In the course of the 1970's-which, historically speaking, means almost overnight--the Brazilian Amazon has become a full-fledged frontier. Across an enormous crescent of country, reaching from the Bolivian border to the Atlantic Ocean, the southern rim of the Amazon Basin is being occupied by peasants fleeing the overcrowded northeast and south of Brazil, by land speculators out to make a quick killing, by foreign investors eager to exploit its vast resources, and by government officials in charge of easing the region's transition into modern-day capitalism. A reasonable guess as to the present population of the Brazilian Amazon is about nine million, or less than four people per square mile in a region that accounts for 60% of Brazil's land area. But the pace of development is dizzying. The grid of roads is expanding so fast that maps quickly become outdated. The rain forest is receding before powers stronger than itself; and the immense basin is awakening from the slumber of physical isolation and economic depression. The Amazon, too, has become an arena of social struggle and yet another testing ground for the dictatorship's style of "economic development." THE PIONEERS A visit to the Amazon immediately reveals that Amazonia is being occupied by two antagonistic groups: the paulistas (a word that literally means people from Sao Paulo, but in the Amazon has come to mean any investor from the South) and the peasants. In the hotels of Porto Velho, a city in the Federal Territory of Rondonia that has doubled in size to 70,000 during the last decade, the paulistas sit and wait for a deal to close, for a bribe to reach the right hands, for the local bureacracy to budge. A typical example is Otavio Levanti, the grandson of Italians who emigrated to Brazil and settled in the fertile southern state of Parana. He has taken advantage of government fiscal incentives to buy 17,000 hectares of land.*One hectare is about 2.5 acres.* As soon as the papers are processed he plans to return to Parana, leaving a partner to look after the Amazon land. At the beginning of the dry season they will burn off the forest, plant pasture and bring in cattle from Mato Grosso. It should be a good investment, he says, but in the meantime he is sick with longing for the cool weather and quasi-European amenities of Parana. Another contingent of pioneers stands in small clusters outside the local headquarters of the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, or INCRA. Their floppy, stained shirts, ragged trousers, shapeless straw hats and their silent, diffident manner identifies them as peasants. Most of them are hoping to discover whether the state, as embodied by INCRA, will give them legal title to 100 hectares of forested land-land that in many cases they are already occupying. To a large extent, the future shape of Amazonia lies in INCRA's hands. A series of laws has placed ownership of the bulk of Brazil's Amazon with the government and INCRA administers the distribution of that land. In Rondonia, INCRA's role is particularly crucial. The territory contains large tracts of extraordinarily good soil for Amazonia, which suddenly became accessible in 1960 with the completion of a rudimentary highway from Cuiaba to Porto Velho. The BR-364, precursor of a network of roads that has been feverishly cut through the forest, inaugurated the era of the truck in Amazonia-an event as significant as the great railroads were to the American West. Now trucks struggle up the dirt road by the hundreds, bringing migrants by the thousands: rural laborers thrown out of work by the mechanization of agriculture, or small farmers forced by drought or market collapse to sell out their ever-larger agribusiness competitors. They are destitute, often illiterate. They arrive in ramshackle pick-ups or panel trucks, several families riding in the back sheltered only by tarpaulins. Amazonians have sardonically dubbed these vehicles the "parrot's perch"-the name of one of the most notorious forms of torture perfected by the Brazilian military regime. (The victim is slung over a bar, head down, and then beaten, shocked or raped.) The rush up the BR-364 began in earnest in 1972; by 1974, according to official figures, more than 900 families were entering Rondonia every month. Belatedly, INCRA moved to channel this massive influx into orderly "colonization" projects. Five such projects are now under way in Rondonia and in theory, they exemplify simplicity and social justice in action. The landless peasant arrives in Rondonia and registers with INCRA. He is assigned a plot, usually of 100 hectares, in one of the designated areas. INCRA provides financing, infrastructure, health care, education, technical assistance, marketing facilities-all this is theory. But lower-echelon INCRA employees make no secret of the fact that the agency's resources don't remotely match the requirements of the situation. What actually happens, in a typical case, is that a peasant family arrives and may or may not register with INCRA; in either case, they search out some attractive land, clear the forest and pray to obtain legal title someday. By 1978, the legal status of 12,000 colonizing families in Rondonia had been "regularized," with 16,000 more registered and waiting; how many are unregistered is anyone's guess. And since INCRA cannot actually provide the services that might make the projects thrive, occupation tends to be unstable. The result is a maelstrom of drifting peasants and violent frontier towns on the BR-364. THE SPECULATORS INCRA also has the job of unraveling a byzantine tangle of land tenure, since no one bothered to survey property