Brazilian Indians were in the spotlight of world media this week and the local blogosphere has much to say about it. From the images of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, which were ‘leaked’ first in a blog that is now claiming attribution rights for its scoop, to the enraged protest caught on camera against the building of dams along the Xingu River in the Amazon basin where an official of Brazil’s national electric company got slashed by traditional machetes and clubs. Bloggers had different takes from the dominant mainstream media narratives.

Here is the Brazilian GLOBO video of the engineer’s encounter with the Indians.

Since the gathering in Altamira, the Brazilian media have focused mostly on the issue of violence. GLOBO included a special report in its extremely popular weekend TV magazine FANTASTICO and here’s the text (computer) translated into rough English. As you can see, the focus is on the engineer and the Indians associated with the confrontation and there is very little about the many consequences of building the dam. While the Brazilian mainstream media are preoccupied with the “hot” story, various blogs and NGOs have been struggling to deliver the deeper messages. Encontro Xingu ‘08 provides great coverage of the whole event with in-depth analysis by David Cunningham and lots of wonderful photos by Sue Cunningham. The Xingu Encounter was also reported by International Rivers along with English translations of the declarations of the Xingu Peoples. And here’s the (computer) translated final statement of the broad coalition of Brazilian grassroots organizations that are opposing building of th,e Belo Monte dam.
Violence - Vision Share

Read the rest of this entry »

Changing the command in a Brazilian Ministry used to be a domestic affair, but the resignation of the renowned rainforest defender Marina Silva from the Environmental Ministry has sparked global reactions. Ms. Silva’s replacement was quickly announced by President Lula, through the designation of Carlos Minc, former environmental secretary of Rio de Janeiro State and one of the founders of the Green Party in Brazil. Here are some comments from local bloggers on the shifting sands of public environmental policy.

By leaving the ministry, the ex-rubber tapper and ex-domestic worker, who learned to read only when she was 17 years old [and later to become Brazil's youngest senator at the age of 36], has generated — inside and outside the country — a reverberation that overshadows those that eventually occurred with the fall of former powerful finance ministers. She hopes that her replacement in the ministry, Carlos Minc, will be able to assure the continuity of the government environmental policy, resisting the pressure that comes from Blairo Maggi, the governor of Mato Grosso State who is working against retaining the National Monetary Council resolution that will oblige the financial system to require conforming with environmental regulations as a precondition for access to rural credit in the Amazon…. Marina Silva has declared that when you are in a position of power, even if it is something small (the editor of a newspaper column, for example), we suffer the temptation to look at people from the top down. — “I’ve learned, and it was not now but with many people I had the opportunity to meet along my life, people like Chico Mendes and Dom Moacir Grechi, that we have to look from the bottom up. From the bottom up we are able to watch what is above us. The Amazon is above us. And with such a look we are able to see that, in order to do something that is really good, we have to put ourselves in the perspective of service, which can also mean the gesture of cleaning the path so that another person can take your place. I’ve said before that it’s better to see your son alive on someone else’s lap than to see him dead on your own lap.”
“The Amazon is above us” - Altino Machado

Read the rest of this entry »

César Salgado’s blog (via Altino) announces the launching of the English version of a youtube video which tells much about the lawless situation reigning in many parts of the Brazilian Amazon region.

Farmers and politicians of the Brazilian municipality of Juína (Mato Grosso state) hinders Greenpeace activists, OPAN (Native Amazon Operation) members and european journalists’s visit to the Enawene Nawe Indigenous Land. Watch truculence and intimidation scenes sufered by the crew in August 20th, 2007.

Exibir mapa ampliado

The Ashaninkas are the largest indigenous group in the Peruvian Amazon and differently from the majority of the South American original dwellers, their cultural identity is greatly preserved. Apart from being among the native nations of the continent connected with the traditional use of Ayahuasca, the Ashaninkas are specially known for their use of beautiful cotton robes, or cushmas, which are woven by the Ashaninka women for the men of their tribe. Cushmas are an Ashaninka’s most prized possession and there is a very long tradition of giving and exchanging cushmas and cloth with nyomparis (or trading partners) which linked distant Ashaninka villages into cycles of meetings, collaboration and resource sharing.

Accounts from the beginning of the last century tells about some Ashaninka groups that escaped from the Peruvian “caucheiros” [rubber tappers], and today a few hundred of them live on the Brazilian side of the border. There are stories about the braveness of the skilled warriors who expulsed the wild Amahuakas from the area around the Amonia River in the Upper Juruá. These few groups achieved the ownership of their land in the 90s, after many decades of struggle against the successive waves of colonization, and nowadays they strive to engage in activities that can help them to communicate with the world, and better defend their land and their culture from their current enemies.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ethanol has suddenly turned into a popular word among Brazilian bloggers, specially because of the foreign attention it attracts. In fact, “alcohol” is the word Brazilians have been using to call its sugar-cane derived biofuel since the 70s, when Proalcool started, but blogs are surely under global influence. As President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva traveled to attend an EU-sponsored biofuel international conference last week, some blogs are tracking the global media coverage on the ‘ethanol’ issue and reacting to it.

An article on the Spanish newspaper “El Mundo” reported on Friday that the UE doesn’t want Brazil’s “dirty alcohol”. The term adresses the block’s concerns over Brazilian sugar cane cultivation practices, which are seen by European leaders as potentially harmful to the environment. (…) Concerns over the Brazilian alcohol were manifested also by the Italian “La Repubblica”, who recalled the recent liberation of 1.106 workers in slave conditions in a sugar cane farm in Pará state. According to the newspaper, Lula — who is described as the leader “with the apostle role on biofuels” — “has not mentioned (in Brussels) the connection between the two reports”. (Folha Online) ** “European representative blames Lula on leading Brazil towards unsustainability”. The Green Party’s European representative David Hammerstein has said on Thursday that President Lula is “leading Brazil through a path of unsustainability” with the biofuels and that the EU should not finance the “Brazilian environmental destruction”. “The EU should give priority to feeding and not to transportation”, Hammerstein declared in a release. The representative’s speech was being divulged at the same time Lula was trying to convince the European leaders that the growth on biofuel production in Brazil would not represent any social or environmental risk.”
Replies to Alcoholism - A Nova Corja

Read the rest of this entry »