Road cuts deep into Brazil's Amazon

By Alan Clendenning

updated 3:50 p.m. ET May 27, 2005

TUCURAPE, Brazil - Burly truckers share thermoses of sweet coffee, cook rice and beans on camp stoves and lounge in the sweltering shade of broad-leafed palms as they wait for a front-end loader to tow their rigs through a half-mile stretch of waist-deep mud deep in the Amazon jungle.

Help can take hours or even days to arrive on BR163, one of Brazil’s worst national highways. But there’s good money to be had hauling everything from exotic jungle hardwood to Coca-Cola in these parts, and there are rumblings that the highway is about to get a lot better.

One thing is on the lips of everyone from the truckers to the new settlers of roadside towns that appear on few maps: asphalt, and how it will soon bring growth and opportunity to a big swath of the world’s largest wilderness.

In a controversial plan, Brazil’s government is preparing to let private companies embark on a $417 million paving project to turn BR163 into a modern two-lane toll highway stretching 1,100 miles, nearly the distance between Philadelphia and Miami. That would link Brazil’s most important soy-growing region with a deep-water Amazon River port.

Truck traffic will skyrocket as the country opens up a new export corridor for soybeans, Brazil’s most important crop. Trips that now take weeks during the six-month rainy season will be cut to a matter of hours.

The pavement is bound to boost migration and is expected to lead to deforestation, prompting warnings from environmentalists of possible ecological disaster.

Truckers see comfort
No longer will truckers have to snooze in hammocks beside dense forests of poisonous snakes and spiders, grunting monkeys and 140-pound rodents called capybaras that roam the road at night. Instead, they’ll rest at the truck stops serving all-you-can-eat Brazilian barbecue that have already started to pop up in hamlets now separated by road sections impassable even for four-wheel-drive vehicles.

“I’ve been waiting for the pavement for 20 years,” said trucker Honorato Gomes da Silva, waiting for a tow barefoot, his boots in his rig so they wouldn’t get sucked into mud that acts like quicksand with any kind of shoes.

“We’re used to sleeping in the forest, but that will be a thing of the past when the pavement comes,” he said.

This jungle highway isn’t the Trans-Amazon Highway, another mostly muddy road running east-west from the Atlantic Ocean to Colombia, which was scheduled to be completely paved decades ago.

The three-year paving project on the north-south BR163 could begin as early as this year. While asphalt has been laid down on 530 miles of BR163, the highway is useless for agribusiness until the private effort finishes the job.

Once the paving is completed, Brazil — which has become an undisputed agricultural superpower over the last decade — will be able to drastically reduce the price of sending its crops abroad.

“The Trans-Amazon is last-century stuff,” said Riordan Roett, director of Western Hemisphere studies at Johns Hopkins University’s school of international studies in Washington, D.C. “The north-south route is where you get the soybeans, and it is a logical route for inland migration as well,” from Brazil’s populous south to the relatively uninhabited Amazon.

More logging, violence predicted
Environmentalists and Indians warn the pavement will eliminate even more rain forest, and bring crime, drugs and prostitution to an area whose remoteness has largely protected it from such problems.

And unless the growth is controlled under strict federal oversight, they say, the road could also bring violent land conflicts. In Para, the Brazilian state where most of the paving will take place, those are often solved by gunslinging “pistoleiros.”

Critics point to the February slaying of American nun Dorothy Stang, who spent 23 years protecting the rain forest and peasants. The killing was blamed on a rancher coveting land Stang was trying to protect. The government temporarily froze development in 32,000 square miles along BR163 in response, but environmentalists believe the ban will be lifted within a year.

“Economics are determining the fate of the Amazon,” said Paulo Adario, who heads Greenpeace’s Amazon project. “The paving is inevitable, and at the end of the day, the discussion is centering on what we are willing to lose.”

That’s a bet made by waves of ranchers, loggers, storekeepers and farmers who have washed into the land around the road, a region the size of France, Germany and Italy combined. Keen on exploiting natural resources that will be more accessible thanks to the paved road, many spent their life savings to resettle in towns that only recently got electricity and telephones.

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