Word: landings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Instead of model settlements, the Polonoroeste project has produced impoverished itinerants. Settlers grow rice, corn, coffee and manioc for a few years until the meager soil is exhausted, then move deeper into the forest to clear new land. The farming and burning thus become a perpetual cycle of depredation. Thousands of pioneers give up on farming altogether and migrate to the Amazon's new cities to find work. For many the net effect of the attempt to colonize Rondonia has been a shift from urban slums to Amazonian slums. Says Donald Sawyer, a demographer from the University of Minas Gerais...
...abandoned fields wind up in the hands of ranchers and speculators who have access to capital. Thanks to tax breaks and subsidies, these groups can often profit from the land even when their operations lose money. According to Roberto Alusio Paranhos do Rio Branco, president of the Business Association of the Amazon, nobody would farm Rondonia without government incentives and price supports for cocoa and other crops...
Rondonia's native Indians have fared worse than the settlers. Swept over by the land rush, one tribe, the Nambiquara, lost half its population to violent clashes with the immigrants and newly introduced diseases like measles. Jason Clay, director of research for Cultural Survival, an advocacy organization for the Indians, says that when the Nambiquara were relocated as part of Polonoroeste, the move severed an intimate connection, forged over generations, to the foods and medicines of their traditional lands. That deprived them of their livelihood and posterity of a wealth of information about the riches of the forest. Says Clay...
This courageous leader did not set out to save the Amazon but to improve the lot of rubber tappers, or seringueiros. He and his men would try to dissuade peasants from clearing land. The ranchers were eager to get rid of him, but he survived one assassination attempt after another. The conflict finally came to a head last year, when Mendes confronted a rancher named Darli Alves da Silva, who wanted to cross land claimed by rubber tappers to cut an adjacent 300-acre plot. After Mendes and a group of 200 seringueiros peacefully turned back the rancher...
Still, some Brazilians do accept that the outside world has a legitimate interest in the Amazon. Jose Lutzenberger, an outspoken environmentalist, notes that the Brazilians trying to develop the rain forest are themselves outsiders to the area. "This talk of 'We can do with our land what we want' is not true," he says. "If you set your house on fire it will threaten the homes of your neighbors...