazil
third among world gold producers, behind only South Africa and the Soviet
Union—an amount equal to the great nineteenth-century gold rushes. The most
dramatic garimpo was the one found in 1979 at Serra Pelada, about 90 kilometers
from the city of
The gold prospectors do not cut down large tracks
of forest or take up large stretches of land as the ranchers do, but the
ecological impact of their activities can be devastating. The most insidious
and lasting damage comes from mercury, which is used
to separate the gold from the ore, and poisons both the environment and the garimpeiros. If the garimpeiros
were, as Cleary suggests, producing over a hundred metric tons of gold per
annum in the Brazilian Amazon during the 1980s, an equivalent amount of mercury
escaped into the atmosphere in the form of vapor as it was burned off during
the amalgamation process.
In addition, mercury is often spilled into the
ground and rivers near the garimpo. Testing in
the
The Carajás
iron project started as recently as 1967, when a helicopter with engine trouble
landed in a bare patch in the forest southwest of Marabá.
It was carrying several geologists who were astonished to find that they were
standing on the top of a hill made up of billions of tons of highgrade iron ore, bauxite, manganese, copper, nickel, and
cassiterite. The Brazilian government quickly took
over the site and assigned the stateowned mining
company CVRD (Companhia do Vale do Rio Doce) to develop it. The Greater Carajás
Project, as it became known, was granted control of a region of some 900,000
square kilometers—the size of France and Britain combined—and started an
enormous concentrated effort to build roads, a railway, dams, and a
hydroelectric power plant.
The Carajás program has
four major components: the iron ore mine, a highly mechanized open-pit mine
that began operation in 1986; two aluminum plants, one in Belém,
the other in São Luis, the capital of the state of Maranhão; the Tucuruí
hydroelectric complex on the Tocantins River; and a
nine hundred kilometer railroad inaugurated in 1985 to link Carajás
and São Luis, where a deep water port was opened a
year later. Japanese corporations are the single biggest group of investors,
through cheap loans of $500 billion to the Brazilian government. The EEC
invested $600 million. The World Bank provided $304 million, and $250 million
came from US commercial banks. Even the
Although within the CVRD enclave itself
environmental deterioration has been carefully monitored and controlled, the
company's own territory looks increasingly like a Potemkin
village, surrounded everywhere by devastation. The Carajás
program acted as a strong population magnet, attracting thousands of
construction workers, gold panners, small farmers,
and speculators into the region which until very recently had been tropical
forest. The insatiable demands for the charcoal used to smelt the iron ore will
eventually destroy over 70,000 acres of forest every year, and has already led
to destruction of the surrounding forest in a manner recalling the insatiable
demands of the sugar mills that consumed the coastal forests four centuries
before. The Tucuruí hydropower complex, for which
35,000 people were displaced, has the largest dam in any of the world's
tropical forests and it caused the flooding of 2,500 square kilometers of uncleared forest. The hydropower complex is central to the
entire scheme—supplying electricity at subsidized prices to the iron mine, the
aluminum plants, and the industries along the Carajás–São Luis Railroad.
The profitability of the Carajás project depends heavily on these huge state
investments and on the cheap energy they will produce. Electronorte,
the state monopoly electricity company in the Amazon, has grandiose plans for
sixty-three new reservoirs in the Amazon basin, twenty-seven for the Tocantins-Araguaia region alone.[13]
Road and dam building is immensely profitable, and all the major Brazilian
public works and construction companies, such as Camargo
Correa, Andrade Gutierrez, and Mendes Junior, are involved in the projects,
which absorb vast sums of government resources. Lucio
Flavio Pinto estimated that those expenditures
represent some 15 percent of
Many of the schemes for dams and reservoirs are
particularly ill-considered. The recently completed Balbina
reservoir near Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, covered an area of dense tropical forests and is,
like almost all other Amazonian basin reservoirs, extremely shallow; it
therefore produces a low level of energy per square kilometer flooded. Since no
environmental impact studies or land surveys were made before the flooding, no
one really knows what potential mineral resources were submerged in the
process. No programs for saving animals have been set up, nor has provision been
made for fish ladders at any of the dams. The deterioration of the quality of
the impounded water through decomposition and absorption of organic matter can
lead to a lack of oxygen in the water, cause corrosion of the hydroelectric
turbines, create a buildup of sulfuric acid, and help in the proliferation of mosquitos and the spread of intestinal diseases. Not
surprisingly, an epidemic of malaria has broken out in the Amazon region,
rising from a reported 51,000 cases in 1970 to more than one million in 1990.
