Word: br
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other huge project, Polonoroeste, the government is trying to develop the sprawling western state of Rondonia. The program, backed by subsidies and built around a highway through the state called BR-364, was designed to relieve population pressures in southern Brazil. But Polonoroeste has made Rondonia the area where rain-forest destruction is most rapid, and the focal point of the fight to save the Amazon...
...results of the development have been chaotic and in some cases tragic. Machadinho, for instance, was supposed to be a model settlement village with gravel roads, schools and health clinics. But when a surge of migrants traveled down BR-364 to Machadinho in 1985, orderly development became a pell- mell land grab. Settlers encountered the familiar scourges of the rain forest: poor soil and inescapable mosquito-borne disease. Decio Fujizaki, a settler who came west four years ago, has just contracted malaria for the umpteenth time. Says he: "I always wanted my own plot of land. If only it wasn...
...Mendes' most important achievements was to help convince the Inter- American Development Bank to suspend funding temporarily for further paving of BR-364 between Rondonia and Acre. But the Brazilian government is again seeking the $350 million needed to complete the road all the way to Peru, a prospect that alarms environmentalists. "One lesson we have learned in the Amazon is that when you improve a road, you unleash uncontrolled development on the rain forest," says John Browder, a specialist on Rondonia's deforestation from Virginia Polytechnic Institute...
...opened Splash Mountain, which may be the most high-tech, high-thrill, fastest, longest, tallest log-flume ride in the world. Two thousand passengers an hour can shriek through the swirling path down the watery mountain, at speeds of up to 40 m.p.h. Serenading them along the way are Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Bear and other characters from Disney's 1946 partly animated film Song of the South. Since Splash Mountain opened July 18, visitors have typically waited an hour and a half for the 10-min. ride...
More pixilation is on the way. At Disneyland, stonemasons are now building the facade for the $35 million Splash Mountain, in which passengers will ride replicas of hollowed-out logs down huge slides and through tableaus populated by 101 robotic characters like Br'er Rabbit from Disney's 1946 film Song of the South. "We can control how much the passengers get wet, depending on the time of year," Eisner points out mischievously...