News

Source : Survival International
An investigation into the reported killing of an uncontacted Indian child by loggers, has uncovered disturbing ‘evidence of an attack’ deep in the Amazon forest. The findings suggest loggers were operating 400 meters away from an uncontacted Awá camp where the burned remains of a child were allegedly found. Brazilian NGO CIMI, The Order of Attorneys of Brazil and the Maranhão Human Rights Society, who jointly carried out the investigation, also found, ‘many indications that the Awá had been in the place of the reported incident.’

Source : vaticaninsider.lastampa.it
The Brazilian government is planning the construction of more than 60 facilities on the rivers that run through the largest and most unprotected forest in the world.
The Amazon looms as a great victim of Brazil's impetuous development process. Reported by the Missioline agency in a story by Alessandro Armato.

Source : Condé Nast Traveler
22nd Annual Condé Nast Traveler Environmental Award André Villas-Bôas has helped the Amazon's tribes protect a quarter of the earth's freshwater and its largest remaining rain forest for decades. Now, as they face their most powerful foe, the future of the planet could hang in the balance.

Source : www.forbes.com
Some 1.3 million people signed a petition calling for an end to the construction of Brazil’s massive Belo Monte dam in the Amazon. A delegation of Brazilian celebrities and activists delivered the petition Tuesday to the country’s President Dilma Rousseff and called — yet again — for the immediate suspension of the controversial hydroelectric dam in Para state, located in Brazil’s north.

Source : www.greenpeace.org
The next stage of voting on Brazil’s new Forest Code – which could have devastating impacts on the Amazon - has been once again postponed before going to President Dilma, who can either approve or veto it. The new code, which has been labelled a ‘forest protection measure’, has been so badly altered that it has become nothing more than an invitation for bulldozers and chainsaws to come to the forests.

Source : www.bbc.co.uk
A judge in Brazil has revoked a decision which had halted work on the Belo Monte dam in the Amazon region.

Judge Carlos Castro Martins reversed the order he had issued in September, which had barred any work on the Belo Monte dam that interfered with the natural flow of the Xingu river. He said the company behind the project had subsequently shown its work would not harm local fishing.

Source : www.myoo.com
Hydroelectric power is renewable but is it clean? The debate has electrified the alternative energy community.
The solar people are at war with the wind people; algal oil is the enemy of ethanol. The idea of renewable infighting is now such a cliché that it has entered the world of car advertising.

source : www.as-coa.org
Brazil continues to flex its muscles on the international stage—this week at the UN environmental summit in Durban, South Africa. But despite strong leadership on the environment and reports of decreasing Amazon deforestation, Brazil finds itself under particular scrutiny this year from environmentalists.

http://catarse.me/pt/projects/459-belo-monte-anuncio-de-uma-guerra
There's a war of sorts underway in the Brazilian Amazon, and the stakes are high. On the one side are entrenched business and political interests dead-set on building a massively impactful hydroelectric dam, unmoved by the social, environmental, and cultural upheavals the project entails.

source : The Economist
Keeping the world’s biggest forest standing depends on greens, Amerindians and enlightened farmers working together—if lawmakers let them
Drive out of Porto Velho, the capital of the Amazonian state of Rondônia, and you see the trouble the world’s largest forest is in. Lorry after lorry trundles by laden with logs; more logs lie by the road, to be collected by smugglers who dumped them on the rumour of a (rare) roadcheck.

Source : www.myoo.com
Rachel Riederer puts a spotlight on the individuals fighting back against a massive dam that would turn their homes into a lost city of Atlantis
On Wednesday, October 26th of this year Sheyla Juruna, a leader of the Juruna people, an indigenous Amazonian tribe, held a small press conference in the Washington, D.C. drizzle. In a city of suits, Sheyla Juruna stood out in her leggings, flip-flops, and feather headband, her legs painted with traditional wave designs representing the Jurunas’ connection to their river, a major tributary of the Amazon.

Source : Rainforest News
The Brazilian Senate is poised to pass measures that will strip the Amazon forest and other important ecosystems of hard won protections and open up vast amounts of the forest to agriculture and cattle ranching. Senators intent on doing away with core elements of Brazil’s long-standing Forest Code – legislation protecting the most sensitive forest areas and establishing the amount of forest that can be legally converted to different uses – are pushing to vote on a drastically revised version of the code as soon as the end of the month.

source : International Rivers
In June 2010, the Brazilian and Peruvian governments signed an energy agreement that opens the door for Brazilian companies to build a series of large dams in the Peruvian Amazon. The Ashaninka, one of the largest indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon, numbering close to 70,000, are directly impacted.

