News - Brazil Busts Illegal Logging Ring in Amazon Reserve

Source - Planet Ark/Reuters

CUIABA, Brazil - Brazilian police on Wednesday broke up a suspected illegal logging ring involving Indians, environmental officials, ranchers and businessmen believed to have felled and sold around 2,000 truckloads of logs from an Indian reserve in the Amazon.

A police statement said 17 people had been arrested and dozens more suspects were being hunted in four states.

Those detained included three leaders of the Trumai Indian tribe who lived in the Xingu National Park and four officials of the environmental protection agency IBAMA who had issued permits authorizing logging in prohibited areas of the reserve.

About 1.4 million cubic feet (40,000 cubic metres) of wood, equivalent to 2,000 truckloads, were extracted from Xingu over an unspecified period of time and transported and sold to lumber businesses, the police said.

The Xingu National Park covers 11,000 square miles (28,000 sq km) in Mato Grosso state in the southern Amazon basin and is home to about 4,000 Indians from 14 tribes.

Officials tracking the destruction of the world's largest rain forest estimated that about 6,500 square miles (16,700 sq km) of forest -- an area about the size of Hawaii -- could have been lost legally or illegally in the year to July 2006.

Corruption inside IBAMA, which was reorganized last month, has been part of the problem. Dozens of IBAMA officials have been arrested in recent years for similar schemes.

Story Date: 18/5/2007

News - Brazilian Rancher Guilty in American Nun's Murder

POSTED: 3:20 p.m. EDT, May 16, 2007

Story Highlights

• Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura guilty in murder of American nun Dorothy Stang
• Moura, a Brazilian rancher, sentenced to 30 years as mastermind behind shooting
• Stang had attempted to halt rampant jungle clearing by loggers and ranchers
• Trial a key measure of making masterminds of land-related killings accountable

BELEM, Brazil (AP) -- A Brazilian rancher was convicted Tuesday of ordering the killing of an American nun and rain forest defender in a case seen as an important test of justice in the largely lawless Amazon region. A judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison.

A jury voted 5-2 to convict Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura of masterminding the shooting of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang on February 12, 2005, deep in the rain forest that she had been working decades to defend.

Judge Raymond Moises Alves Flexa said Moura "showed a violent personality unsuited to living in society," adding that the "killing was carried out in violent and cowardly manner." The sentence is the maximum in Brazil, which does not have the death penalty.

Stang's brother David, who flew to Brazil for the two-day trial, trembled and wept after the verdict. "Justice was done," he said. He expressed hope that another rancher accused of ordering his sister's killing, Regivaldo Galvao, might soon be tried. Galvao is free on bail while his lawyers file motions to avoid prosecution.

Stang, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio, helped build schools and was among the activists who worked to defend the rights of impoverished farmers in the Amazon region. She also attempted to halt the rampant jungle clearing by loggers and ranchers that has destroyed some 20 percent of the forest cover.

Tuesday's verdict came even though three other men convicted in connection with the killing -- a gunman, his accomplice and a go-between -- recanted earlier testimony that Moura had offered them $25,000 to kill Stang in a conflict over land he wanted to log and develop.

Human rights defenders said the trial was a key measure of whether the powerful masterminds behind land-related killings can be held accountable in the Amazon state of Para. Of nearly 800 such killings during the past 30 years, only four masterminds have been convicted and none are behind bars.

Shortly after Stang's killing, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva ordered the army into the region, suspended logging permits and ordered large swathes of rain forest off-limits to development.

"The sisters are thrilled because it means it's possible to find justice and we want to make it possible for the many more people who were killed to find justice," said Betsy Flynn, a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the same order as Stang.

About 200 settlers from the jungle town of Anapu, in the region where Stang worked, celebrated the verdict at their makeshift encampment across from the court.

"I'm happy because she was a great woman and didn't deserve to be killed," said Eliete Prado, an elderly woman who made an 18-hour bus trip over dirt roads from Anapu to attend the trial.

Moura denied ordering the killing during the trial, and his lawyer mounted a lengthy anti-American tirade in his closing arguments, calling Stang "the fruit of a poisoned tree."

Accusing the United States of crimes ranging from atom bombs dropped on Japan during World War II to the treatment of prisoners at its Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, defense attorney Americo Leal said Stang "shares this DNA of violence, the DNA to kill."

David Stang expressed dismay.

"The trial's about Bida, Dorothy was the victim," Stang said, referring to Moura by his nickname. "So this fantasy world the defense lawyers are trying to create only maintains this cycle of killings."

On Monday, Moura said he did not even know the nun, who had been organizing poor settlers around the jungle town of Anapu for 23 years.

"This thing about money isn't true. This thing about me and Bida talking isn't true," Clodoaldo Carlos Batista said Monday, in recanting his earlier testimony implicating Moura.

Batista, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison as an accomplice to gunman Rayfran Neves Sales, claimed he had been coerced into implicating Moura by two American FBI agents who traveled to Brazil shortly after the murder to monitor the police investigation.

Both Batista and Sales, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison, claimed the agents threatened to send them to the United States, where they could face the death penalty if they did not cooperate. Brazil does not have the death penalty and the most a convict can serve at a single stretch is 30 years.

The judge said Moura must remain imprisoned pending appeal.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

News - "Oil Chief - Do Uncontacted Tribes Really Exist?"

