ANCESTRAL CONNECTIONS

Altamira, Brazil – Drive about 90 minutes outside this sultry Brazilian Amazon town, and into the thicket of the jungle, and a surreal, other-worldly scene appears.

It’s a place where dozens of steel arms with giant claws from land excavators cut into the red earth, carving out deep holes.

There are earth movers, growling bulldozers and dump trucks crossing switch back roads that lead into colossal man-made craters, while clusters of hard hat-wearing engineers, glare down inspecting it all.

Belo Monte dam washes residents away

This is the scene at the opening phase of the building of the largest and most expensive project in Brazil, and one of the most controversial projects in Latin America: The Belo Monte Dam, along the Xingu River.

Officially the ground breaking quietly happened in June of last year, but the heavy construction ramped up during the turn of the year, and is moving full speed ahead at a blistering pace.

Five thousand men are working in two shifts, from 7 am until 5 pm and from 5 pm until 2:30 am, six days a week.

The construction area is gigantic, comprising three separate work sites sites that will eventually merge together to form two reservoirs 500 square kilometres in size linked by a channel comprising the Belo Monte Dam complex.

Twice a day, dynamite is used to blow up hard rock under the earth to make way for the dam.

A ‘small city’ is being built inside the work area to accommodate some of the 20,000 labourers and engineers who will be working here by November 2013.

When completed, Belo Monte will be the world’s third largest hydroelectric dam and the latest cost estimate is $14bn.

The construction scene is all the more remarkable given that until a few months ago, Belo Monte’s future still seemed in doubt, as the project faced a wave of judicial injunctions, and opposition from indigenous groups and environmental organisations both in Brazil and abroad.

The judicial injunctions were primarily imposed by the federal prosecutors office in the state of Para where Belo Monte is located and they questioned the builders processes of environmental licensing, contracting bids and the rights of effected indigenous populations.

Renewable energy worth social cost?

Those regional injunctions were either thrown out by higher courts or appealed, which has allowed builders to proceed forward and project and air of confidence.

“In this moment Belo Monte has the perspective to fulfill absolutely all its timetables,” Joao Pimentel, the director of institutional relations for Norte Energia, told Al Jazeera. “We haven’t had any delays by any judicial action or for any other reason, and we never had any lost days of work. That’s why Belo Monte is going to continue within the timeframe.”

While Belo Monte is being built by Norte Energia – a consortium of more than 10 mining, engineering and construction companies – the project is heavily backed by the federal government and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, who have long said the dam is an essential component of Brazil’s energy security.

Pimentel argues Belo Monte represents clean, renewable energy, and he points to the fact 86 per cent of Brazil’s energy generation is from renewables, far higher than the world average.

“Brazil needs Belo Monte,” Pimentel said.

Most environmentalists disagree, arguing that the ecological and social impacts of Belo Monte far outweigh any benefits.

“Belo Monte’s social and environmental impacts are far greater than the Norte Energia propagandists would lead us to believe,” Christian Poirier, Brazil programme coordinator for Amazon Watch told Al Jazeera. “They are in fact an unacceptable price to pay for a hugely inefficient mega-project carved into an extremely sensitive and precarious region.”

Poirier says the Brazilian government has put too much emphasis on hydroelectric dams and not on wind and solar energy, which are generally considered to have less social and environmental impacts.

There is also the issue of displacement. According to Pimentel, about 6,000 families, or roughly 24,000 people, are being paid-off to leave their homes to make way for the dam.

Elio Alves da Silva, 56, a fishermen in the community of Santo Antonio – which sits at the base of one the main work sites – is being pushed off the land where he has lived for more than 30 years.

Only 60 families live in the community, but more than half have taken the payout and moved.

Their homes are then quickly demolished by Norte Energia, and no trespassing signs put up. The church will be destroyed, and the tiny cemetery with about 20 gravesites has also been closed. Continue reading…

Gabriel Elizondo Last Modified: 20 Jan 2012 15:16
Reposted from Al Jazeera In Depth Features
“]
Joao Pimentel is a key figure behind the building of the Belo Monte Dam, Brazil’s biggest. He has decades of experience in the energy sector in Brazil, having worked in both the private and public sectors. He was interviewed by Al Jazeera in Altamira, Brazil on January 13, 2012. The interview has been condensed and edited.

