Day 251 - 17 May 96 - Page 30


     
     1        area which is nearest to where I have written Sinop.  Is
     2        that right, generally speaking?
     3        A.  I do not know.  I mean, it depends where the roads go,
     4        you cannot really tell.  Because the areas that are cleared
     5        first are always -- you have a road going in and the area
     6        round the road will be cleared.
     7
     8   Q.   Never mind, perhaps that is a comment by me.  I just
     9        thought you might be able to confirm that that is the
    10        general trend of the deforestation.  It comes and up pushes
    11        its way?
    12        A.  The general trend is, yes, as the agricultural frontier
    13        or the occupation frontier moves up from the south.  But it
    14        is clearly irregular, depending on where roads are built.
    15        I mean, there has even been times when they dropped men in
    16        from planes and they cleared an area, then cleared it down
    17        south again.
    18
    19   Q.   We can see that quite clearly.  This is very, very general
    20        map, but we can see that quite clearly looking at map, can
    21        we not?  If the black areas are deforestation which has
    22        taken place in the 42 years between 1940 and 1982, one can
    23        see that it has not been a consistent pattern?
    24        A.  I would have thought this actually underestimated the
    25        amount that had been deforested by 1982.
    26
    27   Q.   That is as may be.  A couple of other things, if you were
    28        talking about an industrial dispute in Portuguese, what
    29        word would you use to describe, to translate, as it were,
    30        "industrial dispute"?
    31        A.  It would be probably "cocondi trabanista" (?) But are
    32        you referring to --
    33
    34   Q.   You translated it as "conflict", which is a slightly
    35        colourful word and I was wondering, in some of these cases,
    36        one might more aptly use the word "dispute"?
    37        A.  From my knowledge of the cattle ranches up there, they
    38        were fairly colourful conflicts.  I have actually seen in
    39        the Volkswagon ranch, labourers being held there as virtual
    40        slaves.  I mean, they are pretty violent conflicts.
    41
    42        For them to actually get on to the Land Commission's list,
    43        they will be not the kind of dispute that we have in the
    44        BBC, for example, occasionally with our management.  It is
    45        a very different order of magnitude, with people being
    46        killed I mean, there is labourers being killed.  The Land
    47        Commission has documentation of labourers being killed
    48        trying to escape from the cattle ranches.  It is that sort
    49        of violence.
    50 
    51   Q.   When your handwritten note which accompanied that list from 
    52        the commission, sorry the Pastoral Commission of Land or 
    53        whatever it is, you said that these conflicts had been
    54        registered.  What does it mean, "registered"?
    55        A.  It means that they have -- I do not mean it in a
    56        technical way.  I mean that they have gone into their
    57        archives, they have gone into their files.  They will have
    58        come to the attention of the Land Commission, which may be
    59        in lots of different ways, through priests who work in the
    60        area, often through the peasant families themselves who

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