Amazon communities stand up to gun toting loggers to protect the forest and their homes

When the communities near Porto de Moz just south of the Amazon river first moved to the remote forest region, they knew that it would be tough work. They endured a harsh climate and isolation, fought off insects and forest creatures, but hoped for a peaceful life and enough food for their families. They didn't expect to have to endure violence and fight off loggers 20 years later.Having plundered much of the rest of Pará state, the Brazilian Amazon's largest state and biggest timber exporter, loggers, cattle ranchers and land speculators, among others, are now turning Porto de Moz into a new lawless frontier. Public lands are illegally seized, exploited for logging, turned over to cattle ranching. And then they move on to a new area and start all over again. The cycle is driven by greed, lawlessness, violence, intimidation and even murder.

People in search of a simple life

The Porto de Moz area was first occupied during the rubber boom, which eventually collapsed in 1914. Today, communities scratch out a simple living from fishing, small scale hunting, subsistence agriculture and from the few forest products they could sell or extract.

There are about 20,000 people living in the region in rural areas and small communities within the forest that spans 8 million hectares in the center of Para south of the Amazon river, between the Tapajos and Xingu rivers.

Vivaldo Barbosa moved to the Porto de Moz region with his family in 1982. They already had friends living in the community of Santa Maria de Matias and the community agreed Vivaldo and his family could move into the area. Now there are eight families living and working together in this forest community.

"When I arrived here, it was a paradise. We always worked together, we grew everything together - our pigs, our cattle, in only one piece of land. As you can see on this side here there is not even a fence in our lands - our bulls pass from here to the other side, his [bulls] pass from there to this side... Everything is only one piece of land. Thank God, our neighbours are still working together today."

But now Vivaldo and many others like him are fighting to hold on to their forest homes and the peaceful lives they had hoped for have turned into a struggle to hold on to their livelihood, even their lives.

Loggers in search of profit, at any cost

After 1995 when commercial stocks of timber dwindled in large production centers elsewhere in the state, the region of Porto de Moz became known as a new "Eldorado". Several logging companies arrived in the area, fighting with the traditional communities for resources created a situation of rampant violence.

Wood production in the region grew fast. By 2001 for example, 50,000 cubic meters of timber in logs was transported down the Jaurucu river, a tributary of the Xingu, each month. The impact of loggers on the forest increased dramatically due to the use of heavy machinery and the high production. Local people and small extractors, who initially traded with the companies, were removed from the process.

While the government's own figures estimate that 80 percent of all logging in the Brazilian Amazon is illegal, a report published last year by IMAZON, a independent research institute promoting sustainable forestry, stated that 95 percent of the timber exploited in the Amazon is produced through predatory logging.

Today Para is the largest timber producing and exporting region in the Amazon, accounting for 40 percent of production and 60 percent of all exports from all Amazon states. At the same time Pará accounts for over one-third of the total Amazon deforestation in Brazil amounting to an area larger than the size of Austria, Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland combined.

The large area has become a battleground between the forest communities who live in the region and depend on the natural resources for their survival, and logging companies who have invaded the area either with or without official sanction from the government environmental agency IBAMA.

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Source: Greenpeace http://www.greenpeace.org    03 November 2003