PA-150

Dan Becker

May 5 2009

PA-150 takes you from the start of the Tocantins River to the south of Pará, the second largest state in Brazil. The section of the Transamazon highway goes for thousands of kilometers, at least an eight-hour drive-and that's only to the expanding urban city of Marabá. Along the way south, you’ll note the gradual disappearance of forest, of familiar açaí palms, of the typical river traders so common in northern Amazonia. Squatter settlements, cattle ranches, and logging regimes replace these typical images, the contrast becoming more unavoidable as you travel red dirt roads. Each small town and roadside community along the route smells of rubber, fire, and churrascos, the Brazilian standard for a meal of various meats grilled on skewers. Pass through enough towns and eventually you'll reach a fork at PA-257. You’re almost at the very south of Pará state.

Right before you start on PA-257 you'll drive by a roadside memorial, a scar from Brazil's developmental project of the 1960's and 1970's-"land without people for people without land", that was the governmental slogan of the time. Fueled by paranoia over Western economic dominance, President Medici's regime initiated the construction of massive industrial projects throughout the southern Amazonia, converting lush forests into productive mechanical landscapes. The land had no people, after all. An influx of hydroelectric dams, railroads and highways, and immigrant labor settlements from the South of Brazil arrived to feed the demands of the development project that rhetoric stated to propel the country into greatness. Construction and their floods sacrificed agricultural fields and numerous small towns. Some populations were given warnings to evacuate, others were not, their legacies now faintly surviving in the dozens of social movements for justice in the region. The largest of these dams, Tucurui along the Tocantins, powers the Great Carajás Project, just west of PA-257 and the city of Paruapebas.

Carajás is the largest mining site in the world. In 1967, a United States Steel Company helicopter flew over the region and, low on fuel, made a forced landing-to their luck they found a mineral reserve containing concentrations of iron up to 66 percent. Not willing to allow a Western company control over such wealth and power, the Brazilian government pushed the majority of shares into the hands of the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, now known as VALE throughout Pará and its neighboring states. In 1985, VALE obtained complete control of the mineral deposit and began extraction of the 1.5 billion tons of iron ore within.

And like any other hole in the earth it sucks in and consumes. In this case, consumes labor and bodies. The Project pays low wages to the landless poor , the same workers who it's creation and production displaces and limits. It is not as if there have been no reactions though. The name of the roadside memorial you passed on the way to the collosus from PA-150 is known as Eldorado dos Carajás. On April 17th, 1996, the state military police murdered nineteen landless agricultural workers who engaged in the continual and daily struggle to obtain a better livelihood for their families. They were members of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, the Landless Workers Movement, the largest social movement in Latin America, to which its members fight for their right to productive land. Visitors stop and lay flowers at the base of the memorial, itself crafted out of nineteen wooden logs from fauna typical of the region.

According to Brazilian law, land must meet a "productive and adequate use" standard. The MST identifies unproductive rural land that is not meeting the ordained "social function" and occupies the tract. Through struggle, eventually some settlements become recognized for their land use, and the residents will begin to establish schools, plantations and agricultural fields, community centers, medical shops. Eventually, small towns are born. The process repeats itself until some justice comes into existence, but at the price of great suffering and loss-the South of the state is one of the most bloody and violent in the nation.

Upon our roadside stop I didn't have flowers for the memorial, only my eyes. To say I can honestly comprehend the struggle and the suffering would be offense and insult. Even for a Paranaense in the state's capital of Belém, the concept that lies at the memorial and the nineteen names it lists is foreign-for an outsider like myself, even more so. All the same, I wish I had had flowers, something at all besides silence to acknowledge what eyes recognize.