BRAZIL

   
Letter From Rondônia
Part IV: Ridge of the West
Norman Gall
 

The upland settlement of Espigão do Oeste (Ridge of the West) lies along a primitive dirt road in central Rondônia that branches away from BR-364 into the charred remains of the forest. Espigão do Oeste has had a strange history, pointing to the confused, speculative and sometimes violent character of the struggle for land on the Brazilian frontier.

In 1967 some land developers from São Paulo bulldozed their way into the jungle toward the higher ground some 30 kilometers away from BR-364. The Melhorança Brothers, a family firm that has carried out private colonization projects over the past 3 decades in the states of São Paulo, Paraná, and Mato Grosso, brought in 36 families from southern Brazil that first year, selling "improvements" and "occupation rights" to individual tracts of public lands of 5,000 acres. By the time the government accused the Melhoranças of invading Indian lands, nearly 900 colonists had been settled in Espigão do Oeste, laying claim to 2.5 million acres of land. By then the colony had become embroiled in a bitter struggle for control of Rondônia’s virgin lands between private companies from southern Brazil and INCRA, the government colonization agency. At issue is whether the settlement of Rondônia will be carried out under public or private control and whether the dominant mode of settlement will remain colonization by small farmers or shift to large-scale agrobusiness. INCRA officials denounced Espigão do Oeste as an illegal invasion of public lands. They seized upon the political struggle that followed as a test case of whether INCRA could maintain control over colonization in Rondônia. In this struggle, INCRA was accused of corruption, arbitrary expropriation, and administrative incompetence by large landholders, many with dubious titles, and by private colonization companies. In response to the charges of usurpation of federal lands, the Melhoranças claim their colonization efforts were informally encouraged and supported by Rondônia’s governors in the late 1960s, before INCRA had begun to carry out its own settlement program there.

The village of Espigão do Oeste grew quickly. The settlers built a church, school, hotel, several stores, a sawmill, and a rice-hulling plant, and invited a group of 80 Surui Indians to settle nearby. By 1977 the village acquired its own oil-burning electricity generator. As if to refute charges by the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) that they were exploiting the Surui, photographs appeared in the national press of the Melhoranças good-naturedly chauffeuring naked Surui women and children to town in the back of a pickup truck. But the head of the local FUNAI Indian post charged: "The Melhoranças are trying to attract the Indians away from the region interdicted by FUNAI. Once they draw the Indians away, they will apply for official authorization for white settlers to occupy the Indian reserve, which already has been invaded by their colonists. When they obtain this permission, they will then abandon the Indians," In reply, the developers accussed FUNAI of acting as a front for foreign companies that want to exploit alluvial tin deposits in the Indian reserve and in the contiguous region occupied by settlers. By then, the Suruis were completely deprived of their hunting lands and surrounded by settlers from southern Brazil.

The extermination of Brazil’s forest Indians, begun in colonial times, has accelerated over the past century and is nearing completion. First with the rubber boom and now with the land boom, the decimation of the native population has been effected more by white men’s diseases than by violence. The Indians of Amazônia have proved far more vulnerable to white men’s incursions than the plains Indians of North America, who had obtained horses from the Spaniards in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had become an invincible military force until the adoption of the six-shooter by Texas settlers in the mid-nineteenth century. Much of the Indians’ military prowess was associated with the skills and weaponry they had developed in hunting big game on the plains, mainly buffalo and wild cattle. By contrast, the South American plains and forests have no large animals to challenge and provide protein for hunting populations. Most of the decimated tribes of Amazônia once flourished along the jungle rivers, where they fed on fish and water mammals, only to be pushed away from the river banks to the terra firma of the inner forest by other Indian groups and by civiizados from other parts of Brazil. Today, some of the surviving Surui have been hired as day laborers in Espigão do Oeste. Others wander listlessly along the mud streets of the village, begging for food and money. In December 1976, the head of the local Indian post angrily resigned, charging that his FUNAI superiors in Brasília had ignored his reports about the deteriorating condition of the Surui. Earlier that month, he had reported in a radiogram that,

"The Melhoranças gave the Indians presents and the Indians came to live very near Espigão do Oeste," one of the settlers said.

