Brazil's Amazon building boom draws protests

Foreign investors are eager to get in on the action. On Monday, a consortium led by France's Suez utility company outbid another that included Spain's Banco Santander to build the $5.2 billion Jirau dam — the second of two on the Madeira River near Bolivia's border.

Elsewhere in the Amazon, Brazil's Construtora Norberto Odebrecht SA is leading a consortium paving a dirt jungle highway to Peru so trucks can haul Brazilian Amazon goods across the Andes Mountains to the Pacific for shipment to Asian markets like China.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa wants to create another cross-continental export corridor between his nation and Brazil, using a land-and-river route he says could be an alternative to the Panama Canal.

The Belo Monte dam is projected to produce 6.3 percent of Brazil's electricity by 2014, feeding the country's southeastern industrial base, rapid development along its northeastern coast and the jungle free-trade manufacturing zone of Manaus along the Amazon River.

It also will flood areas in and around Altamira, where the only paved highways turn to dirt a dozen miles outside of town. Thousands of people live in simple homes on stilts that flood during the six-month rainy season, but could be totally inundated after the dam is built. There is no public sewer or water system, and children are taken to school in canoes half of the year.

Diane Fereira Barbosa came to Altamira with her husband and two children after being forced off their farm by "pistoleiros," hired guns for local ranchers and land grabbers.

"If the dam comes, we'll just suffer more," she said as a pet green parrot laid its head against her feet. "We don't have anywhere to go."

Gold rush mentality?
The government promises extensive studies to reduce adverse impacts from the dam.

Marcio Zimmerman, executive secretary of Brazil's Mines and Energy Ministry, called Belo Monte a matter of Brazilian energy security that will increase employment in the historically poor state.

"From an energy and economic point of view, the plant is extremely important to balance demand and supply of electric energy in coming years," he said in a statement.

But critics warn the Amazon projects will bring waves of immigration into areas where the government has little oversight, allowing loggers, ranchers, farmers and other jungle entrepreneurs to cut down forest with little fear of retribution.

Silvia Izquierdo / AP This bridge construction in Puerto Maldonado, Brazil, is part of a project to connect Brazil to Peru and then China.

The Madeira River dam projects alone are expected to draw 20,000 construction workers to a remote area — with another 100,000 people swarming there to seek their fortunes, said Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth Brazil.

Sure to follow are problems that have yet to be resolved in the Amazon, he added, including land-grabbing, contract killings, slave-like labor and rampant child prostitution.

"Any mega-intervention brings a huge number of people in an area where you have no rules of the game," Smeraldi said. "There's no justice, no police, no health assistance, no schools, no whatever."

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