Farewell to a Wild River

It is a bitter loss. The wild river that along its lengthy journey gives life to so much and so many will be tamed forever. Where I stand on the shores of the Xingú River, just a few miles from the city of Altamira I can see the markers where the main wall of the Belo Monte dam will be built.  Across the main waterway of the Xingú, 14 meters or 46 feet high, the dam will muzzle the flow of the river and will create a gigantic lake almost 600 square kilometers or 148 acres in size. When the city of New Orleans, which is roughly that size, was flooded after hurricane Katrina, the entire world shrieked in horror.  As an equivalent area of Amazonian rainforest is scheduled to be flooded, barely anybody outside this area is paying attention.   For over 20 years, the ploy to dam the tributaries of the Amazon has been bounced around and finally, despite tremendous opposition it has won. The walls of the dam will go up and the character of this vital ecosystem will be changed forever.

What the dam will mean to the people who live along the river below the wall is a seasonal state of drought. The thousands of indigenous people and peasants who scratch a living out of the forest and the river will see their main source of drinking water and food dwindle. More dramatic, however, is the loss of their only means of transportation. There are no roads here and the only way to travel for the vast majority is by boat.  Once the flow of the river is blocked and the flow diminishes, people will become trapped in their communities for part of the year.  They have no other choice than to relocate. One can sense the fear and the frustration in their faces. The newspapers talk about the government’s plans to compensate, educate and facilitate relocation, but no one has come to these small villages to explain how that process will work.

For the people on the other side of the wall, the threat of seeing their homes under water has finally become a not-so-distant reality.  They too will need to find new homes.  The flood will reach all the way to the city of Altamira and no one is surprised to know that the most vulnerable people are also the poorest inhabitants of the city; the ones that live in the “favelas” or informal settlements along the river’s floodplain.  Without any services ---electricity, running water or sanitation – these people are used to rough conditions and to being marginalized.  They too have heard the promises of compensation for their relocation, but so far no one has come here to ease their fears and certainly no one believes any promises the government is making.  They have heard it all before and at this point the only thing that is certain is that they too have no idea of where they will go.

The indigenous people who live in the interior, some nearby and others hundreds of miles from the construction site, have long opposed the idea of the dam, as they too will be affected.  Although some indigenous territories lie outside the area of direct influence of the dam, the thousands of workers that will come to the region to build the dam’s infrastructure will likely stay.  They too will need services, food and opportunity to thrive.  That means more Amazonian rain forest will need to be deforested to make way for more agriculture, homes, and infrastructure to feed, house and create new jobs for the newcomers.  

 For decades now, the indigenous people here have been fighting the avalanche of invasion to their lands from illegal logging, mining, cattle ranching and soybean plantations.  As more people settle in the area, the pressure on the forest is only going to increase.

  

I have spent some time in remote villages in the Amazon and it has always surprised me how little they need not only to survive, but to thrive. A fishing line, some locally made bows and arrows and a machete are the only tools a head of household in an Indian village needs in order to provide food for his family.  To see this people, who are proud and independent, helplessly watch as their main source of all nourishment, transportation and livelihood threatened in the name of Brazil’s progress is heartbreaking.

There is no stopping this dam now.  It has been approved by a government who insists this is the solution to the energy needs of the country.  Seventy percent of the energy produced by the dam will go to households hundreds of miles away from the Xingu while 30% will go to support the mining industry. There is one major blind spot in this scheme.  This dam, which is being built on a river that runs almost dry a large part of the year, will be a very inefficient project –running at 10% of its capacity during the driest months.  The energy produced will go to mines that extract resources that are then shipped to other countries, where “things” are manufactured.  Brazil is squandering its future potential in new markets like “freshwater and carbon” and is shipping raw materials to create jobs elsewhere.    Not a very smart strategy for a country that has so much potential. I suggest that international media starts paying attention to this dam for it is the first one of more than 30 planned for the region.  We all know that this is an inefficient project – one that may be better than a coal or nuclear plant but far from ideal. If we dare follow the money we are likely to find a different set of reasons for why projects like these, which make no sense from a social or environmental standpoint, go through anyway.

So here is my farewell to a wild river.  This will be the beginning of the end of the Amazon region as we know it.  One day we might look back at Brazil’s Amazonian legacy and wonder if they could have done things differently. Until then, the people of the Amazon, the people of Brazil and the people of the world will be left to deal with the environmental consequences.