Over the past few years, Espigão do Oesta has been plagued by conflict between settlers and Indians, between the settlers themselves, between the settlers and colonists sent into the area by INCRA, and between all these groups and posseiros venturing into the area on their own. Two years ago, INCRA established the Gy-Paraná colonization project in the region of Espigão do Oeste to check the activities of private developers. INCRA denounced the Melhoranças as grileiros ("land-thieves") and sent topographers into the area to measure 250-acre plots for the new colonization project. The surveyors, however, were surrounded by angry settlers already living in Espigão do Oeste and their instruments taken away from them. The police responded by entering the village and beating up several people, including one farmer who died a few days later. Eleven settlers were sent to jail in the territorial capital of Pôrto Velho. Nilo Melhorança, who managed the family’s interests in Espigão do Oeste, was taken, prisoner and held for six months in the city of Belém, far away at the mouth of the Amazon, under charges of violating Brazil’s national security law, only to be freed by a military tribunal that declared it had no jurisdiction.

These events later were described on the floor of the Brazilian Congress, by the opposition deputy from Rondônia, as the "massacre" of Espigão do Oeste.

Jovino Fernandez Lopes, the owner of the Hotel Pioneiro in Espigão do Oeste, had come to Rondônia from Minas Gerais in 1973 to make his fortune as a landlord and politician. A year later, he imperiously dispatched 2 employees to expel a group of colonists sent by INCRA to occupy his posse, or "claim," of 2,500 acres, only for the 2 men to be killed in a clash with the colonists. He protested in writing to his friend Deputy Jerônimo Santana, who frequently attacked INCRA in taking up the posseiros’ cause. Lopes charged that

when my rice was maturing, the posse was invaded by 13 armed men who killed 2 of my workers. The invaders said they were sent by INCRA and that if they were able to keep possession, INCRA would divide the land for them into lots of 250 acres. That was in March 1974. A year later INCRA fulfilled this promise, extending one of its feeder roads to divide my area. This situation forced me to lose all the clearings and plantings I had made, because I could not return to harvest my rice.

Today Jovino Lopes’s activities are confined to village politics and the running of the Hotel Pioneiro, a desolate clapboard structure with few guests. Just outside the kitchen window is a large pigsty, inhabited by animals withdrawn in haste from his fazenda. Jovino has become one of the embittered men of the Brazilian frontier. A burly figure with glowering eyes and a commanding voice, he has become a spokesman for the frustrated settlers of Espigão do Oeste, failed in their ambitions and doubtful of their future, a group of whom gather in the evenings to talk with Jovino on the porch of the Hotel Pioneiro. "We were the ones who entered first," he says.

The entry of INCRA into the Espigão do Oeste area has provoked friction between two kinds of settlers that already had cleared homesteads there. The colonization agency offered to grant all these settlers 250-acre lots in exchange for their original squatters’ claims. Because the Melhorança family sold "occupation rights" to settlers for lots as small as 15 acres and as large as 7,500 acres, only the smaller homesteaders stood to profit from this offer. One of them, Roque Simón, was caught in the middle of the conflict between large and small settlers and between INCRA and the private developers of Espigão do Oeste.

