Bolsonaro blamed as evidence mounts of Amazon murders
"Belo Monte dam marks a troubling new era in Brazil's attitude to its rainforest Karen Hoffmann .. 15th August, 2011"
------ Insert: Belo Monte boondoggle: Brazil’s biggest, costliest dam may be unviable by Tiffany Higgins on 17 January 2020 IMAGE * The controversial Belo Monte mega-dam in Pará state has done significant socio environmental harm to the Xingu River and the indigenous and traditional people living beside it. Now it appears the dam may not be able to produce the electricity totals promised by its builders — an eventuality critics had long warned about. * Project designers appear to have seriously misestimated the Xingu River’s flow rates and fluctuations between wet and dry seasons, while also not accounting for reductions in flow due to deforestation caused by rapidly expanding cattle ranches and soy plantations far upriver in Mato Grosso state. * Climate change-induced droughts are also decreasing Xingu River flows and generating capacity. In 2013, an important Brazilian Panel on Climate Change report warned that global warming could drop water levels all across the Amazon basin, putting hydropower in serious jeopardy. * As deforestation due to agribusiness and mining spreads across the basin, now driven by the development-friendly policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the future for Amazon hydroelectric dams, their generating capacity and investment potential looks increasingly bleak. [...] Opened in 2016 in Pará state, Belo Monte was slated to operate at a level where it would generate 4,571 MW monthly over 12 months. This is what’s called “firm energy,” an approximation of actual electricity produced. But now even that amount looks high. P - In 2019, the Xingu’s flow dropped drastically during the July to November dry season, and even with all but one of its 18 turbines operational, the plant produced a monthly average of just 568 MW in August, 361 in September, 276 in October, and 583 in November, according to Brazilian authorities. Norte Energia, the dam’s operator, was forced to shut down the turbines multiple times to prevent their being damaged. P - But even in the high water season, the dam never came close to producing the 11,233 MW monthly “full operational capacity,” which Norte Energia’s press release touts to investors. The highest value last year was 6,882 MW produced in February. https://news.mongabay.com/2020/01/belo-monte-boondoggle-brazils-biggest-costliest-dam-may-be-unviable/ ------
Issued on: 16/06/2022 - 19:38Modified: 16/06/2022 - 19:36
British journalist Dom Phillips and expert Bruno Pereira were working researching sustainable development in the Amazon when they disappeared on June 5 CARL DE SOUZA AFP/File
Atalaia do Norte (Brazil) (AFP) – Nature defenders, colleagues and family of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira expressed anger Thursday as evidence mounted they were murdered in the Amazon, laying the blame at the door of Brazil's government.
Guardian contributor Phillips, 57, and Pereira, 41, went missing on June 5 in a remote part of the rainforest that is rife with illegal mining, fishing and logging, as well as drug trafficking.
Ten days later, on Wednesday, a suspect named Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira took police to a place where he said he had helped bury bodies near the city of Atalaia do Norte, where the pair had been headed.
Human remains unearthed from the site were to be brought to Brazilia Thursday to be officially identified by experts. Results are likely expected by next week.
Late Wednesday, the federal police chief of Brazil's northern Amazonas state said there was "a 99-percent probability" the remains "corresponded" to the missing men.
They had apparently been shot.
Phillips, a long-time contributor to The Guardian and other leading international newspapers, was working on a book on sustainable development in the Amazon, with Pereira as his guide, when they went missing.
Pereira, an expert at Brazil's indigenous affairs agency FUNAI, had received multiple threats from loggers and miners trying to invade isolated Indigenous land.
'Heartbroken'
Phillips' family said in a statement they were "heartbroken" by the discovery of two bodies Wednesday, which they took as confirmation that the pair were murdered.
Greenpeace Brazil said the deaths were "a direct result of the agenda of President Jair Bolsonaro for the Amazon, which opens the way for predatory activities and crimes to be reproduced in broad daylight."
The Javari Valley where the men went missing -- an area near the borders with Peru and Colombia -- is home to about 20 isolated Indigenous groups where drug traffickers, loggers, miners and illegal fishermen operate.
"In the last three years, our country has increasingly become a land where the only valid law is that of 'anything goes," said Greenpeace of the Bolsonaro term.
"It has become a land of invasion and land grabbing; of mining and illegal logging; of territorial conflicts, and where it’s worth killing to ensure that none of these criminal activities are prevented from happening. All this is fueled by the actions and omissions of the Brazilian government."
Bolsonaro has pushed to develop the Amazon, the world's largest tropical rainforest, since he took office in 2019.
On Wednesday, he drew fresh criticism for saying Phillips was "disliked" for his reporting on the region and should have been more careful.
"The level of violence applied to Bruno and Dom makes clear how the Amazon is at the mercy of the law of the most powerful, under which brutality is the rule," said WWF Brazil.
"The State abandoned the Amazon due to a meaningless project of destruction of the forest and extermination of its peoples."
'Political crime'
The Univaja Indigenous peoples grouping, which had taken part in the search, denounced the suspected killings as a "political crime," while the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism said "the president and his allies have become protagonists of attacks on the press" uncovering environmental crimes.
Jonathan Watts, a colleague of Phillips at The Guardian, told AFP in London the "monstrous" crime should not deter journalists and others from exposing the truth.
"People dead for defending Indigenous lands and the environment. Brazil cannot be that," said ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who will face Bolsonaro in October elections.
Investigations continue into the motive for the crime as well as the role played by Oliveira and fellow suspect Oseney da Costa de Oliveira.
Brazilian media report there may be three more people involved. Police have not confirmed the information, but have not ruled out more arrests.
2013 - Uncontacted peoples [...] Ishi .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi , a Yahi, is believed to be the last Native American in Northern California to have lived most of his life completely outside American culture. In the year 1911, he emerged from the wild near Oroville, California, leaving his ancestral homeland in the foothills near Lassen Peak. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=90629290
The last stand of the Amazon Novelist Edward Docx has spent almost a decade travelling to the Amazon, watching as multinational companies ravage the land he loves. Here is his heartfelt dispatch on the forest's final frontier – still home to as many as 100 tribes of uncontacted Indians The lost tribe: a long-range aerial photograph of uncontacted Indians living deep in the Amazon forest. Edward Docx Sunday 3 April 2011 https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=61662308 .. as of June, 17, 2022, eight replies .. one of .. [...]"But the bottom line is certainly not a bank – it is communal human wellbeing in concert with the rest of the species on the only planet we have – or are ever likely to have. Making profits while endangering people's lives and livelihoods is immoral, and it is happening in the Amazon today. It doesn't have to be that way. We can do better." https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=61670371
2011 - VIDEO: Romney Aided Fringe Utah College Founded by Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorist In 2009, the GOP candidate introduced Glenn Beck at a fundraiser for a school that promoted the work of a conservative "nutjob" eschewed by the Mormon church. By David Corn and Stephanie Mencimer | Thu Oct. 11, 2012 3:00 AM PDT In 2009, Mitt Romney, who is now trying to campaign for president as a moderate [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/04/us-usa-campaign-romney-idUSBRE8931RA20121004 ], lent his star power to an unusual charitable project: celebrating right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck to raise money for an unaccredited Utah-based college, which was founded by acolytes of the late W. Cleon Skousen and promoted the work of this fringe conservative figure. Much-touted by Beck, Skousen was an anti-communist crusader, a purported political philosopher, a historian accused of racist revisionism, and a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He contended that the Founding Fathers were direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, claimed that a global cabal of bankers controlled the world from behind the scenes, and wrote a book that referred to the "blessings of slavery." Skousen, who died in 2006, taught Romney at Brigham Young University. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=80446524
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