Source : www.imazon.org.br
The degraded forests in Legal Amazon totaled 658 square kilometers in September 2011. Regarding September 2010 there was an expressive increase of 33% when the forest degradation totaled 496 square kilometers.

Source : www.amnesty.org
Around 100 Guarani-Kaiowá people are encamped on their ancestral lands: on 18 November 40 gunmen attacked the camp, killing an indigenous leader and abducting three children. The indigenous group has vowed to stay on their ancestral land.

Activists in Brazil are in uproar after one of the country's best-known indigenous leaders was sacked from his job with the indigenous protection service, allegedly because of his outspoken stance against the construction of a massive hydro-electric plant in the Brazilian Amazon.

Source : AFP (Agence France Presse)
SAO PAULO — More than 400 activists occupied the site of Brazil's $11 billion Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, demanding that construction be halted on the controversial project in the heart of the Amazon. "Everything was peaceful -- there were no guards or workers," a spokesman for the Indigenous Missionary Council, a group linked to the Catholic Church, told AFP on Thursday. The indigenous people and environmentalists at the site of what would be the third biggest dam in the world -- after China's Three Gorges dam and the Itaipu dam on the border of Brazil and Paraguay -- say they will stay indefinitely.

Source : www.internationalrivers.org
On Monday, federal judge Selene Maria de Almeida voted in a landmark opinion in Brazilian courts that the Belo Monte Dam licenses are illegal and must be cancelled due to what is now widely-accepted evidence that the Brazilian government did not hold proper consultations with indigenous tribes that would be affected by the project. De Almeida argued that while the dam reservoirs do not flood indigenous territories, the project's diversion of the Xingu River will directly impact the tribes' abilities to reproduce physically, culturally, and economically, as 80% of the Xingu River would be channeled away from their lands to the reservoirs. The vote shined a stark spotlight on the project's astronomical risks, and on a growing gap between the implementation of Brazil's legislative framework and the standards of international best practice. 

Indigenous leader of the Kayapo people, Raoni Metyktire, went together with Bemoro, and Ta-u Metuktire to the UN, on the 30 September 2011, to speak about his concerns, the destruction of the earth, the land, waters, rivers, forests. He firmly reaffirmed his opposition the building of dams in the amazon, such as Belo Monte. He explained that the Xingu river is contaminated and poisoned starting at the watershed of the river, by soja plantations, agro-business, cattle farms. he also informed the UN that this would be his last time that he would come to the UN, and that Bemoro would take over his position as the new chief of his people.

The Mebengôkrés warriors (Kayapos) have massively demonstrated in front of the city Council of Colider (Mato Grosso – Brazil), 3 June 2011, to show to the President of Brazil, Dilma ROUSSEF, that she did not make the Chief Raoni cry as it has been said by the press after the announcement of the authorization granted for the construction of the Belo Monte dam. The purpose of this demonstration was to show that Raoni remains steadfast/firm and strong in his struggle against the dam project on the Xingu river.

Signature of RAONI's petition

We, the indigenous people of Xingu, do not want Belo Monte. We, the indigenous people of Xingu, are fighting for our people, our land but also for the future of the planet. President Lula said he was worried about the Indians, he was concerned about the Amazon and that he did not want international NGOs to oppose the Belo Monte dam project. We are not international NGOs. We, the 62 indigenous leaders of the villages of Bacajâ, Mrotidjam, Kararaô, Terra-Wanga, Boa Vista Km 17, Tukamâ, Kapoto, Moikarako, Aykre, Kiketrum, Potikro, Tukai, Mentutire, Omekrankum, and Cakamkubem Pokaimone, have already undergone many invasions and faced many dangers.

Back in Europe (May 3-17, 2010) for the very last time, Kayapo Chief RAONI, great defender of the Amazon rainforest, will seize the opportunity to promote his memoirs, ’Raoni, Mémoires d’un chef Indien’ (Editions du Rocher), to call for help against the Belo Monte dam complex and relaunch the pilot project for an Institute bearing his name.