Tuesday, 24 April 2007, 9:28 am
Press Release: Survival International Peru:





The president of Perupetro, the government body responsible for granting oil exploration licences, has caused outrage after calling into doubt the existence of uncontacted Indian tribes in the Peruvian Amazon.

The comments come after the Peruvian government recently opened up 70% of its rainforest to oil exploration. Some of this territory is inhabited by uncontacted tribes. A vast amount of evidence for their existence has been collected by Survival, local indigenous organisations and other researchers going back decades, ranging from the testimonies of other Indians to sightings, encounters, photographs, and even reports of violent clashes with loggers and oil workers. Yet Perupetro's president, Daniel Saba, said during an interview on Peruvian TV, 'It's absurd to say there are uncontacted peoples when no one has seen them. So, who are these uncontacted tribes people are talking about?'

The uncontacted Indians have no immunity to outsiders' diseases because of their isolation from the rest of society and any form of contact, no matter how brief, can be fatal. Following oil exploration on their land in the 1980s, more than 50% of the Nahua tribe died.

Survival's director, Stephen Corry, said today, 'Doubtless Mr Saba would much rather there were no uncontacted Indians in the areas where he wants to explore for oil. Declaring they don't exist at all, however, is a shameful self-fulfilling prophecy. If Perupetro allows companies to go in, it's likely to destroy the Indians completely and then they really won't exist.'

News - "Drug Wars Threaten to Wipe Out Amazon Nomads"

Kelly Hearnfor
National Geographic News
April 27, 2007






Civil strife and wars over the plant source of cocaine are pushing one of Colombia's last hunter-gather cultures into ruinous contact with modernity, rights groups say. For millennia the Nukak Maku have lived a nomadic existence in the tropical forests of southern Colombia in a small swath of land below the Guaviare River. Tribe members still hunt game with blowguns, fish with bows and arrows, and gather berries.















But the Amazon lands that sustain the tribe are being overrun by Colombia's drug war. The tribe's troubles have even led one leader to commit suicide. Clashes between coca-plant-growing colonists, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas, and Colombian antidrug troops—flush with U.S. military aid—are increasing in the tribe's territory.

The estimated 500 remaining members of the Nukak—who made first contact with modern society only in 1988—are caught in the crossfire. "The guerilla groups think [the Nukak] are collaborators with the government, and the government troops think they are collaborating with the guerillas," said Luis Evelis Andrade of Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia (ONIC), a Bogotá, Colombia-based indigenous-rights group working with the tribe.

"This has meant murders, threats, kidnappings, and blockades of food and medicine that have nearly destroyed the Nukak."

Protection Sought

Things have gotten so bad that last March some 120 Nukak walked half-naked out of the forest and into the stunned jungle community of San José del Guaviare. A tribal leader named Mao-be was soon asking Colombian officials for protection, pledges to cease armed conflicts in their territories, and money for getting back home. Colombia is widely known for its progressive legal stances on indigenous rights. But ONIC's Andrade said the government told the Nukak that it could not guarantee their security.


On August 11 Colombian officials did relocate the Nukak to a protected area in nearby Puerto Ospina. But David Hill, of the London-based indigenous-culture advocacy group Survival International, said the relocation "backfired" and the Nukak have since moved back to San José del Guaviare.


"Gas on the Fire"


Many critics blame Plan Colombia, the U.S. aid program that funds Colombia's coca-eradication efforts. The program has fallen under intense criticism for its aerial spraying of the herbicide glyphosate, which activists say also kills legal crops and causes health problems for residents of jungle communities.
Echoing human rights and environmental groups, Wade Davis, an explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society, says Plan Colombia has been a devastating failure. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

U.S. military subsidies for Colombia's coca wars have been "gas on the fire" of a drawn-out civil war that would have otherwise "petered out due to sheer national exhaustion," Davis said.
The project has failed to diminish coca production but has managed to empower the Colombian military and "rationalize a continuation of the war. … ," he said.

"It has accomplished little except the idiocy of destroying the environment with herbicides."
The U.S. government's Office of National Drug Control Policy maintains that coca acreage under cultivation in Colombia fell between 2001—the year the program started—and 2005.

In addition to drug wars, the Nukak face other threats due to globalization in the region.
In recent years high world commodities prices have sparked an oil and natural gas boom along the eastern slopes of the Andes and the adjacent Amazon lowlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

"Whenever the Nukak have stood up to these multinational corporations, it has meant more threats, expulsions, and disappearances," ONIC's Andrade said. "They don't have vaccines, proper food, or security."

Hill, of Survival International, said that many activists suspect "that the government's apparent inability or unwillingness to help the Nukak relocate to their territory is due to the fact that there are oil reserves."

Deep Isolation

The Nukak follow a relatively rare preference for living a nomadic life deep in the Amazon forests rather than along settled riverside villages. As a result, their distance from contemporary ways is immense. When asked if they were concerned about the future, Mao-be—the only member who learned some Spanish—seemed to have no concept of the word, according to a March report by the New York Times.

Some Nukak asked if planes that flew over the jungle canopy traveled along invisible roads.
But the Nukak still seem keenly attuned to the problems caused by outsiders. "We are few now, hardly any Nukak remain," Survival International quoted one Nukak man as saying. "The outsiders are many, and have big houses. They don't care that the Nukak are being wiped out."
For some Nukak, this attitude has led to irrecoverable despair: In October, Mao-be killed himself by drinking poison.

"From what we can tell, he felt the responsibility to get the Nukak back home," Andrade said. "He felt he had failed."