John Perkins : Occupy the Dam

Three hundred indigenous people, small farmers, fisherfolk, and local residents occupied the Belo Monte Dam project at the Xingu River, Brazil, on June 15, 2012 Photo by Atossa Soltani / Amazon Watch / Spectral Q. Go here for photo essay. Photos courtesy of International Rivers
Occupy the dam:
Brazil's indigenous uprising

In the Amazonian backcountry, tribes are challenging construction of the world's third-largest dam -- by dismantling it. Here's what they can teach us about standing up to power.

By John Perkins / YES! Magazine / July 25, 2012

Last month, hundreds of indigenous demonstrators began dismantling a dam in the heart of Brazil’s rainforest to protest the destruction it will bring to lands they have loved and honored for centuries. The Brazilian government is determined to promote construction of the massive, $14 billion Belo Monte Dam, which will be the world’s third largest when it is completed in 2019.

It is being developed by Norte Energia, a consortium of 10 of the world’s largest construction, engineering, and mining firms set up specifically for the project.

The Belo Monte Dam is the most controversial of dozens of dams planned in the Amazon region and threatens the lives and livelihoods of thousands of Amazonian people, plants, and animals. Situated on the Xingu River, the dam is set to flood roughly 150 square miles of already-stressed rainforest and deprive an estimated 20,000 people of their homes, their incomes, and -- for those who succumb to malaria, bilharzia, and other diseases carried by insects and snails that are predicted to breed in the new reservoir -- their lives.

Moreover, the influx of immigrants will bring massive disruption to the socioeconomic balance of the region. People whose livelihoods have primarily depended on hunting and gathering or farming may suddenly find themselves forced to take jobs as manual laborers, servants, and prostitutes.

History has shown again and again that dams in general wreak havoc in areas where they are built, despite promises to the contrary by developers and governments. Hydroelectric energy is anything but “clean” when measured in terms of the excruciating pain it causes individuals, social institutions, and local ecology.

The costs -- often hidden -- include those associated with the privatization of water; the extinction of plants that might provide cures for cancer, HIV, and other diseases; the silting up of rivers and lakes; and the disruption of migratory patterns for many species of birds.

The indigenous cultures threatened by the Belo Monte Dam, including those of the Xikrin, Juruna, Arara, Parakanã, Kuruaya, and Kayapó tribes, are tied to the land: generations have hunted and gathered and cultivated the same areas for centuries. They -- as well as local flora and fauna -- have suffered disproportionately from the effects of other hydroelectric dams, while rarely gaining any of the potential benefits. Now they are fighting back.

Indigenous leaders from these groups have asked the Brazilian government to immediately withdraw the installation license for Belo Monte. They demand a halt to work until the government puts into place "effective programs and measures to address the impacts of the dam on local people." They point out that a promised monetary program to compensate for the negative impacts of the mega-dam has not yet been presented in local villages; also, that a system to ensure small boat navigation in the vicinity of the cofferdams, temporary enclosures built to facilitate the construction process, has not been implemented.

Without such a system, many will be isolated from markets, health care facilities, and other services. The cofferdams have already rendered much of the region’s water undrinkable and unsuitable for bathing. Wells promised by the government and Norte Energia have not yet been drilled. The list of grievances goes on and on and is only the latest in a very old story of exploitation of nature and people in the name of “progress.” Far too often, this has meant benefiting only the wealthiest in society and business.

Yet here in the backcountry of Brazil, there is a difference: the makings of a new story. The indigenous people’s occupation of the dam garnered international attention, connecting their situation to other events across the globe -- the Arab Spring, democratic revolutions in Latin America, the Occupy Movement, and austerity strikes in Spain and other European nations. Brazil’s indigenous protesters have essentially joined protesters on every continent who are demanding that rights be restored to the people.

Stories take time to evolve. This one -- the story of people awakening on a global level to the need to oppose and replace exploitative dreams -- is still in its beginning phase. And the first chapter has been powerful, elegant, and bold.

