The Price of Profits by Zachary Hurwitz - The Diigo Meta page

• 26 Jun 08
  

  Adam Bohannon

  The Initiative for the Regional Integration of Infrastructure in South America is the latest and largest in a series of bank-financed schemes to bring "development" to the Amazon Basin—and more trouble to the region's indigenous communities.

  anthropology culture latinamerica humanrights business amazon

  • Initiative for the Regional Integration  of Infrastructure in South America
  • The Interoceanica Sur highway in Madre de Dios, Peru, is one of the 31 first-stage  IIRSA projects that are programmed for completion by the year 2010. The road  is financed by the Andean Development Corporation, the Brazilian National  Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Peruvian government  and is currently under construction.
  • The Interoceanica project is going to benefit large agricultural interests,  not local populations. Local populations are not prepared economically to benefit  from the highway, and there’s been no interest from the national or regional  government to give us at least a few incentives to prepare us for the highway.  If the government doesn’t promote a sustainable vision for our region,  what we’re going to see are large trucks passing through here, big businesses  from the Brazilian side. There they have a broad vision of expanding spaces  for soy cultivation, which is going to affect indigenous peoples, riverside  communities, and rural communities. So this is only a capitalistic vision,  not a vision that will help the poor populations of our country.
  • We’ve been informed that there is a new proposal for an executive law  that would allow the government to begin a colonization project with agricultural  and industrial ends. For the Amazon, this is a threat, because we already live  here, we already exist here, so what lands are they going to colonize? This  could mean land invasions, conflicts between agricultural interests and indigenous  people, so this proposal for new law worries us, and we’ve rejected it  through the Alliance of Federations here in Madre de Dios.

  • The Madeira Hidrovia Complex is one of the most controversial projects included  in the Initiative for the Regional Integration of Infrastructure of South America.  The Hidrovia plans include the construction of five hydroelectric dams (two  in Bolivia and three in Brazil) along the Madeira river, to facilitate transporting  soy from the southern city of Porto Velho to Manaus for export. 

    For the Parintintin of western Brazil, who depend on the river for their livelihood  and culture, the hydroelectric dams proposed by the Madeira complex are a serious  threat. As cacique (chief) Domingos Parintintin points out, mining and logging  already exert tremendous pressure on their territory. Hydroelectric dams would  offer even more pressure, cutting river water levels, which would threaten  the availability and health of fish, as well as the Parintintin agricultural  plots, which depend on the river’s natural cycles of flooding to restore  soil fertility. There would also be increased competition for land and resources,  as migrants move in to work in construction and agriculture.
  • This is 2007; it’s time for things to be different. The government  threw a party to celebrate the 500th birthday of Brazil, but we’re against  that. Because today you go to any land in Amazônia, and our close relatives,  brothers, parents, they’re all buried on that land. How can you celebrate  on the land where your relatives are buried?
  • Our people, in the area of health, we have our own traditions. We make remedies  ourselves. We have a part of our culture that knows which medicine to use,  which medicines cure, and we pass this on to our people who conserve this knowledge.  For example, if you have a bruise, or a cut, we know which treatment to use  to cure it. We have remedies for everything. We never give up our culture.
  • Beyond this, we never let go of our culture. For example, we never give up  our traditional clothing. Our people are advancing, but they don’t know  how to do everything. We don’t know how to do everything at the beginning  of something new, but we’re advancing. There are some things about our  culture that I can’t speak about, because they are secrets. This goes  for other people too. Truthfully, for us as Parintintin, from the time of contact  to today, our vision has changed. Today, our people are much more like Brazilians.  To us, our people have failed in some parts of our culture. There are things  that are changing our own culture as indigenous people. We speak two languages.  In the case of my village, we speak our own language and Portuguese. But we  never give up our culture. I’m not an enemy of Brazil, I’m an indigenous  man, but the question of land invasions, the question of mining, the question  of illegal logging, hunting, fishing, all of this comes back to our people;  it causes a problem, a very serious problem.

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