NEWS FROM
BRAZIL
supplied by Brazil Justice Net
Number 623, December 8, 2009
Visit our home page at: http://www.braziljusticenet.org
Dear News from Brazil
readers,
This will be our last
newsletter for 2009. We will return to our work in February,
2010.
We
the staff of Brazil Justice Net wish you much peace as we come to yet
another year’s end. May 2010 be a year filled with
more peace and
justice for Brazil and all the nations on this good Earth.
Best wishes,
Brazil Justice Net staff
In this week's News from Brazil:
The Valley of Resistance
By Silvia Alvarez
In
1969, guerilla leader Carlos Lamarca, member of the VPR (Popular
Revolutionary Vanguard) chose the Vale do Ribeira, a region along the
border of the states of São Paulo and Paraná, to
build a training
center for rural guerilla warfare. The following year in an
interview
with a European magazine, Lamarca commented that the rural worker was
receptive and capable of understanding [the ways of guerilla
warfare].
Meanwhile, the military did not accept such receptivity:
“The military
began to realize that we had gained popular support. They
arrested and
assassinated a young rural couple. They evacuated the
population in
the region and then bombed it. They continued the terror by
machine-gunning the forest, and sending low-flying aircraft over huts
still inhabited,” said Lamarca.
Twenty years later, after Brazil
had already established rights for election and began to write its new
constitution, the various populations of the Vale do Ribeira were
threatened again. This time, not by the military, but by a
company.
In 1989 the Brazilian Aluminum Company (CBA) began its first
feasibility studies of constructing the Tijuco Alto dam to be built on
the Ribeira de Iguape river. This would be the main dam among
three
other dams on the river, Batatal, Funil and Itaoca.
Another 20
years have passed, and not one of the proposed dams have been
built.
Once again, the people of the Vale de Ribeira have shown that they know
what it is to resist. In 2009, the Movement of Those Affected
by Dams
(MOAB) celebrated these two decades of resistance against the dams and
other types of this construction.
“When I arrived here in 1986,
I found various rural communities, and many, many trees--this impressed
me a lot--and a population forgotten by those in power, very rich in
their culture and in their relationship to the earth,”
commented Sr.
Sueli Berlanga, one of the founders of MOAB. Berlanga went on
to
comment that some of this richness no longer exists. There
are now
large extensions of land dedicated to eucalyptus and pine productions,
and other areas which have been deforested. Even so,
according to
statistics from the Social-Environment Institute (ISA), this region has
21% of what remains of the Atlantic Rainforest. Part of this
cultural
and environmental diversity are 273 natural caverns that attract
tourists and increase economic activity in the region.
The
Environmental Impact Study of the Tijuco Alto Dam estimates that 51
square kilometers--the equivalent of 11,000 soccer fields--of this
richly diverse area would be flooded, an area ripe for agriculture and
animal husbandry. The study affirms that 689 families would
be
affected by the construction of the dam.
“The Vale has always
been a forgotten land, a valley of misery, but now businesses have come
here because they have discovered the richness that we have, and want
to exploit it for the benefit of very few,” asserted
José Galindo,
professor of History and member of MOAB. “In
reality, everything is
part of the plan for the construction of the dam, the eucalyptus
plantation, the pine plantation, the construction of paper factories,
the construction of the port in Cananeia to export these
products. It
seems like they are isolated factors, by they are part of a big puzzle
now being put together.”
Together with the struggle against the
dams, MOAB has also fought for land titles for those living in
quilombos (communities of descendents of runaway slaves). The
Vale de
Ribeira has within its region 51 such quilombos, whose ancestors worked
as slaves in mining operations of the 18th century.
“We know what it
is to struggle for the rights of the quilombo communities and to
struggle against the dams. If the dams were constructed, we
would lose
the land for which we have struggled all these years, and for which our
ancestors struggled. The two struggles are
connected,” commented
Benedito Alves of the Ivaporunduva quilombo, considered to be the
oldest in the region.
Between 1989 and 1997, CBA began land
acquisitions and began to evict rural workers in the municipalities of
Ribeira and Cerro Azul, where the company’s quarry is located
for the
construction of the dam. The company acquired 379 properties,
paying
very little or nothing at all for these. In the case of
Joceli
Andadre, the company paid nothing. One day, a judicial
eviction notice
was presented to her and her family, along with a moving
truck. The
family never even had heard of the dam. “They
wanted to take us to the
mayor’s office, but we asked them to leave us here at my
father’s
house,” said Andrade who now lives in the periphery of Cerro
Azul with
her husband and five children, where they often have to beg for food.
Without
even being constructed, the dam has already generated unemployment and
misery. Sr. Sueli along with Sr. Angela Bigioni assert that
the owner
of CBA, Antonio Ermirio de Moraes has an enormous debt with the people
of the valley: “If we were to count all the energy,
time and money
spent during these 20 years of resistance, the hours of protesting,
under the hot sun, without food or water, the time families have wasted
on this issue instead of working on the farms, Antonio
Ermirio’s debt
is great.”
Of all the protests that have happened over these
twenty years, there have been many unforgettable moments, like the one
that happened in 1994 after a meeting of the Environment Council of
São
Paulo, where the Tijuco Alto dam project was being debated.
When
Antonio Ermirio de Moraes left the meeting, a young reporter from
Paulista State University approached him and asked him about the
project. Irritated, he grabbed the young woman and twisted
her arm.
At that moment the Globo and Bandeirantes television crews turned off
their cameras so as to not capture the scene. Another woman,
Araci
Pedroso, who lives on one of the quilombos of the region, grabbed de
Moraes’ arm and reprimanded him for assaulting the
reporter. He turned
to the Pedroso and asked sarcastically, “How much do you want
for your
land?” Pedroso responded, “It is not only
I who live on the land. You
would have to buy up everyone’s land, and this I doubt you
will ever
do. We don’t want your dam, and we don’t
want to sell.”
The
Tijuco Alto dam would not be the first dam to be built by CBA in the
region. They have already built two along the
Juquiá River. “When CBA
came here in 1968, it made the same promise it does today: it
would
bring development and jobs, and everything would change. If
you
compare Juquiá at that time to how it is today, you will see
that
nothing has changed practically. It continues to have one of
the
lowest human development index factors in the region,” said
one of the
inhabitants of Juquiá.
Source: Brasil de Fato, November 19 - 25, 2009
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reproduction of this
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