Nowhere, moreover, have small projects been
developed to provide electricity to the rural populations. All the electrical
power generated has been for urban and industrial use, which only serves to
increase migration and to make more acute the crisis in producing food, which
is largely grown by the poor and vulnerable Amazon peasants. As the small
farmers and land-hungry migrants have faced the rapid concentration of land
into large holdings, society and the environment have been subject to damage that
Hall claims to be "unprecedented in Brazilian history."
The ending of military rule in 1985, if anything,
speeded the process of ecological depletion in the Amazon and intensified the
growing confrontation between large and small landowners. In 1986 it was
estimated that 64 percent of all conflicts over land in
After 1985 the conflict in the Amazon changed.
Powerful landed interests became politically more aggressive, as the military,
which had protected them, retreated and the political system became more
liberal. The Cruzado Plan of 1985–1986 which
temporarily reduced speculative profits in the money markets shifted investments
to land and property. The new civilian government also set up a ministry of
agrarian reform and a program of land reform was announced.
The proposed reform threatened to expropriate land
that was not in use and immediately caused more evictions and burning of
forests as landowners avidly began to open more pastures in order to prove the
land was being farmed. Peasants, too, occupied unused land on estates in the
hope of acquiring titles to it. Increasingly active workers' movements emerged
during the 1980s, organized by unions from the south and by the Church. They
began to articulate peasant demands for land reform, while their members
harassed and in some cases killed landowners. At the same time a powerful
organization of landowners and ranchers, the Rural Democratic Union (UDR), was
formed to oppose even the mild proposals for land reform that were put forward
by the administration of President José Sarney. The UDR's lobbying in Brasília was highly successful, and the
constitutional assembly in 1988 voted down a proposal that would have allowed
state expropriation of very large land holdings as part of a reform plan.
Many saw the hand of the UDR behind the increasing
sophistication and violence of the ranchers' response to the rural workers'
organizations, as well as the rising number of assassinations of union leaders,
church men and women, and labor lawyers. Amnesty International's Brazil:
Authorized Violence in Rural Areas, a report first published in September
1988, tells the story in grisly and horrifying detail. A steady increase in
reported killings of peasants in rural areas had occurred throughout
The failure to pursue serious investigations of
these crimes was tantamount to complicity in them, and Amnesty concluded that
the pattern of assassinations of workers' leaders was "so persistent that
it facilitates fresh killings and may amount to deliberate permissiveness
toward them." Amnesty could find only two cases in which hired gunmen were
convicted and sentenced for politically motivated killings and not a single
case in which those accused of commissioning the killings were brought to
justice.
The entire Amazon region was, in the
words of Anthony Anderson, "increasingly out of the control of the public
sector." Whereas government incentives and investment had once been a sine
qua non for private activity, now ranchers, farmers, miners, loggers, and
charcoal producers were working on their own. Ranchers were opening their own
roads. Private gold mines were polluting the rivers. Settlements of new
colonies were spreading along the southern flank of the region and overwhelming
the frontier communities already in place.
By 1987, in the Cachimbo
region near the center of
The burning season—whether for clearing farmland,
ranch land, or charcoal burning or for mining operations—was now affecting a
great arc from
The fires in the Amazon are entirely
manmade; they are not to be compared, for example, with the raging fires that
strike in the American West. For trees to burn in the wet tropical forest they
need to be felled and left for two or three months to dry. They are then
ignited usually by people who want to clear the land, sometimes simply in the
hope of selling it. That fire does not spread naturally in this region is
central to the surveillance efforts of the Brazilian space institute, which
began using meteorological satellites to provide four images each day of the
Amazon region. Using high-resolution satellite imagery one can obtain a good
map of areas burned, pinpointing particular properties.[15]
At the peak of the burning season, from the end of
August until early September, this space imaging revealed as many as eight
thousand separate fires in a single day throughout the region. Since at least
half the rainfall in the Amazon basin comes from water that is condensed from
within the forest atmosphere itself, the scale of deforestation threatened to
heavily reduce the region's rainfall. But it was the scale of the burning
forest revealed by the satellites that brought home to scientists that what was
occurring in
The reason for this threat lay in the vital link in
the carbon cycle between climate and forest. Carbon dioxide, water, and
sunlight make wood and release oxygen in a process of photosynthesis. In the
opposite reaction, wood decomposes or burns, producing energy and carbon
dioxide. What is important is the change in carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere. Since carbon dioxide acts as a heat-trapping gas, it keeps the earth
warmer than it would normally be. The burning of the Brazilian forest
dramatically shifts the balance, changing from a situation where much carbon,
perhaps 150 tons, is retained in the total mass of living organisms or
"biomass," to a system where only a small amount of carbon, around
fifteen tons, is retained in grassland or pasture. It is because of this
process, in which the forest is transformed into grassland or pasture, that
How dangerous? José Goldemberg,
a renowned Brazilian physicist and former president of the
The report, Environmental Damage and Climatic
Change, by the Ditchley Foundation, a body not
exactly famous for its extremism, states without hesitation that "global
warming is…the ultimate environmental threat." New global measures of the
surface temperature of the oceans, according to the Ditchley
report, show a rise of 0.1 degree centigrade per year for the last eight years.
