Opinion | Op-Ed Contributor
In the Amazon, a Catastrophic Gold Rush Looms
CONCORD,
Calif. — Brazil’s interim president, Michel Temer, is willing to
sacrifice millions of acres of rain forest in pursuit of a 16th-century
boondoggle: fortunes of gold in the Amazon.
In August, Mr. Temer signed a decree to open a rain forest reserve
— an area larger than Denmark — to commercial mining, threatening
decades of progress on environmental protection and indigenous rights in
the Amazon. The approximately 17,800-square-mile National Reserve of
Copper and Associates, or Renca, which straddles the northern states of
Pará and Amapá, was created by Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1984 to
guard mineral resources from foreign exploitation as the country
staggered toward democracy.
Today
the reserve is a patchwork of conservation areas and indigenous lands.
Its protected status has deterred the runaway development rampant
elsewhere in the Amazon that has squelched biodiversity, destroyed
indigenous communities and reduced millions of acres of rain forest to
pastureland.
During
Brazil’s last gold rush, in the 1980s, thousands of Yanomami people
lost their land — and their lives — to the government-sponsored invasion
of “garimpeiros” (prospectors) who exposed tribes to disease, alcohol,
drugs and prostitution. The federal government is now investigating
the suspected slaughter of more than 10 members of an isolated tribe on
the border with Perú by miners who boasted at a bar of cutting up the
dead, including women and children, and disposing of their remains in
the river.
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Like
his counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, Mr. Temer treats
environmental regulations like red tape. By opening roughly 30 percent
of Renca to mining exploration, the decree sets a dangerous precedent by
dissolving a longstanding federal barrier to development, leaving other
protected areas within and beyond the reserve exposed to potential to
research and exploration. Randolfe Rodrigues, an opposition senator from
Amapá State, called the decree “the biggest attack on the Amazon of the
last 50 years.”
For
decades, Brazilian policy makers have looked at the rain forest as a
source of future mineral, timber, oil and agricultural wealth, and
little in the country’s history suggests that the government can steward
sustainable development in the planet’s largest forest and watershed.
In the 1970s, the Trans-Amazonian Highway
project cut a 2,500-mile-long road across the Amazon Basin, promising
to open the unexplored interior to settlement. Thousands of indigenous
people were killed or forced to move, few settlers heard the call, and
generations later the route is a largely unpaved thread connecting small
towns with few economic opportunities.
Another project from the twilight of the military regime, the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam,
was resurrected in this century as a solution to Brazil’s energy woes.
The megaproject redirected the flow of one of the Amazon’s largest
tributaries to generate energy for development and mining projects,
displacing thousands of indigenous people and other residents in the
path of the floodwaters. Tribes in the area protested vigorously for
years, only to be pacified with emergency aid programs so poorly managed
that a federal prosecutor charged the government with “ethnocide.”
In
the years since Renca was established, ranchers throughout the Amazon
have slashed and burned their way deeper into the forest with impunity.
The Amazon frontier has become a South American Wild West where land
barons feud over property, extort judges and politicians with threats of
violence, and abuse workers in conditions akin to slavery. Over time, a
powerful lobby of ranchers, loggers, land speculators and mining
companies has consolidated its political power, forming a pivotal
congressional bloc — the ruralistas — who recently intervened to shield
Mr. Temer from a federal corruption investigation.
Mr.
Temer is asking Brazilians to forget that history and trust in
assurances that mining in Renca won’t harm the environment and
indigenous people, but mine operators’ records in places like Minas
Gerais State do not inspire confidence. In 2015, Brazil suffered what is
regarded as the worst environmental disaster in its history
when an iron ore tailings dam in Minas Gerais failed, killing 17 people
and poisoning the region’s most important river with tons of toxic
orange sludge that will take years to clean.
Large-scale
mining efforts are even riskier in the Amazon where so-called
greenfield projects require the construction of roads, railways and
hydroelectric dams that worsen deforestation, pollute the water supply
and destroy plant and animal life. According to data collected by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute,
a scientific organization working for the sustainable development of
the Amazon, Renca is home to one of the highest concentrations of
endangered mammals in the rain forest.
According
to Mr. Temer, though, “It’s no paradise.” His administration is quick
to point to the presence of illegal loggers and miners in the reserve
who are “plundering the nation’s wealth” and polluting the water supply
with mercury. They claim that legal operations will push out
prospectors, but history shows that prospectors will be drawn like
mosquitoes to the allure of fresh veins.
The Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network,
a group of Catholic clergy members in the region, calls the decree “a
blasphemy of Brazilian democracy,” warning against “increased land
conflicts, uncontrolled aggression against cultures and lifestyles of
indigenous and traditional communities, with large tax exemptions but
minimum benefits for the people of the region.”
Responding to worldwide outcry, the Temer administration tried to make its decree more palatable, but a federal judge suspended the opening of the reserve,
saying the move would require congressional approval. Now the proposal
is open for public comment. Unfortunately the decree is but one of many
attacks on environmental regulations in Brazil.
Three
current bills under consideration could open more than 12 million acres
(five million hectares) of protected forest over the next eight years.
Mr. Temer has proposed a new mining code that shifts the responsibility
for monitoring environmental standards away from the government and
toward the companies themselves. Another catastrophic proposal would open all land
within Brazil’s protected border zone — a territory the size of Alaska —
to foreign mining investment, bringing bulldozers and new waves of
prospectors to the refuge of some of the world’s last isolated tribes.
The
Amazon is a natural wonder enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution as
part of the national patrimony. Its future is critical to Brazil, South
America and the planet. It is also a region in chaos where local, state
and federal governments struggle to deliver basic health and sanitation
services, let alone regulate international mining operations.
If
Mr. Temer wants to stimulate economic development in the region, he
should solicit foreign investors to repair and expand its public
infrastructure so that the Amazon and its people can live up to their
remarkable potential in fields like biotechnology, health care and
sustainable fishing and agriculture. To accelerate mining in the Amazon
in 2017 would only refresh the cycle of pillage, boom and bust that has
plagued the world’s largest forest since the first marauders arrived in
search of El Dorado.
Chris Feliciano Arnold is
the author of the forthcoming “The Third Bank of the River: Power and
Survival in the 21-Century Amazon.”
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