Environment: A Dubious Plan for the Amazon

(2 of 2)

The President's strident nationalism drew a sour reaction from his many critics. "Sarney declared war on the world today," said Fabio Feldman, a Congressman from Sao Paulo who is a vocal environmentalist. "He's trying to - rally public support around a discredited government." Feldman declared the Our Nature program itself "too academic and vague. It won't change a thing." Said another leading ecologist: "It is obvious that the intention of the program is not to save the Amazon but to appease foreign criticism."

If so, Sarney fell far short of his goal. Just days before Our Nature was announced, a group of 28 Latin American intellectuals, none of them Brazilian, issued a stinging open letter to Sarney accusing him of a "policy of ecocide and ethnocide" in the Amazon. The statement called for an immediate halt to "massive deforestation" and other "acts of barbarism." Among the signers were three prominent novelists: Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru.

The protesting intellectuals particularly criticized the Amazon project that is of most concern to ecologists: a proposed road across the western state of Acre to Pucallpa, Peru, where it would link up with a Peruvian highway that stretches over the Andes to Lima. The highway link would provide Acre with a Pacific outlet for its tropical hardwoods, which are much in demand in Japan. It would also open up the western Amazon for the first time to the kind of commercial exploitation that, in the view of environmentalists, would lead to devastation.

Alarm over the Acre proposal, first aired in January, has been so strong that President George Bush reportedly asked Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita to clarify whether his government had any plans to finance the highway. Takeshita said Japan had yet to receive a request from Brazil for funding. As President Sarney's speech last week demonstrated, the proud Brazilians will not be easily deterred. Officials insist that the highway from Acre to Peru will be built in spite of the clamor it has aroused.