Gabriel Elizondo: When will it be finished and how has the opening stages of construction been going?

Joao Pimentel: The first turbine of Belo Monte will start to generate electricity in 2015. And then there will be a sequence of events to finish the entire project by 2019. The state of the construction is absolutely within our timetable. We had some problems regarding the judicial aspects of the projects, but they happily did not delay in any way the construction. So we are absolutely within the timetable established by the government.

It is important to understand we are a concession of public service, so we have a commitment to the government to start our operations within our timetable. That means if there are delays we will be punished by the government, and since this is a for-profit company that needs to give profit back to its stake holders, they want the dates and timetables to be observed.

Elizondo: Why, in your opinion, has Belo Monte been so controversial?

Pimentel: Belo Monte might be considered a controversial project because there is this idea that the Amazon is a territory that is absolutely virgin, intact, full of people: people walking half naked, monkeys and birds. But when you go above the region, you see that this is not the reality. This city where we are now (Altamira), there are about 110,000 people living here. In the region covered by Belo Monte, there are 11 cities and 360,000 people living here.

The indigenous people impacted by Belo Monte are about 2,200, and they are not going to be directly effected by Belo Monte – but they are in the area of influence of Belo Monte. There is a distortion in terms of information that Belo Monte is a controversial project; I will not deny that it’s controversial. But the principal controversy is because of a lack of information that exists, not only internationally, but also in Brazil.

Elizondo: Lack of what information?

Pimentel: Like that Belo Monte will flood a huge area. Not true. The area of Belo Monte that effectively will flood is very small. We did the Belo Monte project differently from Itaipu Dam and Three Gorges Dam (in China). We opted to use the minimum flooding plans. We will not have a big reservoir of flooded area. Half of the reservoir on Belo Monte is going to be the bed of the Xingu River and the other half are areas that are being disappropriated from farms and cattle ranches. And that area is not virgin forest, it’s just the opposite – they are areas already degraded with deforestation.

Elizondo: If the project is so positive, why have there been so many judicial injunctions by local prosecutors’ office to have it blocked?

Pimentel: Because of the lack of technical knowledge of what Belo Monte is going to be. The name Belo Monte is associated with a project that originated in the times of the military dictatorship in the end of 70s and early 80s. Back then, the project was much bigger – and included the construction of six hydroelectric dams along the length of the Xingu River.

Today, the federal government has authorised only one dam, and required that dozens of measures be taken to mitigate negative impacts. There are always going to be impacts on nature, of course. Anything you use in life has an environmental impact. But we are here to minimise those impacts. There are a lot of international interests against Belo Monte.

Brazil is the 6th largest economy in the world today, we just surpassed England. And it is the only country of the top six economies of the world that has an energy matrix of 86 per cent of renewable energy; while the rest of the world has a matrix of renewable energy at 19 per cent. Brazil has 86 per cent! The generation of electricity in Brazil by hydroelectric dams is 81 per cent of the total. Which country has that form of clean energy in the largest economies of the world? France? They use nuclear plants. Japan? Nuclear. England? Nuclear or coal.

Elizondo: But what about the social impacts of Belo Monte? Dams might be clean energy in the technical sense of the word, but they come with social consequences, wouldn’t you agree?

Pimentel: Belo Monte will effect the population in a minimum way. The design of Belo Monte was changed in the last year precisely to reduce the social impacts. The population that will be removed during the process of the building of Belo Monte will only be in those areas that are necessary for the reservoir. And that is a small population. There are groups of people that don’t want to leave their land, but this is a project that has been determined by the government of great public interest. Up to today, Belo Monte has negotiated to pay people to move at 500 properties, and only with two properties we had to go to the courts – the rest were negotiated with the owners in a friendly way… Yes, there are social impacts of a big project like Belo Monte, but we are mitigating those.

Elizondo: How many people is Norte Energia having to pay off to relocate to make way for the construction of Belo Monte?

