Day 251 - 17 May 96 - Page 05

     
     1        "In our book, we looked at the violent struggle over land
     2        in the north of Brazil, a struggle that involves cattle
     3        companies, peasant families and Indians.  We travelled
     4        extensively throughout the region.  As we wrote in our
     5        introduction, we were horrified at 'the scale of the
     6        lawlessness and violence accompanying the occupation, its
     7        cost in human suffering.  People everywhere - in buses,
     8        bars, pensions'" -- what are pensions?
     9        A.  Sort of cheap boarding houses, small hotels.
    10
    11   Q.   "'... spoke of murders, brutal beatings, threats,
    12        bullying.  Very often the violence was the result of land
    13        disputes, with powerful landowners and land thieves sending
    14        in gunmen to clear peasant families off the land'.
    15
    16        "We were also alarmed at the scale of the environmental
    17        damage.  Again, as we say in our book, the pace of forest
    18        destruction by the cattle companies were so fast that it
    19        seemed that the whole forest would be obliterated within a
    20        decade or two.
    21
    22        "One of the areas of tropical forest that suffered greatest
    23        devastation was Acre, in the north-west of Brazil.  When we
    24        first visited the region in 1971, most of the state was
    25        primary tropical forest, occupied only by Indians.  Indeed,
    26        three-quarters of the land was classified by the government
    27        as 'terra devoluta', that is, unoccupied public land.  But
    28        a road link was created, for the first time, with the rest
    29        of Brazil.
    30
    31        "The state government undertook a big advertising campaign
    32        in San Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to attract cattle
    33        companies.  By 1975, after just four years, four-fifths of
    34        Acre's land belonged to companies from the south.  These
    35        companies carried out horrifying environmental damage,
    36        cutting down primary tropical forest to plant pasture, and
    37        were involved in violent land conflicts with peasant
    38        families and Indians.
    39
    40        "One of the most active companies was the meat-packing
         group, Bordon.  We, personally, saw forest being cut down
    42        by Bordon employees and gathered evidence from peasant
    43        families that they had been forcibly evicted from their
    44        plots by Bordon employees.
    45
    46        "Another region that was being devastated at the time lay
    47        to the north of Cuiaba, the capital of Mato Grosso".
    48
    49        Did that include the area of Sinop?
    50        A.  Yes. 
    51 
    52   Q.  "After the construction of the BR-163 (the highway linking 
    53        Santarem, a port on the Amazon River, with Cuiaba) in the
    54        early 1970s, numerous new ranches were opened beside this
    55        road.  The incentives were tax breaks from the federal
    56        government and the new transport link that meant that the
    57        ranches could now take their cattle to meat packing plants
    58        in Cuiaba".
    59
    60        Could I just ask you about Sinop?  I wonder if we could get