Day 241 - 26 Apr 96 - Page 48
1 of ---
2
3 MS. STEEL: Tribal areas,.
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: -- number of tribes or tribal areas which are
6 then set out and she carries on: "... among many others"
7 -----
8
9 MS. STEEL: " ... among many others, through clearing of
10 territories, as well as direct expulsion and invasion of
11 these lands -- the famous 'cleaning of territories'.
12
13 "This process often preceded demarcation efforts so their
14 impact is under-estimated, since most demarcations and
15 delimitations of native terrains occurred in the 1980s,
16 after the livestock wave was already well advanced.
17
18 "Increasing Social Tension. The Brazilian amazon has been
19 the locus of widespread land conflict which pitted small
20 scale colonists against large scale, often highly
21 subsidised ranches, and radically altered the pattern of
22 land distribution. I enclose a table from a research
23 article of mine which illustrates the pattern of land
24 concentration in the ranching areas compared with Amazonia
25 as a whole, in agricultural areas, and in livestock zones.
26
27 "It is less well known that Amazonia is a zone of intense
28 conflict and was the scene of at least 75,000 threatening
29 incidents and more than 3,000 violent deaths in the last
30 five years. This pattern has been typical of regional
31 occupation throughout the 70s and 80s but only effectively
32 documented recently by the Catholic Church.
33
34 (1) The conflicts, fuelled by livestock land speculation,
35 land fraud, timber poaching and environmental degradation,
36 became so intense that by the mid 1970s the main
37 development corridor of the eastern Amazon, the
38 Araguaia-Tocantins Valley was placed under the direct
39 control of the military. At the same time, the state
40 attempted to deflect migration from these violent zones
41 into state controlled development programmes in Rondonia
42 and Acre in western Amazonia which effectively opened these
43 regions to a cattle frontier.
44
45 "Migrants flooded into the richest rubber and Brazil nut
46 forests of the Amazon. Just as the decline of debt peonage
47 had freed these rubber tappers and nut gatherers from
48 indentured servitude, they found themselves pitted against
49 land speculators and livestock interests.
50
51 Another source of social tension has been the expansion of
52 the export directed soy frontier in Mato Grosso do Sul and
53 Goias which has been instrumental in stimulating migration
54 into the forest zones. Migrants from Goias, which" -----
55
56 MR. MORRIS: It is meant to be "Goias".
57
58 MS. STEEL: "... from Goias, which formed roughly 30 per cent
59 of migrants on the Belem-Brasilia, and Mato Grosso do Sul
60 migrants into the BR354 rather of Rondonia cited land
