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
