Brazil's Amazon building boom draws protests

By Alan Clendenning

updated 3:36 p.m. ET May 23, 2008

ALONG THE XINGU RIVER, Brazil - Indians fish from canoes along the curves of this Amazon tributary and tend manioc crops near the site of a proposed dam talked about for decades — but now pushing forward under Brazil's multi-billion-dollar construction spree.

The Belo Monte dam will swallow thick rain forest and harm rare fish, as well as the livelihoods and homes of roughly 15,000 people who live in this remote area of northeastern Para state, critics say.

Flush with cash from its roaring economy, Brazil is spending $296 billion in the next two years alone on huge hydroelectric dams, transcontinental roads and other infrastructure to expand industry, boost exports, create jobs and help speed the emergence of Latin America's largest country as a world economic power.

But at a time when the world is focused on climate change and Amazon rain forest destruction, Brazil's boom means paving, flooding and stringing power lines through thousands of miles of pristine jungle.

Edivaldo Juruna, a subsistence farmer and fisherman who lives in a ramshackle wooden house on a sandbar, worries when he hears the dam will flood 170 square miles of Amazon basin and turn a 90-mile stretch of the river into stagnant puddles.

"Up there near the city it's going to flood, but down here it's going to dry up," said Juruna, an Indian whose last name is the same as his tribe. "Everyone's talking about the jobs that will come and that there will be energy for Brazil. But no one's talking about the bad side."

Tensions are climbing. Some 1,000 Indians gathered in nearby Altamira on Friday and earlier this week to fight the proposed $6.7 billion dam, planned as the world's third-largest power producer behind China's Three Gorges and Itaipu on the border between Brazil and Paraguay.

Utility official attacked
On Tuesday, painted and feathered protesters attacked a national electric company official with machetes and clubs after he spoke to the group; he left shirtless and bloody from a gash in his shoulder.

Indians and environmentalists thought they had beaten the dam in 1989, when a similar protest drew the rock star Sting and international condemnation.

Silvia Izquierdo / AP Land burns near an old highway being replaced with a new one in Puerto Maldonado, Brazil, last Nov. 1. The new highway will connect let Brazil ship exports to Asia from Peru.

But now Brazil has the money for such projects without needing outside help, and the dam is scheduled to go out to bid next year.

The country's boom-and-bust cycles are long gone. It paid off its foreign debt last year and this month was declared a safe place for foreign investors to park money, with a debt upgrade from the Standard & Poor's ratings agency.

Critics say the pro-development forces in President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government have taken control, the reason cited for famed Amazon preservationist Marina Silva's resignation as Brazil's environment minister last week.

The Brazilian leader already is battling a spike in rain forest destruction and has sent federal police and environmental workers to crack down on illegal logging.

President: Amazon not a sanctuary
He argues the mega-projects are needed to create jobs in desperately poor regions and to share the country's new wealth. Half of all Brazilians get by on $500 a month or less.

"We shouldn't think of the Amazon as a sanctuary," Silva said in a speech earlier this month.

The government's coordinator for Amazon policy defended the plan, saying that despite the environmental concerns, "we must remember that water-based energy is the cleanest form of energy."

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