A few years ago I was invited, with a group, to Ladakh, a protectorate of India, to meet with the Dalai Lama. Among a great deal of sage advice he offered was the following: “It is important to pray and meditate for peace, for a more compassionate and better world. But if that is all you do, it is a waste of time. You also must take actions to make that happen. Every single day.”

It is time for each and every one us to follow that advice.

Opposing the Belo Monte Dam project provides an opportunity for you and me to honor those words, and those leading resistance to it can help us understand the importance of looking around -- in our neighborhoods as well as globally -- to determine what else we can do to change the story.

[John Perkins is the author of New York Times bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hitman and, most recently, Hoodwinked: An Economic Hitman Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded -- and What We Need to Do to Remake Them. This article was originally published at YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.]

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Hugh O'Shaughnessy: Former Guerrilla Rousseff Set to Lead Brazil

Dilma Rousseff: Brazil's next president? Photo from Menas Associates.
Brazil's Dilma Rousseff:
Former guerrilla in line to be
world's most powerful woman

By Hugh O'Shaughnessy / September 16, 2010

See 'Female representation: A woman's place... is in the government,' Below.

The world's most powerful woman will start coming into her own next weekend. Stocky and forceful at 63, this former leader of the resistance to a Western-backed military dictatorship (which tortured her) is preparing to take her place as President of Brazil.

As head of state, president Dilma Rousseff would outrank Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, and Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State: her enormous country of 200 million people is reveling in its new oil wealth. Brazil's growth rate, rivaling China's, is one that Europe and Washington can only envy.

Her widely predicted victory in next Sunday's presidential poll will be greeted with delight by millions. It marks the final demolition of the "national security state," an arrangement that conservative governments in the U.S. and Europe once regarded as their best artifice for limiting democracy and reform. It maintained a rotten status quo that kept a vast majority in poverty in Latin America while favoring their rich friends.

Ms. Rousseff, the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant to Brazil and his schoolteacher wife, has benefited from being, in effect, the prime minister of the immensely popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former union leader. But, with a record of determination and success (which includes appearing to have conquered lymphatic cancer), this wife, mother, and grandmother will be her own woman.

The polls say she has built up an unassailable lead -- of more than 50 percent compared with less than 30 percent -- over her nearest rival, an uninspiring man of the center called Jose Serra. Few doubt that she will be installed in the Alvorada presidential palace in Brasilia in January.

Like President Jose Mujica of Uruguay, Brazil's neighbor, Ms Rousseff is unashamed of a past as an urban guerrilla which included battling the generals and spending time in jail as a political prisoner.

As a little girl growing up in the provincial city of Belo Horizonte, she says she dreamed successively of becoming a ballerina, a firefighter, and a trapeze artist. The nuns at her school took her class to the city's poor area to show them the vast gaps between the middle-class minority and the vast majority of the poor. She remembers that when a young beggar with sad eyes came to her family's door she tore a currency note in half to share with him, not knowing that half a banknote had no value.

Her father, Pedro, died when she was 14, but by then he had introduced her to the novels of Zola and Dostoevsky. After that, she and her siblings had to work hard with their mother to make ends meet. By 16 she was in POLOP (Workers' Politics), a group outside the traditional Brazilian Communist Party that sought to bring socialism to those who knew little about it.

The generals seized power in 1964 and decreed a reign of terror to defend what they called "national security." She joined secretive radical groups that saw nothing wrong with taking up arms against an illegitimate military regime. Besides cosseting the rich and crushing trade unions and the underclass, the generals censored the press, forbidding editors from leaving gaps in newspapers to show where news had been suppressed.

Dilma Rousseff in 1970 police mugshot. Photo from Reuters / The Independent, U.K.
Ms. Rousseff ended up in the clandestine VAR-Palmares (Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard). In the 1960's and 1970's, members of such organizations seized foreign diplomats for ransom: a U.S. ambassador was swapped for a dozen political prisoners; a German ambassador was exchanged for 40 militants; a Swiss envoy swapped for 70. They also shot foreign torture experts sent to train the generals' death squads.

