Justice Now!
Join the worldwide chorus calling for justice by urging Brazil’s Supreme Court to rule on lawsuits against the Belo Monte Dam!
This week the global polemic surrounding Brazil’s Belo Monte dam returns to Europe with a high-profile conference entitled “Belo Monte Mega-Dam: The Amazon up for grabs?” in the European Parliament in Brussels followed by major protests and public events in Paris. As the mega-dam comes under increasing scrutiny at home, with this week’s huge worker’s strike again paralyzing construction at its largest work camp only two weeks after a high Brazilian court suspended the project over gross illegalities, European observers are bringing forward their own critiques of Belo Monte and the “development” model it portends for the Amazon and its people.
Called by the Green Party Parliamentarians who traveled to Altamira earlier this year, today’s conference brings together progressive European political leaders alongside some of Brazil’s fiercest critics of Belo Monte including Antonia Melo, coordinator of the Xingu Alive Forever Movement (Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre), Felicio Pontes, Public Prosecutor in Brazil’s Federal Public Ministry (MPF) responsible for numerous lawsuits against the project, a group of Brazilian specialists on the dam, as well as European academics and NGO representatives.
In an unexpected move, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff herself placed last minute demands on the Greens, by way of her Ministry of External Relations, that a delegation of “Belo Monte experts” be inserted into the program including PR spin doctor João Pimentel of the dam-building consortium Norte Energia and the ghoulish Mauricio Tolmasquim, authoritarian President of the government’s opaque and corrupt Energy Research Company (EPE).
While a legitimate request that could be said to balance viewpoints in an important and necessary debate, these representatives of Brazil’s powerful energy, construction, and mining mafia appear to have been sent on a mission to quash valid criticism under a sea of lies. Mr. Tolmasquim went so far as to claim that “Belo Monte is not only a dam, it’s a regional development program with benefits for the planet and humanity, but especially for local communities.” The absurdity of this claim and its measured attempt to deceive the public is matched only by the ruthlessness of the government who sent him here.
Today’s event in Brussels is unprecedented in that it includes important leaders from both sides of this contentious debate. It is also years overdue: it appears the only way that highly placed representatives from the Brazilian government will deem it important enough to show up – indeed scramble – for a public event of this kind is when it takes place in an international forum as important as the European Parliament where their image could be rightfully tarnished. These same representatives have been conspicuously absent from such debate in Brazil, deaf to the resounding criticisms in their own country that question the model being imposed on the Amazon.
At the core of the critiques of the Belo Monte dam being discussed today is not merely the question of how such a clearly disastrous mega-project could be considered sustainable development, but also what European interests are avidly profiteering from the socio-environmental destruction being caused by Brazil’s Amazon dam-building boom. For example, a network of German NGOs is calling attention to the role of the major German insurance companies Allianz and Munich Re in underwriting Belo Monte’s considerable risks. Meanwhile a growing group of French organizations are targeting big national energy companies like GDF-Suez, responsible for the devastating Jirau dam on the Amazon’s Madeira River, and major hardware suppliers like Alstom whose turbines aim to power Belo Monte and many others like it.
Following today’s conference Antonia Melo will bring her longstanding and tireless struggle to the streets of Paris where she and her European allies including Amazon Watch will expose French corporations like GDF Suez, Alstom, and their EU-based cohorts for their shameless exploitation of the Amazon’s last wild rivers. Antonia is looking to meet with the CEO of Alstom and the Brazilian Ambassador while in Paris, followed by a public event entitled “The Belo Monte Dam: Update on an Ecological and Humanitarian Disaster with International Ramifications.”
The global ramifications of Belo Monte and Brazil’s unprecedented dam-building plans for the Amazon basin are manifold. The climate impacts of these dams in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, driven by their associated massive methane bursts and runaway deforestation, represent anything but the sustainable energy future we need to forge to avoid climate catastrophe. The question of human rights violations and dire human suffering that come part and parcel with these projects could never justify the wasteful energy production or the ephemeral economic growth they yield.
Alongside her Brazilian colleagues and European allies, Antonia’s brave conviction will shed light on the European actors and global interests aiding and abetting the crimes being committed by the Brazilian government in the Amazon. By raising awareness and outrage among the global community – and sweeping away the shameful propaganda that accompanies it – we will begin to turn the tide on the State-backed corporate malfeasance that allows such a catastrophic model to pass as “clean development” for the 21st century.