Roque Simón is a slightly built man of 32 who arrived with his family in Espigão do Oeste aboard a pau de arara truck in August1973. He has quick eyes, curly hair, and the ruddy, sunburned complexion common among the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants who came to Brazil early in this century to work as field laborers on the coffee plantations of Sao Paulo State. If Roque is more astute in his observations and decisions than other settlers of Espigão do Oeste, it may be due in part to the four years, from 1967 to 1971, he spent in the metropolis of São Paulo, working in a factory that made gas ovens and repairing electrical appliances in his spare time, until he contracted a lung disorder that his doctor said was caused by gas inhalation in the factory and by environmental pollution. "Sao Paulo is the place to work for the man without capital," he said. "You never lack food in São Paulo and the laws work better there. Even though strikes are forbidden, the unions force employers to obey the law. But a man without capital in São Paulo can‘t go beyond possessing a house and a car. I had to have two jobs to build a clapboard house and buy a used car. When we moved to Mato Grosso in 1971, 1 spent a year working in the fields. Then I went into comércio. My brothers and I started an agency selling agricultural implements to small farmers. I sharecropped with my brother to produce coffee and continued to repair electrical appliances. The region of Dourados in Mato Grosso was very fertile, but we could only survive there. We could subsist, but never make any progress. Land prices were rising because the big farmers were buying out the small ones. Also, the frost blasted our coffee. While you can defend yourself against insects and floods, there is no defense against a frost. A friend who had been in Rondônia told us about Espigão do Oeste. I went there first myself and then brought my family later in 1973.

"It took six days for us to reach Espigão do Oeste in the pau de arara. There were 3 families in the truck, 21 people between children and adults, plus some furniture and clothing, 35 pigs, and 50 chickens, all together weighing about 9 tons. The truck was so crowded we had to sleep standing up or else spend the nights underneath the truck at the side of the road. We traveled 15 hours a day and the main problem was dust. When I came here alone the first time, I bought a little shack in the village for my family. When we all arrived, I could search for land at once. The smallest farms close to the village cost 20,000 or 30,000 cruzeiros [$3,000-$5,000], and I didn’t have that much money. So I went deeper into the mata and bought 15 acres for 4,000 cruzeiros. It was all jungle. There was no road to get there. So I walked in to clear some land and built a hut where my family could live. We went to live there with the idea of someday possessing more land. The Melhoranças gave people a chance to possess two or three properties. We didn‘t know about INCRA ‘S system of limiting each man to possessing a single lot in the territory. I cleared seven acres that first year. You go in with a scythe in the month of April to cut the small branches, then you use an axe to fell the trees. It took me six weeks to do this work by hand, but it would have taken half the time if I could afford a motor-saw.

"While I was still clearing my land in 1973, other people began to arrive in my part of the forest. At first they said they were just hunting, but they carried scythes and other tools in their hands. We had already heard about the problems between the posseiros of Espigão do Oeste and the colonists being sent into the area by INCRA. We asked the Melhoranças about these new people. The explanation was that they were invaders and that we should expel them. First we went to the police for help in expelling them, but the police wouldn‘t do anything. Since we couldn’t expel these people, some of our settlers went to the office of INCRA, and they were assigned 250-acre lots somewhere else. INCRA ‘s feeder roads were coming very near us, and they were giving out lots along the feeder road, with 500 meters of frontage and running 2000 meters back into the forest. Then a posseiro came to work some land within 1,000 meters of my place. The man came to work just like that, without buying anything from anyone. We knew that these lands were once part of a fazenda. The fazenda had no house or crops but it had an owner, and the papers were in the custody of the Melhoranças. We asked the company about these people and were told: ‘Put lead into these grileiros.’

"Instead, I went to INCRA. 1 went to inform myself and the functionaries said, ‘We haven’t sent anyone to settle there.’ Then the chief of the office opened a map that showed where INCRA had assigned lots to people and gave their names. He put his finger to the map and asked me, ‘Are you the neighbor of this one?’ When I said yes, he told me: ‘I’m going to mark out 250 acres for you here. You’re legally entitled to 250 acres, not just the 15 acres you have right now.’ Then I answered, ‘Listen! This land already has been sold by the Itaporanga Company.’ But the INCRA man explained: ‘Officially, this company doesn‘t exist. The Itaporanga Company is a clandestine company, of invaders, grileiros. The clearings you’ve seen in Espigão do Oeste could have been made by anyone who entered there and sold land without any right.’

