[Marxism] Lula caves in to loggers

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, February 13, 2005
Brazil, Bowing to Protests, Reopens Logging in Amazon
By LARRY ROHTER

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb. 12 - To the dismay of environmental groups here and 
abroad, the Brazilian government has restored logging licenses that were 
suspended last year as part of an effort to impede deforestation in 
frontier areas of the Amazon where the jungle is rapidly vanishing.

The turnabout came after loggers and their allies blocked a major highway 
through the heart of the jungle and a large tributary of the Amazon River, 
burned buses, and threatened to pollute waterways with chemicals and seize 
an airport.

Environmental groups described the government's unexpected policy change as 
a setback to conservation efforts in the Amazon and said it would only 
encourage further lawlessness in an area already noted for violence.

"Giving in to blackmail is always a dangerous precedent, and I think that 
is the case here," said Adriana Ramos of the Socio-Environmental Institute, 
a leading research and advocacy group. "Before long, somebody else appears, 
also wanting to unilaterally force negotiations, so it is important that 
the government not weaken the implementation of the law."

This dispute is the latest of several since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and 
the left-leaning Workers' Party took office two years ago in which the 
government has bowed to organized acts of civil disobedience. Ranchers, 
rice growers and farmers who blocked highways last year to prevent the 
establishment of an Indian reservation in the northern Amazon also got 
their way, and landless peasants regularly invade and occupy farms with no 
legal action taken against them.

On Jan. 27, the senior environmental inspector in the eastern Amazon state 
of Para vowed that the government "will not cave in to blackmail." But when 
the leader of the loggers' association was quoted as warning that "blood 
will flow" unless his group's demands were met, and business and political 
leaders in towns along the blockaded BR-163 highway complained that 
supplies were running short and normal commerce was grinding to a halt, 
officials in Brasília apparently had second thoughts.

The official announcement of the reversal was made just before Carnival, 
with Brazil's attention focused on those festivities. Spokesmen for the 
environment minister, Marina Silva, a former rubber tapper who was a close 
friend and ally of the environmentalist leader Chico Mendes until gunmen 
hired by ranchers assassinated him in 1988, said she was not available for 
an interview.

But in a statement issued in Brasília, the government said it had "not 
given in to any pressure or backed away from any of its previous 
decisions." The restoration of logging licenses was described as a 
"transitional" measure aimed at ending "the impasse facing productive 
sectors" in the Amazon.

What is behind the logging dispute is another, even more fundamental issue: 
land ownership in the Amazon. Throughout the jungle, but especially in the 
area of Para around the town of Novo Progresso where the loggers engaged in 
civil disobedience, lands owned by the federal government have been 
illegally occupied and subdivided and then repeatedly sold without proper 
land titles, often by and to logging groups.

Under regulations announced last year, though, the government canceled the 
registry of large landholdings in the area. Claimants had until Jan. 31 to 
provide proper documentation for a new registration or face expulsion from 
properties they occupy, a deadline the government agreed to extend in the 
accord it reached with the rebellious loggers.

Loggers have also been accused of using slave labor, not paying taxes on 
their profits and bribing bureaucrats to obtain export licenses. "If 
properly implemented, the land tenure regulations can be an important tool 
in weakening the entire system that prevails in the region," Ms. Ramos said.

Mr. da Silva's government says it intends to introduce legislation this 
month that would all but end the practice of letting public lands in the 
Amazon be occupied by private interests and then sold. Instead, companies 
and individuals would be granted concessions to lots for fixed periods, 
during which logging and other activities would be permitted but strictly 
monitored and controlled.

"Obviously you can't put a cop behind every tree," Paulo Adario, the Amazon 
campaign coordinator for Greenpeace, said in a telephone interview from 
Manaus. "But you can take steps to bring activities that are now 
clandestine into a regulated, legalized system, if you can just get this 
proposal through Congress without it being modified too much."

An initial draft of the government proposal was leaked to the Brazilian 
press last year and was portrayed as handing the jungle over to rapacious 
commercial enterprises, mostly foreign ones. Environmental groups say that 
was a politically inspired mischaracterization of the measure, whose 
ultimate success would depend on the government's ability and willingness 
to compel compliance.

"The underlying intent is to be able to govern timber extraction, but it's 
not clear to me that a concession system will be able to do that," said 
Stephan Schwartzman of Environmental Defense, who visited the area of 
conflict last month. "We know, for example, that timber concessions in 
Indonesia have done nothing for the forest or local indigenous communities."

The government's environmental agency has always complained that a chronic 
lack of money and manpower prevents it from enforcing laws that, though 
they look tough on paper, are widely ignored. "The timber harvest itself 
starts in June," with the arrival of the Amazon dry season, Mr. Adario 
said, "so we are going to have to wait to see if we have a legal harvest 
this year."

"Everybody is positioning their tanks," he said. "The real combat is from 
here on in."

American Nun Killed in Jungle

BELEM, Brazil, Feb. 12 (Reuters) - A 74-year-old American nun was shot to 
death early Saturday in the Amazon rain forest, where she had worked for a 
decade to defend human rights and the environment despite frequent death 
threats, the federal police said.

The missionary, Dorothy Stang, was shot three times at point-blank range at 
an isolated agricultural settlement in dense jungle in Para State, the 
police and coworkers said.

Only weeks ago, she warned federal rights authorities that she faced 
continual death threats for her work.

Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism