From a media relations point of view, this seemed like a questionable way for a priest to start in with a pair of visiting journalists. But it was part and parcel of Father Sena’s rebel persona, which he clearly held very dear. In his office, I asked him what he thought about the Brazilian government’s figures, which showed that deforestation had reached record lows.
“Bullshit!” he cried, his face shining. He acknowledged that deforestation had diminished in 2010, but insisted that this wasn’t the whole story. “When you put it together with the deforestation of 2008, 2007…” He chopped his hand against the desk. “For the last eight years, we have a sum of
I was feeling better already.
Unfortunately, his figures were badly exaggerated. It had taken more like thirty years, not just eight, to destroy 16 percent of the Amazon. But that was beside the point. Deforestation was only part of the story, he said. “We ask, ‘Why are you, Mr. Government, continuing with huge projects of hydroelectrics in Amazonia?’ Government has a plan to build
Sena had brought the same defiant spirit to the fight against soy farming in the area. The organization he founded, called the Amazon Defense Front, had partnered with Greenpeace to protest the Cargill terminal. But the collaboration didn’t last.
“Greenpeace was a very important ally from 2004 to 2006,” he said. “Then we stopped…Our styles were different. We went to the street, to make protest. Greenpeace went jumping on the roof of Cargill.” He laughed. “And filming, and showing to Europe and to the world that
There were philosophical differences, too. “I am not an environmentalist!” he said, waving his finger in the air. “I am an
He smiled the smile of a firebrand. “Greenpeace has money. But it doesn’t help much when you don’t have a holistic viewpoint. They defend the forest. They defend the animals. They forget that the environment includes the people that live here. That’s the difference. We defend our people.”
It was the Ambe approach, applied to environmental politics. Without taking people into account—in your activism, in your national parks—something essential was missing. And Sena didn’t just mean indigenous people. He also included the small farmers who had been displaced by soy, and more than twenty million other people spread across the Amazon basin, whether in the countryside or in big cities like Manaus. They were all critical stakeholders.
But there was at least one group that didn’t count.
“Before 2000, we didn’t know the plant of soy,” Sena told us. But by 2001, soy farmers from Mato Grosso had started showing up. “They went with money and bought this land,” he said emphatically. “They didn’t come to live here. They came to cultivate here.”
Newly arrived from the south, the soy farmers had not integrated well, not least because their mechanized farms offered few jobs for the people of Para. The locals took to calling the soy farmers
“Soyeros don’t like it when we call them that,” Father Sena said. “But they
Call it the Sena Doctrine. People are an indispensable part of the environment—unless they’re dirty bastards.
We trundled down BR-163 in Mango’s car again, to about kilometer 45, where we met Nestor, a small-time farmer who had survived the soy fever and kept his farm. Nestor sold us beers and, together with his son, took us on a walking tour of his manioc fields. “There were many people living here who owned small farms,” he said. But in the first five years of the decade, buyers from the south had swarmed in, bidding up land prices. Most people had taken the money. “They sold the land, and the tractors came and finished with it all.” A nearby village called Paca had been wiped completely off the map to make way for soybeans. Even the Pentecostal church in the village had sold out and moved. “They sold it all,” said Nestor’s son, laughing. “They brought down the church to plant soybeans. You can’t even tell there was a church there.”
Nestor blamed the local politicians who he said had brought Cargill in: “The government brought these people to bring progress. And maybe it did. But it also brought bad things…People saw the money and thought it would never end. One person would sell, and that would inspire the next person to do the same.”
It sounded like a frenzy, I said. Gil translated, using the word
The frenzy had changed the local environment, in ways both subtle and obvious. We met multiple farmers who complained about the chemicals that neighboring soy farms used on their crop, and about how the soy monoculture had increased the burden of pests on small farms nearby. “There are a lot of diseases in their fields,” one man said of the soy farmers. “I plant rice and I get nothing. If I plant beans, the insects eat it all. We can’t harvest anything.” He claimed that the soy farmers were able to thrive only because of all the fertilizers they used.
He said, too, that such large, open tracts of land changed the winds and the temperature around them, and that the simple absence of shade made life harder. Where once they had walked great distances in a day’s work, the wide expanses of the soy farms meant less protection from the punishing Brazilian sun—and thus less walking.
We asked Nestor why he hadn’t sold. Buyers had been offering big money. He said that wasn’t important. He didn’t like money.
“If you don’t like money,” I said, “then we won’t bother paying for the beers.”
He laughed. “We like a
Now the ones who had sold their land and moved to Santarem regretted it, he said. They wanted to come back. Another small farmer down the road told us the same. “Many think that when they move to town, the money they got will never run out,” he said. “They go to town, buy a house, a TV set, a refrigerator. But they never got an education, so they can’t get a job. When the money runs out and they have no means to work, they regret selling the land.”
We never stopped hearing about the families who regretted selling—from Nestor, from other farmers, from Father Sena. Here, people worried less about soy’s effects on the forest than about its effects on their society, about the ways it had impoverished the people who had sold their farms.
“Now they are after a small plot of land and can’t find one,” Nestor said. “Their daughters became prostitutes. Their sons became glue-sniffers.”
Gil said it was the same as when his grandfather had been bought out of his home in the Tapajos National Forest. “They ran out of money right away. It happened to most of my uncles.”
Another interesting thing about Nestor was that his farm was on fire.
Much of our conversation took place in the middle of a smoldering field, similar to the one in which I would later melt the soles of my boots, staring at those ghostly, tree-shaped piles of ash. The fire was the reason we had stopped to talk to Nestor in the first place. I was here to see some deforestation, dammit, and if a field of slashed- and-burning trees wasn’t deforestation, then I didn’t know what deforestation was.
Turns out I didn’t. In the Amazon, deforestation is a dispiritingly messy subject to unpack. Even Adam found the topic surprisingly opaque once he got down to the nitty-gritty of it for me. The main theme of any in-depth article about deforestation in Brazil, he once told me, ought to be how frustrating it is just trying to figure out what counts.
Take Nestor’s case. You would think a charred stump is a charred stump, but not so. Nestor was just rotating his crops.