"The INCRA man left me with a terrible doubt. Neighbors who had bought larger areas inside the Indian reserve later told me that they had gone to Cuiabá and Pôrto Velho to investigate the company and found that the government didn‘t recognize it at all. That put me between the sword and the wall. I felt a desire to move from here and to find some other land far away. But first I would have to sell my present house and land, and who would buy them from me? My land was inside the lot of another person assigned there by INCRA, and he was living there with his two children. So I had to leave all that and move to a 250-acre lot nearby that INCRA offered me, which was all jungle, mata. To reach it we had to cross the clearings and lots sold to people by the Itaporanga Company. These posseiros had boundaries 5,000 meters long, while the INCRA lots were only 20 by 100 meters, with the feeder roads cutting across the claims of the posseiros. In the eyes of INCRA, these were public lands occupied by nobody. But in the eyes of the people of Espigão do Oeste, I was invading my neighbors ‘land.

"The Melhoranças circulated a petition that I refused to sign, by caprice, because it was circulated in blank to be filled in later. It was to ask a court to enjoin INCRA from distributing more land in Espigão do Oeste. The community was divided between small farmers, who increased their areas by taking the 250 acres offered by INCRA, and those with claims of up to 7,000 acres, who would lose nearly everything if INCRA moved in with settlers. My wife and l discussed the possibility that I might not be able to get out of this alive. The Melhoranças didn’t threaten me directly but sent word with others that a man lives only once and that someone could die in trouble like this. A man came up to me in the mata and said. ‘Look, even the police, paid by us, could put a bullet in you and then put an Indian arrow in the wound and it’s all over. Nobody would investigate. ‘I told him, ‘To die of an arrow or of a shot or of malaria or of hunger is all the same to me. It doesn‘t make any difference.’

"The problem here is very serious because the Melhoranças promoted one idea, and the reality in Rondônia is another. They were parceling out the land as if it were theirs, selling ‘improvements and ‘services,’ charging rent and opening stores that sold goods at very high prices in exchange for promissory notes. They brought a population of settlers here, and these people sold out to others when they found that the business was risky. They were treated as invaders and couldn‘t get help from INCRA or the police when others came behind them. Many of them come all by themselves, without authorization from INCRA or the Melhoranças or anyone else. These are what I call the índios brancos, the white Indians. These are people abandoned and deprived of everything, without route or destination, who come from all the states and wander along the highways of Brazil. They come to Rondônia as adventurers, in search of something to keep them alive. They find work on a derrubada far inside the forest. The hiring boss brings them into the mata and then escapes with the money. So they keep on wandering, part of a swelling wave of marginalized people, until they wander onto somebody else’s land. The índios brancos may want land of their own or to work as tenants. They may have been field workers in southern Brazil, sent packing by the new harvesting machines to the backlands or the cities. So, many of them come here to Rondônia, five or six families in a truck and sometimes without any money or possessions. INCRA ‘s propaganda, on the radio and in newspapers, told them of free land in Rondônia. But there are too many of them for INCRA to take care of so they move in on their own. One shrewd guy arrives in the midst of 50 desperate families. He spreads the idea that they will improve their lives if they move into an area far inside the mata and start working.

After all, INCRA says the land is for those who work it. They think there’s no owner but tomorrow an owner appears. They find they are living on an Indian reserve or that one of the grupos fortes from São Paulo has bought this jungle in a public auction. Then a conflict begins that only God can resolve. That is what happened in Espigão do Oeste."

* * * * *

While Rondônia today is Brazil’s most dynamic area of agricultural colonization, the governmental machinery is being overwhelmed by the pressure of new settlers seeking land throughout the Brazilian frontier. INCRA is said to control 650,000 square miles of public lands in Amazônia, but much of this land has been invaded and traded many times over before planned colonization schemes could be implemented. In 1970 President Emílio Garrastazu Médici visited the impoverished and overpopulated Northeast during one of its Biblical droughts, the first of these catastrophes to be seen by a Brazilian president. As two million people fled the stricken areas, Médici ordered construction of an east-west Transamazon highway—absent from previous transportation plans—to open the virgin jungle to land-hungry Northeastern peasants. INCRA chartered buses, trucks, coastal steamers, and jet airliners to bring in settlers from the Northeast to occupy the planned agrovilas along the new highway. Although plans called for settlement of 100,000 families on 230,000 square miles of land along the Transamazon, only 5,717 families were on the INCRA lots by the end of 1974. Many have abandoned disease-ridden agrovilas to return to the Northeast. An anthropologist living along the Transamazon in 1973-74 reported that