boundaries in the Amazon for centuries. But with agriculture and ranching now a possibility, land has become a valuable commodity. The grileiro, or real estate swindler, has become one of Amazonia's classic characters. Petty grileiros prey on the peasants; they trek a mile or two into the forest, clear a plot, build a hut and then, claiming ownership, sell out to one or more gullible newcomers. The large-scale grileiros, many of them lawyers, are more ambitious. They set up storefronts in town and deal in huge parcels of land on the basis of titles that at best are doubtful and at worst are printed for the occasion. Since INCRA usually must go to court to have the titles declared invalid, and since the new "owners" may well be rich and powerful groups of paulistas, property questions are often settled by what one official politely called "extra- official means." The pattern is repeated throughout Amazonia. In response to an advertising campaign in southern Brazil, concocted by the governor, a horde of speculators descended on the state of Acre. Between 1972 and 1974, they sold and re-sold an estimated two-thirds of all the lands in the state. Investors now own about 80% of the state, much of it concentrated in the hands of Sao Paulo companies like the Grupo Atlantico/Boa Vista and the Grupo Atalla, who together hold title to nearly two million hectares. The real victims of the speculative outburst are the descendents of Acre's original settlers. Their forebears migrated from the blighted northeast to the Amazon during the rubber boom in the late nineteenth century, and it was their occupation of Acre, then part of Bolivia, that made possible Brazil's annexation of the area in 1903. If they did not tame the jungle, they at least learned to live in it; and from the rubber trees they extracted the milky liquid that built the cities of Manaus and Belem. When the boom collapsed, those who had survived the unimaginably brutal conditions of the seringais (where the rubber trees grow wild and are dispersed in the jungle) stayed on, eking out a living by planting subsistence crops and tapping the trees on a more or less independent basis. Then the speculators arrived, wanting to rid the land of "squatters"- the laborers that had been there for decades, and some for a hundred years. Dom Moacyr Grechi, Bishop of the Prelacy of Acre and Purus, has dozens of cases on file documenting the methods employed to "clean" the land. He heads the Pastoral Commission on the Land, which studies problems of land tenure and distribution. He gives the example of one Romulo Bonalume, a paulista from Parana, who appeared on the BR-317 road in 1973, and told the 70 people living between kilometers 104 and 140 that he had bought all the property. The peasants had legal rights to the land they had occupied and developed, and refused to leave. Bonalume then hired gunslingers to intimidate them, at the same time offering 3,000 cruzeiros (about $300) to anyone who would sell out. By 1976, many of the peasants had succumbed and fled. INCRA and other agencies ignored the protests of those who stayed. Bonalume's lawyer convinced the police to visit the site and arrest the "squatters" they had accused of leading the "agitation." More arrests were made in 1977. Today only a few hang on. According to Dom Moacyr, violence in the Amazon has an oddly seasonal character. "When the rains stop, the shooting starts." May to November is the time to clear the land of both forest and squatters. Houses and crops are burned. Barbed wire is strung. But it is also the time when those doing the clearing may be ambushed. One man who has worked to organize the peasants was pessimistic: "The government wants large-scale ranches in Amazonia. The paulistas come in here with planes, tractors, defoliants, private armies, bank loans, subsidies. And the local police, the judges, the soldiers--they look after the people who can pay the price." Those who are forced from the land often return to it as peons on ranches owned by the paulistas. Generally, they are hired by a labor contractor, whose stock in trade features tempting promises about pay and working conditions. Once he assembles his herd, the peons are driven or flown to the ranch, often deep in the forest, to do backbreaking labor for ten hours a day or more. Not infrequently they are treated as prisoners, subject to beatings for infractions, with armed guards posted to prevent escape. Equally often the contractor vanishes at the end of the season, without paying his men. And with the appa- ratus of justice notoriously for sale, the peons have little hope for redress. Benedito Tavares, an Acre landowner who was among the very few ever brought to trial for conditions amounting to slavery on his ranch, boasted publicly that he could buy any local policeman in the state for five dollars. OPERATION AMAZONIA A very different aspect of Amazonian "development" is reflected in the city of Manaus, born as a Portuguese fort on the bluffs overlooking the Rio Negro near its confluence with the Amazon. Since the end of the rubber boom around 1912, the city had stagnated. But in 1966. Field Marshall Humberto Castelo Branco, first in Brazil's line of military presidents, announced a development program that promised to revive the city. "Operation Amazonia" called for the creation of a free trade zone in Manaus. For a period of 30 years, foreign imports into the city would be free of tariffs; and industries would be encouraged to locate there by tax exemptions. In just a few years, Manaus was transformed into a bizarre emporium, a town gone retail-mad. Sophisticated consumer goods--appliances, watches, calculators