This is a rate of 1.0 degrees centigrade per decade. An average global warming
of 1.5 degrees centigrade would alter the climate beyond anything experienced
by the planet in the past 10,000 years.[18]
There is a crude irony in this
tragedy. The Brazilian politicians and military strategists who planned and
promoted the march to the west did so in large part out of the desire to see
—This is the first of two
articles.
[1]
These figures were disputed by Roger Stone in a review of the Hecht and
Cockburn book, "The Politics of Deforestation," Issues in Science
and Technology (Spring 1990), pp. 77–78. He says, "The total value of
Brazilian exports, including manufactured goods, amounted to less than $34
billion in 1988." Hecht and Cockburn's figure, however, included coca, the
main product exported (albeit clandestinely) from the western Amazon basin.
[2] Full
text in W.B. Greenlee, ed., The Voyage of Pedro Alvares
Cabral to Brazil and India from Contemporary Narratives, Hakluyt Series, No. 81 (1838), pp. 3–33. Caminha's letter is reproduced in facsimile in the New York
Public Library exhibition catalog, Brazil–Portugal: The
Age of Atlantic Discovery (Editora Bertrand and
Franco Maria Ricci, 1990).
[3] All
the early accounts spoke of large populations. See Sir C.R. Markham ed., Expeditions
into the Valley of the Amazon: 1539, 1540, 1639, Hakluyt
Series, No. 24 (1859), pp. 61, 79, passim.
[4] John
Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Harvard
University Press, 1978), and Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian
Indians (Harvard University Press, 1987). Hemming is also author of
"How Brazil Acquired Roraima," Hispanic
American Historical Review, Vol. 70, No. 2 (May 1990), pp. 295–325.
Unfortunately, Hemming and other scholars rarely use the extraordinary riches
of the Portuguese archives to study these questions. They are particularly
valuable for any work on the Amazon, including scientific work. For an
introduction to the extensive scientific mission of Alexander Rodrigues Ferreira in the late eighteenth century, for
example, there is a good book by William Joel Simon, Scientific Expeditions
in the
[5] Sherborne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah,
Essays in Population History, 3 vols. (University of California Press,
1971, 1974, 1979).
[6] The
African component in the formation of Brazilian society of course parallels the
story of the destruction of the Indians and is essential to any understanding
of
[7] The
life of Vieira, one of the most remarkable figures of the seventeenth century,
is currently the subject of a major biography by Gregory Rabassa.
[8] The
best book on these topics, much mined though rarely acknowledged, is that by
[9]
Cited by John Hemming in Amazon Frontier, p. 246.
[10]
"A morte ronda os índios na floresta,"
Veja,
[11]
"Belém Para," Jornal
Pessoal, Vol. II, No. 64, July 1990.
[12] Fortune,
[13]
Wolfgang J. Junk and J. A. S. Nunes de Mello, "Impactos ecológicos das represas hidrelétricas
na bacia amazônica brasileira," Estudos Avançados, Vol. 4,
No. 8 (January–April 1990), pp. 126–143.
[14]
"Belém Para," Jornal
Pessoal, Vol. II, No. 64, July 1990, p. 10.
[15]
Alberto Setzer,
[16]
Foster Brown in "The Burning of
[17]
José Goldemberg, "A
Amazônia e seu futuro," Folha de São Paulo,
[18] Pearce Wright, Environmental Damage and Climatic Change (Ditchley Foundation Report Number D88/4).