Pimentel: The number we have are 6,000 families, so that would be about 24,000 people if you consider four people per family.

Elizondo: In your opinion, is there any scenario you could see where Belo Monte construction could be halted?

Pimentel: No, in this moment Belo Monte has the perspective to fulfill absolutely all its timetables. We haven’t had any delays by any judicial action or for any other reason, and we never had any lost days of work. That’s why Belo Monte is going to continue within the timeframe. Brazil needs Belo Monte because if there is no Belo Monte there will be a need for nuclear or coal power, and that is worse.
“]

Mr Alves da Silva, 56, has lived in the community of Santo Antonio since it was created over 30 years ago. He was the third person who settled there and he is a fisherman. The community once had 60 families, but about half have already left after being paid off by Norte Energia to move to make way for the Belo Monte construction. The builders are slowly demolishing the homes in the community. Mr Alves da Silva was interviewed by Al Jazeera at his home on January 14, 2012. The interview has been condensed and edited. Continue reading…

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: January 6, 2012 NY Times BRASILÉIA, Brazil — Of the odyssey that delivered him to this town in the Brazilian Amazon, Wesley Saint-Fleur could muster only a look of exhaustion and bewilderment.

Months ago, he boarded a bus in Haiti, before getting on a plane in the Dominican Republic, landing first in Panama and then in Ecuador. That was where his wife gave birth to their son, Isaac, he said, bouncing the 4-month-old infant on his knee and brandishing the boy’s Ecuadorean identification card. Then they continued by bus yet again, through Ecuador and Peru. Next, they trekked by foot in Bolivia, where, he said, the police robbed him and his wife of their clothing and their life savings: $320 in cash.

“Then we finally got to Brazil, which I’m told is building everything, stadiums, dams, roads,” said Mr. Saint-Fleur, 27, a construction worker, one of hundreds of Haitians who gather each day around the gazebo in Brasiléia’s palm-fringed plaza. “All I want is work, and Brazil, thank God, has jobs for us.”

Gambling everything, thousands of Haitians have made their way across the Americas to reach small towns in the Brazilian Amazon over the past year in a desperate search for work, including a surge of hundreds arriving in recent days amid fears that Brazil’s government could slow the influx before it overwhelms the authorities here.

Their improbable journeys — from the rubble of their island homes to remote outposts here in the Amazon — say as much about the dire economic conditions that persist in Haiti two years after the earthquake as it does about the rising economic profile of Brazil, which is fast becoming a magnet not only for poor foreign laborers but also for growing numbers of educated professionals from Europe, the United States and Latin America.

Upon arriving here and in other border outposts, the Haitians are often given vaccinations, clean water and two meals a day by the authorities. Many stay for weeks in Brasiléia and other towns before being granted humanitarian visas that allow them to work in Brazil.

But with such a crush of new arrivals, others have not been so lucky. After traveling thousands of miles and overcoming countless obstacles, some crowd eight to a small hotel room or wind up sleeping on the streets, almost reliving the misery they had hoped to leave behind. Continue reading…

Makeda
On the eve of the Civil Rights movement, while struggling to survive the emotional vacuum of his family, young Gray March escapes into the safe and magical world of his grandmother Makeda’s tiny parlor. There his life is transformed by his visits to the aging matriarch, a woman blind since birth but who has always dreamed in color. She begins to confide in Gray the things she “sees” and remembers from her dream state, and a story starts to emerge, a story that becomes increasingly more detailed, layered with descriptions and historical accuracy beyond the scope of Makeda’s elementary school education. Gradually, Gray begins to make a connection . . .

. . . a connection between his grandmother’s dreams and the epic life of an African queen described in the Bible . . .

Part coming-of-age story, part spiritual journey, and part love story, Makeda is a universal tale of family, heritage, and the ties that bind. It is about the people who help to shape and mold us, and lead us into the light. Appealing to the deepest sense of who we are, Robinson plumbs the hearts of grandmother Makeda and her grandson Gray, and summons our collective blood memories, taking the reader on an unforgettable journey of the soul that will linger long after the last page has been turned.