and the like--flooded in from abroad. Every downtown block had new stores, windows bristling with gadgets, loudspeakers bellowing prices. A $100-per-person limit on goods that could be taken out of Manaus only made the city a nest of smugglers. In 1975, Brazil's balance-of-payments problems led the government to restrict imports, causing a minor retail recession in Manaus. But tourists, most of them Brazilian, still come to the heart of the Amazon to buy a Sony Trinitron or a Nikon FM. As the commercial provisions of the free trade zone were turning the city into one vast Radio Shack, the attempt to create an industrial base was causing problems of its own. Fiscal incentives did attract hundreds of new enterprises, as evidenced by the newly-built Industrial District. At each intersection, a thicket of arrow-shaped signs points the way to the likes of General Electric, Philco, Gillette and Honda. But here, too, the consumer electronics industry predominates, and most of the plants simply assemble components imported duty-free from abroad. These assembly plants use relatively unskilled labor and contribute little to the creation of a solid economic base. Even their capacity to generate employment is limited. Through February 1978, the new industrial projects employed 33,884 workers, with plants to employ 12,000 more under construction or planned. Yet government ballyhoo over the free zone had much to do with Manaus' amazing population growth, from some 220,000 in 1967 to over 600,000 today-in a city where much of the infrastructure dates from 1910. To the companies the influx is not unwelcome, since it assures a steady supply of very cheap labor. But to the populace of the appalling favelas, Operation Amazonia must seem less than a success. GENOCIDE IN THE JUNGLE Amazonian "development" has had a particularly devastating effect on an entire race of human beings, the Amazonian Indians. Genocide is a word much overused, but it describes without hyperbole what is taking place in Brazil today. According to a 1946 United Nations convention, which Brazil signed, genocide involves, among other things, the "intentional" subjection of a national, racial, religious or ethnic group to "conditions of existence that necessarily brings about its total or partial physical destruction." In this century, Brazil's Indian population has plummeted from an estimated one million to 100,000--a loss of more than 100,000 a year. The military government of Brazil has been an active promoter of genocide. (In this, it must be said, the generals are following a tradition of enslavement, massacre and despoilation already centuries old in Brazil.) The organ that governs Indian affairs today is the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI. FUNAI was established in 1968 after an investigation of its predecessor agency, the Indian Protection Service (SPI), revealed, as the New York Times put it, "evidence of widespread corruption and sadism, ranging from the massacre of whole tribes by dynamite, machine guns and sugar laced with arsenic, to the removal of an 11-year-old girl from school to serve as a slave to an official of the Service." By and large, FUNAI agents have avoided the more egregious misdeeds of the SPI era, but the agency's basic policy has had the same devastating effect. As an arm of the Ministry of the Interior, whose main goal is to spur economic growth, FUNAI clearly regards Indian interests as secondary to those of groups that want to "develop" the resources theoretically controlled by the tribes. "Assistance to the Indians, which should be as complete as possible, must not obstruct national development nor the axes of penetration for the integration of the Amazon," wrote the agency's president in 1971. What FUNAI's approach means in practice has been demonstrated in scores of cases that follow the same dismal pattern. First the frontier expands, often by means of a new road (an "axis of penetration"), into the area occupied by a tribe. FUNAI, aware of the effect the road will have, does nothing to prevent its construction. Instead, the agency promises to demarcate a reserve for the Indians, but then delays doing so, often for years. Meanwhile, the Indians, exposed to frequent contact with whites, immediately suffer deadly epidemics of diseases to which they have no immunity: colds, flu, measles, tuberculosis. Those who survive, stunned by the calamity, have no skills to cope with an alien new world. The tribe's cultural cohesion breaks down, and its members are driven to beggary, prostitution or at best rootless rural labor. One of the most urgent cases of dispossession concerns the Yanomamo Indians, who inhabit an area on the border of Brazil and Venezuela, north of Manaus. There is a cruel irony in the mortal threat now facing the Yanomamo, since the tribe's large size (15,000 members, at least 6,000 in Brazil) and customs have made it the most intensively studied group of Indians in Latin America. Every American anthropology student reads Professor Napoleon Chagnon's classic, The Yanomamo: The Fierce People. Yet the Yanomamo's celebrity has not protected them from the encroaching frontier. In 1974, the government began to build the Northern Perimeter Highway, which is designed to run from the mouth of the Amazon to the Colombian border, roughly parallel to the river-and directly through Yanomamo territory. (The Brazilian Constitution and the Indian Statute of 1973 give Indians asolute right to the lands they inhabit, but FUNAI determines the boundaries of those lands, and the government may override Indian sovereignty in order to "carry out public works of