Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – With most Brazilian eyes firmly fixed on the country’s annual carnival, construction work officially started this week on the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon.
In a blog post, the company leading the dam project, Norte Energia, announced that infrastructure work on roads that will provide access to the region started on Monday morning. A photograph showed lorries and a yellow road-roller moving on to the site.
The £7bn Belo Monte dam on the Amazon’s Xingu river is scheduled to start producing energy on 31 December 2014 and would be the second largest of its kind in Brazil and reputedly the world’s third largest.
The Brazilian government says the dam is urgently needed if the country is to keep pace with soaring domestic energy demand resulting from a booming economy that grew 7.5% last year.
But indigenous and environmental groups claim Belo Monte will displace tens of thousands of river-dwellers and bring violence and social chaos to the Amazon state of Para.
In a recent interview with international journalists, Mauricio Tolmasquim, the president of Brazil’s Energy Research Company, defended the project. “Belo Monte allows Brazil to achieve two objectives. First, it manages to meet the energy needs of the country, which will foster growth in development; while at the same time maintaining low levels of greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
But during a campaigning trip to London earlier this month, Sheyla Juruna, a prominent indigenous activist from the region, said the dam would destroy river communities.
“We are here to show the international community that we are not being heard and that the Brazilian government is seriously violating our rights. The government speaks about sustainable development and human rights. How can this be true when they are forcing these projects of destruction on us?”
Last year, the Oscar-winning director James Cameron, visited the dam, claiming: “If this goes forward then every other hydroelectric project in the Amazon basin gets a blank cheque. It’s now a global issue. The Amazon rainforest is so big and so powerful a piece of the overall climate picture that its destruction will affect everyone.”
“I do not accept the Belo Monte dam,” said Mokuka Kayapó, an indigenous leader who met with Cameron. “The forest is our butcher. The river, with its fish, is our market. This is how we survive.”
Not all locals agree. In Altamira, the nearest town, some are excited about energy ministry claims that around 20,000 jobs will be created. Outsiders, assumed to be dam-opponents from environmental groups, are often treated with with suspicion.
Tolmasquim said the dam’s blueprint was designed to bring “the smallest possible negative effects to local communities” and claimed Belo Monte could be a “driving force for sustainable development in the region.”
“No indigenous land surrounding the area of the project will be flooded. No indigenous community will be moved out of their land,” he said, adding: “This is a very different project from other major projects, such as the Three Gorges Dam project, which was estimated to have relocated one million people.”
Opponents are unconvinced and this week vowed to continue fighting, despite the start of building works.
The project remains at the center of a major legal tussle and has so far been granted only a partial environmental license under which full construction cannot begin.
“The struggle to resist the Belo Monte Dam and protect the Xingu river is far from over,” said Christian Poirier, the Brazil programme co-ordinator for environmental group Amazon Watch. “Resistance on the ground will not waver.”
“We will keep battling,” Renata Pinheiro, a legal representative from the Xingu River Forever Alive Movement, told the Amazonian O Liberal newspaper.