Praise for MAKEDA
“In Robinson’s majestic prose and sweeping historical vision, the tongues of Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison blend to remind us that we can renew our souls in the eyes of ancestors who return to us in whatever way our lives demand.”
—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Can You Hear Me Now?
Continue reading…

By Donovan Webster, GlobalPost
To see where the enormous sums of humanitarian aid directed to Haiti after its catastrophic earthquake in 2010 went, a good place to start is the ocean harbor. That’s where the island’s shore meets the rest of the world. And the best place for that is here at the seaport in the nation’s capital: Port-au-Prince, near the earthquake’s epicenter.

There, at this moment, a gigantic “supermaritime” cargo ship called the Sarine is off-loading more than five metric tons of rice that has just arrived from Miami.

If you think of the rice as post-earthquake assistance money — the individual grains as donated dollars — you might get some idea about what’s happened since the earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010. Not to mention a sense of where the individual rice grains (or the dollars) have gone.

And, like the grains of rice aboard, the dollars mount into the hundreds of millions; even billions. According to some reports, the United States government, American individuals, families and humanitarian groups donated approximately $3 billion. That’s just from America with a total of something like $12 billion coming from all donor nations for funds to be disbursed.

Still, somehow, no one seems quite sure precisely how many grains — or dollars — we’re talking about. The accounting seems to have a sliding scale that can move hundreds of millions of dollars one way or another. At the time of publication, President Bill Clinton, the UN Special Envoy to Haiti and the co-chair of overseeing the nation’s re-construction for the last two years, hasn’t responded to repeated requests by GlobalPost regarding specific aid and cash donation figures.

Where those billions went following the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that left a government-estimated figure of 220,000 people dead — and at least 1.6 million more homeless — remains a confounding mystery. Inside of the recovery effort, however, are unquestionable successes along with the failures. And, to be fair, because the money came in so quickly and in such great volume, much of it has been wasted or lost like so much rice spilling on the docks. Or stolen, like the sacks of rice from here which will end up in Haiti’s black market for food.

The situation grows complicated…fast. And the metaphor here of this crane off-loading rice by the metric ton packs a still larger and more complex metaphor, according to aid experts, about this country’s history along a still-active fault line of aid, politics and blame in the aftermath of the quake.

As for this specific ship, the Sarine, it has a double-steel hull and is roughly 330 feet long. And now, pulled up to the quay in Port-au-Prince, the “grabbing box” from a huge off-load crane reaches down into the vessel’s hold, and, like the hand of God, lifts another half-ton or so of rice out — hundreds of thousands of individual grains of rice. Then the loose rice is dumped into a white, V-shaped steel hopper whose nozzle sits inside a small hut on the Port-au-Prince waterfront.

Using gravity, the hopper directs the rice into 25-kg (55-pound) white plastic bags, with blue stars on their fronts and the words “AMERICAN RICE” written on their sides. After that — using a sewing machine — the top of each bag is sealed.

As I watch, over and over — bag after bag after bag — a man running the V-shaped hopper turns to me. He rubs his belly.

“I’m hungry,” he says in French.

“Well,” I respond, “why don’t you take some rice for yourself? There’s a lot.”

The man flashes a grin back, and shrugs. “Yes,” he says, “that’s possible. But I’m not that kind of hungry.”

The rice bags move from the factory along an assembly line to waiting trucks which will travel deeper into Haiti to feed a nation still suffering from hunger on a vast scale.

But the economy of rice in Haiti says everything about the condition the country is in. The US government subsidizes and “donates” ton after ton of rice in Haiti and in so doing has through the last several decades completely undercut Haitian rice farmers and left them destitute and migrating into cities where they live in hovels that were destroyed by the quake.

As recently as the early 1980s, Haiti was producing just about all of its own rice. Now more than 60 percent is imported from the US, making it the fourth largest recipient of American rice exports in the world. That was before the quake and now with donated rice coming in as well, Haiti is even more awash in rice while American agribusiness makes billions of dollars every year through generous government subsidies. Continue reading…

The US and its allies are positioned to ‘take’ much of the continent
Glen Ford
2011-12-22, Issue 564

As the U.S. and its NATO allies move southward to further consolidate their grip on Africa, following the seizure of Libya and its vast oil fields, most of the continent’s leadership seems to welcome re-absorption into empire. “Africa is the most vulnerable region in America’s warpath, a continent ripe for the plucking due to the multitudinous entanglements of Africa’s political and military classes with imperialism.” AFRICOM is already in the cat-bird seat, placed there by Africans, themselves.