because construction of the main highway cost far more than anticipated, many planned feeder roads were never built. Thus the road system served only a minority of the region’s producers. The lack of passable side roads affects not only the transportation of agricultural goods, but also the extension services, the development of agrovilas on side roads and the provision of health care.... production was left stacked in the fields and was destroyed by pests and rotted by humidity. Farming decisions which were based on the assumption of a passable road eventually led to the inability of many farmers to pay back their bank loans.

The exodus of settlers from the Transamazon settlements, brought there at government expense, was more than matched by the inflow of a larger and hardier breed of squatters and land speculators entering the less regulated portions of the region, forming a seminomadic rural population moving among lands without boundaries, with many claimants and always in dispute.

The central figure in the conflict over land in Rondônia has been Captain Silvio Goncalves da Faria, who until recently directed INCRA’s colonization projects in the territory. Captain Sílvio is a huge, bearish mulatto, an imposing figure with ruffled gray hair and large, soft eyes who, over the past decade, became the bane of local landowners and of the grupos fortes of businessmen from southern Brazil who have bought large rubber-producing areas from local families. Now in his mid-fifties, Captain Sílvio is a veteran of three decades in Amazônia, first as an army topographer measuring Brazil’s boundaries with Paraguay and Bolivia, then laying out airfields in the jungle. In the course of these decades, he rose from private to captain in an army where such promotions, by competitive examination, are very rare, acquiring an intimate knowledge of Amazônia that few Brazilians possess. "People come to Amazônia without knowing the special limitations on what can be done," he explains.

"For example, you are from the South, say, Sao Paulo. You are the son of a landowner, the owner of 10,000 head of cattle and 15,000 acres of land. You have your own airplane, a good bank account, excellent political connections, and a certain amount of experience. Now, such a man comes to Amazônia, with all that money and cattle behind him, with enthusiasm and a desire to do things. But he will have to clear a region, do what his grandfather may have done, but he hasn’t an idea of what to do. The first thing he does is find some land, clear some land that doesn’t have another owner. He thinks that when these things are done, the people already living on this land either should leave or become his employees. But when these people—farmers or Indians—also want to be owners and don‘t want to leave, that is when the conflict begins. Now the paulista buys 250,000 or 500,000 acres in Amazônia, areas that it is impossible to even think of buying in the South. Now he thinks this land has no owner, but it has an owner. Only 5 percent of Rondônia‘s land was legally sold before 1968, and the rest belongs to the federal government, which is giving access to land for those men who want to work for themselves and their families. For me, the Land Statute has only one clause; no, only a phrase that is part of a clause: ‘the farmer has the right to remain on the land he cultivates.’"

Captain Sílvio defended this principle with an obstinacy that had its measure of grandeur, but he ultimately was defeated. He has since become a consultant to private firms seeking to acquire land in the region.

I visited Captain Sílvio at the INCRA headquarters in Pôrto Velho in December 1976, a few days before he left office. When I entered his office on that Saturday afternoon, he was giving detailed instructions on land titles to a secretary wearing an orange Batman shirt and blue jeans, with other young assistants standing around his desk. Except for a few senior officials, the INCRA functionaries are very young. At the new Gy-Paraná colonization project, for example, where INCRA has sent thousands of settlers into the area claimed by the developers of Espigão do Oeste, the 2 project managers are 25 and 23 years old, with less than 6 months on the job and no prior experience in the complex problems of colonization, save for a 3-month cram course at INCRA headquarters in Brasilia. Not surprisingly, this fragile INCRA organization has been overwhelmed by the impact of the trucks loaded with peasant families who arrive daily in the mushroom town of Cacoal in search of land, by hook or crook, leading to widespread fraud, corruption, and mismanagement on the part of the minor officials who make the daily decisions on granting official recognition to de facto possession and on assigning an individual peasant family to a particular plot of land. Each day at dawn the settlers line up outside the office of Edvaldo de Santana, head of the INCRA office in Cacoal. "It is a hopeless situation," said Santana, a young man who rides around in a government pickup truck with a gun wrapped in a magazine at his side.

