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

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