The United States and its allies are engaged in an Asian and African offensive, a multi-pronged assault thinly camouflaged as humanitarian intervention that, in some regions, looks like a blitzkrieg. This frenzied aggression, still in its first year, saw NATO transformed into an expeditionary force to crush the unoffending Gaddafi regime in Libya and is now poised to topple the secular order in Syria. Although drawing on longstanding schemes for overt and covert regime change in selected countries, and fully consistent with global capital’s historic imperative to bludgeon the planet into one malleable market subordinate to Washington, London and Paris, the current offensive had a particular genesis in time: the nightmare vision of an Arab awakening.

The prospect of an Arab Spring at the dawn of 2011 sparked a general hysteria in imperial capitals. Suddenly, they stared in the face of geopolitical death at the hands of the Arab “street.” Washington understands full well that the emergence of Arab governments that reflect the will of the people would soon result, as Noam Chomsky is fond of saying, in the U.S. being “thrown out” of the region – the final toll of the bell, not just for the oil-hungry West, but for international capital’s annexes in the autocratic cesspools of the Persian Gulf.

With centuries of Euro-American domination flashing before their eyes, Washington, London and Paris quickly configured NATO to unleash Shock and Awe on the victim of choice in North Africa: Muammar Gaddafi. The momentum of that show of force has led an expanding cast of imperial actors to the gates of Damascus. But Africa is the most vulnerable region in America’s warpath, a continent ripe for the plucking due to the multitudinous entanglements of Africa’s political and military classes with imperialism. The awful truth is, the United States and its allies, principally the French, are positioned to “take” much of the continent with the collaboration of most of its governments and, especially, its soldiers.

AFRICOM, established in 2008 by the Bush administration and now fully the creature of President Obama’s “humanitarian” interventionist doctrine, claims military responsibility for the entire continent except Egypt. The U.S. military command has assembled a dizzying array of alliances with regional organizations and blocs of countries that, together, encompass all but a few nations on the continent – leaving those holdouts with crosshairs on their backs. As the U.S. bullies its way southward in the wake of the seizure of Libya, its path has been smoothed by the Africans, themselves. Continue reading…

Archaeologists find remains of port where hundreds of thousands of Africans were sold to plantation owners
Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 March 2011 09.17 EST

It was one of the busiest slave ports in the Americas, a filthy, bustling harbour where hundreds of thousands of Africans were sold into a life of exploitation and abuse.

Famished, exhausted and with their heads half-shaved, the slaves were herded off ships, groomed in “fattening houses” and dispatched to sugar and coffee plantations across Brazil.

Now, nearly two centuries after Rio’s notorious Valongo wharf began operating, local archaeologists believe they may have located the slave port’s ruins during a multibillion-dollar, pre-Olympic renovation of the city’s harbour. “As soon as the discovery was made I went there,” said Washington Fajardo, Rio’s secretary for cultural heritage. “It is a moving experience, seeing an existing city and then another city two metres below. You feel a bit like Indiana Jones.”

The possible discovery of the Cais do Valongo, or Valongo wharf, was made during the regeneration of Rio’s port area.

With the 2016 Olympics in mind, authorities are steaming ahead with a project known as Porto Maravilha or Marvellous Port, intended to transform Rio’s dilapidated port into a vibrant tourist and business hub.

Tania Andrade Lima, an archaeologist from Rio’s National Museum who has been leading the hunt for the Valongo, said 10 local archaeologists had been digging since February and now believed they had started unearthing “structures” connected to the notorious slave market.

Her team has confirmed discovery of Rio’s Empress’s wharf, believed to have been built on top of the slave port in the 1840s by the French architect Grandjean de Montigny and designed to welcome Brazil’s future empress, Teresa Cristina. A 19th-century sewerage system, created by British architect Edward Gotto, was also found.

