A friend of mine tells that, at age 9 or 10, he had absurd and totalitarian ideas for solving problems in Brazil. Faced with crime in favelas, “I thought the government should bomb the hills of Rio de Janeiro and everything would be resolved”, he says today, obviously embarrassed.
A childish frenzy like this seems to have inspired the action of Ibama and the Federal Police, coordinated by the Ministry of Justice, which set fire to more than 130 mining rafts on the Madeira River.
As a nine-year-old child, the Ministry of Justice and several environmentalists think it is fair and possible to solve a social problem simply by burning it down.
After the operation, hundreds of families were isolated in riverside villages, unable to return home. The city of Borba had to provide shelter for 340 people, including women and children, according to O Globo. In Autazes, the city hall welcomed 70 homeless people.
In the community of Rosarinho, residents distributed sheets and food to families whose rafts were burned, according to the newspaper A CrÃtica, from Manaus.
The Southeast press reported little, but there were several protests in the region’s cities. In Novo Auripuanã, a girl was holding cardboard: “garimpeiro is not a criminal”.
Neither Greenpeace Brasil nor its vice president, Hamilton Mourão, were sensitive to the calamity caused by the police. Both celebrated the operation.
According to IBGE, 47.4% of the population of Amazonas is below the poverty line – more than in Piauà (43%) and Alagoas (47.2%). As the reporter from the sheet Fabiano Maisonnave, who went to the region in 2016, the miners of the Madeira River are generally riverside dwellers of indigenous and northeastern descendants.
Many abandoned fishing after the construction of hydroelectric dams during PT governments.
Fires by the Federal Police to destroy equipment are nothing new – they have been happening for years, without being able to contain the advance of illegal mining. It’s hard to think of a more stupid attitude.
It spends public resources on helicopters and police, destroys the meager economy of the residents, takes jobs from cooks and workers in the fields, creates a trail of fire and huge smudges of diesel in the river and does not solve the problem.
Does anyone doubt that in three or four months the images of the ferries will be repeated?
Environmentalists are right to worry about the contamination of rivers in the Amazon by mercury used in mines. But they err in thinking that banning the entire activity will pay off.
Rather than insisting on drug war-like prohibitionism, wouldn’t it be more fruitful if environmentalists helped miners adopt techniques that dispense with or reduce mercury use?
As Professor Marcelo dos Anjos, a specialist in the Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems at the Federal University of Amazonas, told Maisonnave, “illegality has a much greater impact.
What should be done is to regulate, through miners’ cooperatives, and create protocols that they can follow in order to minimize the expected impact of the activity.”
But it is enough for someone to propose facilitating the legalization of mines to be accused by activists and journalists of defending the “loosening of environmental rules”. It is a clear example of how the dogmatism of most environmentalists harms the environment in Brazil.
.