Though she says she never used weapons, she was eventually rounded up and tortured by the secret police in Brazil's equivalent to Abu Ghraib, the Tiradentes prison in Sao Paulo. She was given a 25-month sentence for "subversion" and freed after three years. Today she openly confesses to having "wanted to change the world."

In 1973 she moved to the prosperous southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where her second husband, Carlos Araujo, a lawyer, was finishing a four-year term as a political prisoner (her first marriage with a young left-winger, Claudio Galeno, had not survived the strains of two people being on the run in different cities). She went back to university, started working for the state government in 1975, and had a daughter, Paula.

In 1986, she was named finance chief of Porto Alegre, the state capital, where her political talents began to blossom. Yet the 1990s were bitter-sweet years for her. In 1993 she was named secretary of energy for the state, and pulled off the coup of vastly increasing power production, ensuring the state was spared the power cuts that plagued the rest of the country.

She had 1,000km of new electric power lines, new dams and thermal power stations built while persuading citizens to switch off the lights whenever they could. Her political star started shining brightly. But in 1994, after 24 years together, she separated from Mr Araujo, though apparently on good terms. At the same time she was torn between academic life and politics, but her attempt to gain a doctorate in social sciences failed in 1998.

In 2000 she threw her lot in with Lula and his Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers' Party which set its sights successfully on combining economic growth with an attack on poverty. The two immediately hit it off and she became his first energy minister in 2003. Two years later he made her his chief of staff and has since backed her as his successor.

She has been by his side as Brazil has found vast new offshore oil deposits, aiding a leader whom many in the European and U.S. media were denouncing a decade ago as a extreme left-wing wrecker to pull 24 million Brazilians out of poverty. Lula stood by her in April last year as she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, a condition that was declared under control a year ago. Recent reports of financial irregularities among her staff do not seem to have damaged her popularity.

Ms Rousseff is likely to invite President Mujica of Uruguay to her inauguration in the New Year. President Evo Morales of Bolivia, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay -- other successful South American leaders who have, like her, weathered merciless campaigns of denigration in the Western media -- are also sure to be there. It will be a celebration of political decency -- and feminism.

Female representation:
A woman's place... is in the government

In recent years, female political representation has undergone significant growth, with dramatic changes occurring in unexpected corners of the globe. In some countries women are dominating cabinets and even parliamentary chambers. By comparison, the UK falls far behind, with only 22 per cent of seats in the Commons currently held by women.

Bolivia: In the Bolivian cabinet, 10 men are now matched by 10 women. In 2009, women won 25 per cent of seats in the lower chamber, and 47 per cent in the upper chamber.

Costa Rica: In 2010, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Argentina: In 2009, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber and 47 per cent in the upper chamber.

Cuba: In 2009, women won 41 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Rwanda: In 2009, women won 56 per cent of seats in the lower chamber and 35 per cent in the upper chamber.

Mozambique: In 2009, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Angola: In 2009, women won 38 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Switzerland: Has a female-dominated cabinet for the first time. In 2007, women won 29 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Germany: In 2009, the cabinet had six women and 10 men. That year, women won 33 per cent of lower chamber seats.

Spain: Nine women compared with eight men in cabinet. In 2008, women won 37 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Norway: Equal numbers of men and women in the cabinet. Women won 40 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Denmark: Nine women and 10 men in cabinet. In 2007, women won 23 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Netherlands: Three women and nine men in cabinet. In 2010, women won 41 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

© 2010 Independent/UK

Source / The Independent, U.K. / CommonDreams

Thanks to David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog

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Wanted in Rio : 'Prophets of Ecology'

Landslide in Mangueira shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after a 17 hour downpour that ended on April 6, 2010, resulting in death and devastation. Photo by Marcelo Sayao / EPA.
High water in Rio:
'Prophets of ecology' would save lives

By Leonardo Boff / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2010

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Between April 5th and 8th the State of Rio de Janeiro (the city and other neighboring cities, especially Niteroi) experienced the worst flood in 48 years. There were high waters in main streets, landslides in the hillsides, and the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon rose one and a half meters, caused in part by the high tide that blocked the rain water from draining. Worst of all were the deaths of hundreds of people, who were buried alive by tons of earth, trees, rocks, and garbage.