One of the striking things about the boom town of Cacoal, and the rest of the Brazilian frontier is that so many people settle in urban areas, with one foot in town and the other in the countryside, to trade and speculate in land. "People would rather trade in land than till it," a parish priest in the area told me.

"People sell introductions to INCRA officials, who will recognize illegal land deals and shift colonists from poor soils to good soils at a price. Neighbors and relatives from southern Brazil tend to settle near each other in Rondônia. The farmers and small-town merchants with a truck and some money often live in town and hire their poorer compadres to work their colonization lots. Among the settlers, the big ones tend to absorb the little ones. Then come the really big landowners from São Paulo and Paraná. A few of the biggest have bought land and built sawmills in this region, and many others have come along BR -364 to look. One of them told me, ‘Let the beasts enter first. Let them suffer malaria and hepatitis and do the brutal work of clearing the forest. Then we will come in with money to buy it up when it is ready. Now is not yet the time."’

Captain Sílvio fought hard, until his ouster last year, to maintain Rondônia as an area of settlement for small farmers. He had come into conflict with local landlords and with the companies that bought their old claims to large parts of the forest. High officials in Brasilia backed him for years in these disputes, but this support was eroded under charges of arbitrary and inefficient administration. "INCRA would make deals with local people with undocumented claims to huge rubber properties," a former INCRA lawyer said.

"These people would surrender a claim. say, to 700,000 acres of jungle in exchange for INCRA ‘s promise of a clear title to 30,000 acres. But then INCRA ‘s administrative machinery could not deliver the final titles. Meanwhile, these lands would be invaded by squatters, which forced the local families to make desperation sales of their claims at low prices to business groups from southern Brazil. Unlike the local landlords, the grupos fortes have lots of money for lawyers, airplanes, hiring men to clear land, for political influence, and for financing press campaigns against INCRA. While Captain Sílvio defeated many of them, he was too rigid with those companies with legitimate claims. They had enough money and influence to persist and, in the end, they won.

Captain Sílvio’s main achievement was Ouro Prêto, the first and most successful colonization project in Amazônia during the present wave of settlement, occupying 1.3 million acres of fertile terra roxa soils in central Rondônia on both sides of BR-364. In contrast to the violence and disorder that has gone with the clearing and settling of the surrounding jungle areas, Ouro Prêto is a relatively peaceful place. There are roughly 7,000 families raising rice, corn, beans, bananas, coffee, cacao, and livestock. INCRA has built a headquarters town of Ouro Prêto with offices, schools, workshops, grain storage facilities, a clinic, and an airstrip. While INCRA has opened more than 600 miles of feeder roads within the colonization project, helicopters are used for emergency missions and to enable extension agents to reach the many farmers whose 250-acre lots still are not served by feeder roads or whose roads are washed out during the rainy season. Apart from their own subsistence needs, the Ouro Prêto farmers in 1975-76 produced a surplus of 42,000 tons of rice, beans, and corn for sales of more than $15 million to commercial markets. In terms of public investment and orderly settlement, Ouro Prêto is perhaps the most luxurious and successful government colonization effort ever undertaken in Brazil. However, it is clearly not enough. The pressure for land is too much for INCRA to handle, given the limited organizational capability shown in other colonization projects in Rondônia.

Agricultural colonization has a long history in Brazil, going back at least as far as 1824, shortly after independence was declared from Portugal, when the first German colonists were brought in, for geopolitical reasons, to occupy the southern hinterland near the Uruguayan border. This fund of experience seems to have produced three basic criteria for successful colonization: healthy living conditions, identification of a profitable cash crop, and access to markets. While many settlers have died of malaria and hepatitis in the early years of colonization at Ouro Prêto, much progress has been made in controlling these diseases as the jungle is cleared and basic health services are organized. The more far-reaching problems are those involving the stability of soils and crops and the linkages to distant markets. The agronomic literature is full of warnings of how rapidly tropical soils are leached of nutrients under the heavy rains of Amazônia. "Everyone here is worried about erosion," said a government extention agent at Ouro Prêto.