Lima said the Valongo represented a crucial part of the city’s history that had been erased as Brazil sought to cover up the “brutal period of enslavement”. It is believed that some 3 million African slaves were shipped to Brazil between 1550 and 1888, when slavery was officially abolished.

“This area played an important role in Rio’s history – the Valongo wharf area has a strong symbolism for Afro-Brazilian descendants in our city,” Lima added. Continue reading…

Tooth analysis shows Africans taken from wide area ranging from Sudan in the north-east to Mozambique in the south
Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 December 2011 15.21 EST

Locals called it the “cemetery of the new blacks”, but in truth it wasn’t much of a cemetery. Devoid of headstones, wreaths or tearful mourners, this squalid harbourside burial ground was the final resting place for thousands of Africans shipped into slavery.

The new world greeted them with a lonely death in an unfamiliar land.

For decades the cemetery and those buried there between 1760 and 1830 were forgotten, hidden under layer after layer of urban development.

But 15 years after the cemetery’s fortuitous discovery – during the renovation of Petrucio and Ana de la Merced Guimaraes’s family home when builders unearthed a series of muddy skeletons – academics now believe they have evidence of the true reach of the slave trade.

The study of teeth from 30 partial skeletons has hinted that slaves arriving in Rio – many of whom were sold on to work in coffee and sugar plantations or gold mines – came from a much wider geographical region than once thought.

Archaeologists and anthropologists studying bone and tooth fragments are shedding light on the horrors of a trade that saw at least 3 million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil between 1550 and 1888, when the practice was officially abolished.

“It was ugly: a dump into which bodies were thrown and burned,” said Sheila Mendonça de Souza, a bio-archaeologist studying the cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, once one of the busiest slave ports in the Americas.

“People weren’t buried in tombs, they were tossed away into mass graves.”

Della Cook, a biological anthropologist from the University of Indiana working on the burial ground, said: “There is a lot of scholarship on slave cemeteries and the slave trade in North America but very little in South America, which is one of the things that makes this site fascinating.

“We have historical records but we haven’t been able to look before at the people themselves.” Continue reading…

Watch Blood Coltan now!

During this season of gift giving please remember that every new computerized, electronic item one purchases helps murder 500,000 Congolese residents a month. If you don’t believe me simply do the math. What is 6,000,000 murders divided by 12 years?

Do Mama Afrika a favor and buy as many refurbished products as possible from this day forth. Recycling computerized electronics not only preserves the planet but also its inhabitants.

Visit the following link to watch an hour-long documentary about the situation that Afrikans face with regard to coltan extraction:

http://documentaryheaven.com/blood-coltan/

J O I N T H E W U R L D ! ! !

Last member of 65,000-year-old tribe dies, taking one of world’s earliest languages to the grave
By ANNY SHAW
Last updated at 1:09 AM on 10th February 2010

The last member of a 65,000-year-old tribe has died, taking one of the world’s earliest languages to the grave.
Boa Sr, who died last week aged about 85, was the last native of the Andaman Islands who was fluent in Bo.
Named after the tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to the pre-Neolithic period when the earliest humans walked out of Africa.

Boa was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese, a group of tribes that are the the first descendants of early humans who migrated from Africa about 70,000 years ago and who arrived on the islands around 65,000. Other groups went on to colonise Indonesia and Australia.
She lived through the horrors and hardships of the 2004 Asian tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by colonisers in the 19th century.
Boa described the moment the tsunami struck: ‘We were all there when the earthquake came.
‘The eldest told us “the Earth would part, don’t run away or move”. The elders told us, that’s how we know.’
Professor Anvita Abbi, a linguist who knew Boa, said the tribeswoman had been losing her sight in recent years and was unable to speak with anyone in her own language.
Boa had no children and her husband died several years ago.
‘Since she was the only speaker of Bo, she was very lonely as she had no one to converse with,’ Professor Abbi told the Times.
‘Boa Sr had a very good sense of humour, and her smile and full throated laughter were infectious.’ Continue reading…