There seem to be three principal causes for this tragedy, that from time to time envelops this city that is so enchanting for her scenery -- combining sea, mountains, and jungle -- and for her happy and welcoming population.

The first is the flood itself, which is typical of these subtropical areas. But with that is the added burden of global warming. The tragedy of Rio must be seen in the context of tragedies that have occurred in other parts of the country, with hurricanes and prolonged rains causing enormous landslides and hundreds of victims, and the city of Sao Paulo, that has been flooded for more than a month at a time, leaving whole neighborhoods constantly under water.

Some analysts talk of changes in the hydrologic cycles caused by the warming of the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, as is already happening in the Pacific. This scene will tend to repeat itself ever more frequently, and with ever greater intensity, as global warming worsens.

The climatic tragedy brought to light the social tragedy endured by the most needy populations. This is the second cause. There are more than 500 favelas (slums), dangling from the sides of the mountains that twist and turn around the city. They are not the cause of the landslides, as the governor said. The people live in these dangerous zones simply because they have nowhere else to go.

There is a noticeable general insensibility toward the poor, resulting from the elitism of our colonial and slavery tradition. The State is not organized to care for the whole population, but primarily for the well-to-do classes. There has never been a consistent public policy that included the favelas as part of the city and, consequently, developed them, guaranteeing them safe living spaces, drainage infrastructure, water and electricity, and, least of all, transportation.

There have always been poor policies towards the poor, who are the great majority of the population, and good policies for the rich. The consequence of this lack of attention is seen in the disasters that end up taking the lives of hundreds of people.

The third cause is what I would call the lack of "prophets of ecology." Observing the flooded streets and avenues, all forms of garbage, bags filled with refuse, plastic bottles, wooden boxes, and even couches and wardrobes, could be seen floating in the water. This is to say, the population has not developed a minimum of ecological sensitivity, to take care of the garbage produced. That garbage blocked the sewers and other rainwater drains, which caused the sudden rise of the torrential waters and the slowness with which they receded.

Porto Alegre, in the State of Rio Grande del Sur, offers a good model. Under the guidance of Antonio Cecchin, a Marist Brother, who has been working for years in the poor areas that surround the city, hundreds of places to collect garbage were organized and created. He built some 20 large sheds near the center of the city, in the point of the Big Island of the Marineros, where the garbage is sorted, cleaned, and sold to different factories that reuse it.

That makes the garbage men and women conscious that their work helps keep the city clean, so that it can be a place where everyone can live happily. With pride the garbage people wrote in big letters, behind each of their little cars, their title of dignity: "Prophets of Ecology."

They assumed as an ideal the words of Joshep Lutzenberger, one of our main ecologists: "One single garbage person does more for the environment in Brazil than the Secretary of the Environment himself."

If there were such "prophets of the ecology" in the State of Río de Janeiro, the floods would not be as devastating and hundreds of lives would be saved.

Original in Portuguese; translated into Spanish by Servicios Koinonia; translated into English by Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas.

[A Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, and author of more than 60 books, Leonardo Bofff lives in Jardim Araras, an ecological wilderness area in the municipality of Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. Boff is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. A former Franciscan priest with a doctorate from the University of Munich, Boff was an early advocate of liberation theology. In 1991, after a series of clashes with the Vatican, Boff renounced his activities as a priest and "promoted himself to the state of laity."]

Street scene in Rio: Hundreds may have died in the flooding caused by torrential rains. Photo by Antonio Lacerda / EPA.
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