The Amazon is the most extensive forest in the world and the beginning of its destruction more than half a century ago was justified as necessary to root in it part of the population of northeast Brazil that owned more than 5% of the country's inhabitants with less of 13% of its total extension, while the Amazon had 60% of the national surface and only 8% of its inhabitants.
However, it was soon shown that this attempt at "humanitarian colonization" was not the real motive and that behind it political goals and economic interests were hidden.
It was no secret to anyone that the military dictatorship, faced with the public opinion of a country that had traditionally been a lover of democracy, launched the " Great Amazon Adventure " on the table as a formula called to distract attention from the countless problems generated for the exorbitant government corruption.
At first it could be thought that it was a risky and seemingly fortunate political move, but it was soon discovered that foreign capitals had conceived the idea and pressed for it to be carried out.
Companies such as Bethlehen Steel, Georgia Pacific, Dutch Bruynzeel and Tocomenya, held rights in the Amazon that ranged from one million to two and a half million acres of land, rights that allowed them not only to take minerals, but even trees, animals or Any other kind of wealth.
The government had auctioned the region at a rate of 32 cents a quarter of a hectare and international investors fell on those lands like the locust plague.
About 1840, when the United States sold its inland territories at 31 cents per hectare, there was a destruction estimated at about ten million hectares per year, which was about to cause the annihilation of the country .
If one takes into account that the axes have been passed to the chainsaws, it is clear that the disaster that the Amazon can suffer has no limits.
There are those who support the theory that the clearing or fire of these forests is not only not harmful, but even beneficial , which demonstrates a total lack of knowledge of the characteristics of their soil. And, despite the lust of its vegetation, its 80-meter trees and a thick jungle that prevents a step, there is no more barren land in the world once those trees have been laid down and that weed has burned .
When the farmers clean a piece of land they know in advance that they will get an excellent first harvest, a bad second, and a practically non-existent third. By the third year, they have to resume the cycle in another place and there is the paradoxical case that they are both peasants and nomads, so they usually live in houseboats or in huts that are easy to dismantle.
The reason for the poverty of these lands is due to their short thickness, since they are seated on a layer of almost impenetrable red clay of extreme acidity. Because of this they are sparsely populated by all the tiny fauna that in other climates makes the land rich and productive; earthworms, worms, mites, centipedes, grasshoppers, termites and larvae that aerate and fertilize the fields. In the Amazon, its number is very small, so that a thick layer of vegetation is constantly spreading on the surface, and the formation of new soils is so slow that every attempt at cultivation becomes useless. Nothing will grow where the trees are felled; nothing more than barren weeds since the new trees will take hundreds of years to reach their original size . And those who are destroying it know it. The gigantic forests will become grassland, the minerals will be pillaged, the trees will be replaced by soy plantations, but the first torrential rains will take away the scarce land because it will no longer be affirmed by strong roots. What nature took a million years to create a few companies of greedy politics can destroy in the course of our generation with what the Amazon will have gone from virgin to dead without transition.
Some Brazilian democratic leaders tried to minimize the disaster, but its current president, the far-right Jair Bolsonaro - whose electoral campaign financed many of these companies - remains blind and deaf to all warnings since his political and personal interests are, and will always be, above those of humanity or nature.
He claims in his favor that there are more fires in Africa , but he does not clarify that the African fires are due to the farmers setting fire to their fields and meadows in order to obtain better crops. Their lands are fertile and the forest much less dense so that travelers and explorers could travel huge distances without excessive problems, while in the Amazon who enters a kilometer in a thicket in which you have to make your way to machetes runs the risk Of never coming back.
The Bethlehen Steel went bankrupt in 2001 and part of its rights over iron in the region passed to the King of Steel, indu Lakshmi Mittal, who has not yet clarified what he plans to do.
The Dutch Bruynzeel is mainly dedicated to the manufacture of colored pencils and if the children knew that every time they paint a tree they are contributing to the destruction of the forests they would go to the markers. For its part, Georgia Pacific manufactures paper and cardboard, which makes it the most destructive of companies and therefore must be the one that contributes the most money to the coffers and the political campaign of Jair Bolsonaro. From Tocomenya it was never more known, which makes it presuppose - and it is only an assumption - that it was no longer a cover after which the personal interests of some general twist of those dire times were hidden.
The nefarious times always return and now they seem to be returning with more force than ever.
Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa is a spider.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- Jair Bolsonaro
- U.S
- Africa
Free Grandstand Dark Green
Based on real events We the trees
Thoroughly positive view of Europe (for a change)