Memories of the Amazon

The first time I was in the Amazon I was a mere 24 years old and I was very pregnant. The year was 1991 and I had recently married my husband, who is not only much older and experienced than me, but who also had been a jungle explorer for over 20 years. To make matters worse, this was my first ever trip outside Mexico, Canada or the US and I had never been to an Indian village. The village we were visiting was literally in the middle of nowhere. I remember the shock of arriving at the frontier town of Rendecao, where our small Cessna had to stop to refuel before heading into the heart of the Amazon. The dirty, lawless, dusty town where a bunch of garimpeiros or illegal gold miners hung out with prostitutes, drunken loggers and a handful of raggedy looking Indians truly seemed like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.

As debilitating as Redencao was to my pregnant disposition, I was utterly unprepared for the village of Aukre. After a three-hour long flight over unbroken rainforest we landed on a grassy airstrip located next to the circular opening where the village sat. Although Russ, my husband, had prepared me for the welcoming, I was still completely taken aback by the hundred or so people who came to greet the airplane.

Imagine that you live in an isolated village in the Amazon and the only supplies that ever reach you come in a sporadic Cessna, of course you too would run for the airstrip any time an aircraft approached town! The painted bodies, the toothless grins, the smell of sweat were almost too much! I was in what anthropologists call cultural shock.

Over the following years I have been lucky to visit many other Indian villages, but I have to say that to this day, Aukre is one of the most traditional places I have ever been to. The men do wear basketball shorts, but they seldom wear shirts, and many of them still wear feather cokais, or headdresses made of colorful macaw and parrot feathers. They are also never too far apart from their trusty bordunas – the traditional wooden war club. Many of the women wear what in the Amazon is known as the Missionary dress, a shapeless number that resembles more a sack of potatoes than a dress, and has no charm or shape –with the exception of a tiny (and largely useless) pocket on one side. Every Indian woman wears one and their only redeeming feature is that they come in all sorts of bright and cheery colors. The children, however, run around completely naked and wearing no shoes. When I visited Aukre I already traveled extensively in some of the poorest parts of my native Mexico, but I had never seen so many naked children. What I initially took as a sign of poverty, eventually revealed itself as a matter of pragmatism, as Indian children are like fish and they spend most of the time swimming and splashing in the river (there is always a river next to an Indian village….or is it the other way around?).
In any case, I was so exhausted and suffering from bouts of morning sickness that I remember very little of what happened over the next few days. What I do remember is that my husband, an expert at this kind of experience (being an Anthropologist with a PhD from Harvard!) had brought stuff that the Indians wanted to trade: cigarettes, sugar, bright red cloth and several pounds of colorful beads. The purpose of the trading had to do with far more than a simple exercise in friendship; it was in fact a diplomatic endeavor that would eventually lead to a partnership between one of the world’s largest conservation groups, and one of the best politically-organized indigenous nations.

I will expand on the politics of conservation and indigenous people in future blogs. For now, I simply want to say that having that experience completely changed my life. Although I remember most vividly the “uncomfortable” portions of our visit….how I got sick when I accompanied some of the young men on a fishing expedition and couldn’t hold in my breakfast once they started throwing large, bloody fish (speared right through using a bow and arrow) into the bottom of the canoe. The smell of the fish, which by the way kept flapping in a pool of their own blood, much to my disgust and the indifference of the Indians, and the heat of the Amazonian midday sun, were enough to put me in my hammock for the rest of the day! I also remember the surprising chill of the Amazonian night. I spent my first ever night in a hammock shivering in nothing more than a pair of shorts and a tee-shirt. I had packed nothing warm and although I layered every other pair of shorts and tee-shirts I had brought, I still didn’t manage to be warm.

I mostly remember, however, an afternoon spent sitting in the shade of a large tree with the chief’s wife. I could speak no Kayapo and she spoke no English (neither of us spoke any Portuguese either, for that matter). She prepared a mushy substance using the pulp of a fruit mixed in with charcoal and with it she covered my legs, my arms and my pregnant belly with black designs. She kept repeating meikomene, which years later I discovered means “you are ok” in Kayapo.

In any case, it was not the amazing dances the women performed to thank us for bringing beads, or the colorful feather headdresses, or the evenings spent talking by the Indian campfire that I remember most. What stuck in my mind, was the gentle attitude of an Indian woman who sensed how frightened and uncomfortable I was and tried to make me feel better.

It is the common humanity we share with other cultures that attracts me most to indigenous people. It is not how different we are, but how similar we are that continues to fascinate me today.