"The best terra roxa soils are on high ground, yet these are the most easily washed away when stripped of their natural vegetation. The forest cover must be replaced by permanent cash crops, such as cocoa, coffee, or rubber, but the peasants who come here tend to clear the hillsides and plant annual crops such as rice and beans. These crops expose the land to rapid erosion under the rains."

To prevent erosion and to develop a major export crop for Rondônia, the government is promoting the planting of 450,000 acres of cacao as part of Brazil’s effort to again become the world’s leading cacao exporter. The intensity of government colonization and road-building in Amazônia has abated since the October 1973 Middle East War and the quadrupling of oil prices, which coincided with the initial failure of the Transamazon Highway colonization schemes and with a change of general-presidents in Brazil’s military regime. After his inauguration in March 1974, President Ernesto Geisel announced a dramatic change in Amazon development policy. The emphasis on government colonization was discarded in favor of a new "Polamazônia" program, involving millions in investments over a 3-year period in 15 local "growth poles" within the vast regions that are endowed with substantial amounts of minerals, timber, and fertile soils. For Rondônia, the program embraced a new hydroelectric dam, new port facilities for Pôrto Velho, expansion of tin mining, and plantings of coffee and cacao. Two years after Polamazônia was announced, however, a survey by Rio’s leading newspaper found that the program showed

great disparity between plans and reality. ... The delay of Polamazônia began at its birth. The technicians of SUDAM [the Amazon development authority] and of several other federal agencies took 11 months to prepare detailed plans, which filled 11 volumes. The plans were made in the climate of the impact projects launched by the Médici government (1969-19 74), done largely for political effect. Of the $400 million allotted for the program, $250 million was diverted from other existing projects.

Meanwhile, companies based in southern Brazil have established, on paper at least, huge ranches in the Amazon to take advantage of the tax rebates and cheap development loans offered by SUDAM. Among these companies are subsidiaries of Volkswagen, General Motors, the Canadian Brascan interests, and the Italian Liquigas group, in which the Vatican has a stake. While the Brazilian government has provided $300 million in tax rebates since 1965 to subsidize the projects of 337 companies, the Financial Times of London reported that

The economic strategy of cattle-raising at government expense in the Amazon is founded in the belief or hope or pretext that the world soon will be hungering for beef and that Amazônia is thousands of miles closer to the rich markets of North America and Europe than is Argentina, currently South America’s leading meat exporter. There is talk of flying out the cattle in planes and of barging them out along the Amazon’s tributaries. But people also are wondering whether cattle in large numbers can survive the region’s diseases and dry spells, and whether the price of meat can ever compensate for the staggering transportation costs of bringing it to market from so far inside the remote vastness of this primitive continent. Meanwhile, land speculators stand to make windfall profits if the Amazon bubble continues and will be consoled by tax write-offs if it collapses. While this question is being decided, the forest is being decimated and millions of poor people push northward to find land. Their desperation is understandable, but the ecologists warn that the invasion of Amazônia is premature and dangerous: we still are ignorant of the carrying capacity of the land. We do not know whether the occasional swaths of fertile soils, such as those in Rondônia, can retain their nutrients for several years or will be quickly leached and eroded and baked by the sun into brick. We do not even know whether Amazônia can produce a protein supply sufficient to sustain by itself a population larger than the traditional nomadic tribes. In the face of the new price of oil, human invention will be strained to devise alternate energy economies for production and distribution of fuel and fertilizers to sustain the Brazilian frontier at its present depth of inland penetration. In many ways, the road to Rondônia has pushed its way into a no man’s land, terra de ninguém, beyond present frontiers of scientific knowledge, of technical invention, and of organizational coherence. Only a brave effort can make the frontier hold.

(April 1978)

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