interest to national development.") FUNAI made no attempt to precede the construction crews and prepare the Indians for the road's arrival; and when the agency finally established an outpost, in August 1974, its policy was to attract the Indians to the vicinity of the highway. One quarter of the Yanomamo living in three villages near the road soon perished of infectious diseases. Yanomamo men began to beg and Yanomamo women attached themselves to workers' camps. Venereal disease made its appearance. And recently, families from Boa Vista have taken to driving along the road for a picnic and a look at the "savages." To make matters worse, in 1975 Brazil announced the discovery of huge uranium and cassiterite deposits in the heart of Yanomamo country. As anthropologist Shelton Davis points out in his excellent book on Amazonian Indians, Victims of the Miracle, the Indian Statute contradicts itself as regards control of mineral resources. The law flatly states that "native land cannot be the object of leasing or renting or any juridical act or negotiation that restricts the full exercise of direct possession by the native community (emphasis mine)." But other clauses give FUNAI the right to lease subsoil resources of native land to third parties and to administer the proceeds-all for the good of the Indians, of course. The agency's exercise of this power in the past has led to invasion of supposedly inviolable reserves by such powerful multinationals as the W.R. Grace Company and the Patino Tin Mining Company. "EMANCIPATION" Brazilian anthropologists have long urged the government to create a reserve that would at least give the Yanomamo legal tenure to their land. For a decade, proposals languished in FUNAI files -until 1978, when the agency revealed that Yanomamo Indian land would soon be demarcated. However, instead of covering the proposed unified area of 22,700 square kilometers, FUNAI plans to create 16 separate mini-reserves, totaling 13,500 square kilometers. This dismemberment, condemning the migratory Yanomamo to remain within small areas and allowing whites to occupy the land in between, amounts to nothing less than a death sentence. In explaining the idea, the general in charge of Amazonian Indian policy, Democrito de Oliveira, stated that the larger reserve would take up too much valuable land; and in any case, he said, the Yanomamo are "physically and possibly intellectually decadent" as a result of "incestuous" practices, and therefore, he implied, not worth saving. Many anthropologists agree with FUNAI that tribes like the Yanomamo must eventually become integrated into the dominant culture, but they argue that the only hope for the Indians lies in extremely gradual adjustment. FUNAI, however, seems to be moving in the opposite direction-from "rapid integration" to what the agency calls "emancipation." Emancipated Indians would be almost identical, in legal terms, to other Brazilians; that is, they would not be subject to FUNAI's tutelage and protection, such as it is. The government presents this as the pinnacle of achievement for the Indians. When details of a proposed decree to regulate "emancipation" were leaked to the press, the plan was roundly denounced by Indians and their defenders. There was particular skepticism about the clause stating that Indian lands would remain permanently inalienable. In the lawless countryside, the provision would probably be ignored and the law's main result would be emancipation of the Indians from their patrimony. (In the United States, the Indian Non- Intercourse Act of 1790, banning the sale of Indian land to whites without Congressional approval, went unenforced. A century later came the Dawes Severalty Act, providing for the division of Indian land into individual plots as a way of teaching Indians "the habits of civilized life." And so it did: during the next 45 years Indian landholdings dropped from 138 million acres to 48 million.) The protest against the new decree was so sharp that it was shelved momentarily; and while there is little reason to expect it will be abandoned, the simple fact of the regime's hesitation is significant. It illustrates the strength of the fledgling movement in defense of the Indians, led in many cases by activists in the Brazilian church. The Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI), founded by progressive clerics in 1972, has led the battle against FUNAI policies. Most importantly, the Indians themselves have been organizing, with tribal leaders gathering in a series of national assemblies. "That's what frightens the generals-the possibility of a united front among the tribes," says Dom Tomas Balduino, Bishop of Goias and head of CIMI. "And it's not only that it would make it harder to take their land. The Indians are a challenge to the whole ideology of development. Their way of life is communal. They instinctively respect the ecology. In the generals' eyes, what could be more subversive?" POLAMAZONIA The generals' concept of "development" has been through many stages. First came Operation Amazonia in 1966: the free trade zone, the creation of SUDAM- a giant agency to direct the flow of investment projects-and fiscal incentives. Soon afterwards came another plan, President Medici's dream of a Trans-Amazonian Highway, a 3,000-mile road to run from the Atlantic coast to the Peruvian border, largely through virgin forest. Medici predicted that peasants would pour into the Amazon and build prosperous farms, towns and cities along the highway, thus narrowing the gulf between Brazil's modernizing south and its poverty-stricken north. But the Trans-Amazon was a failure. Five million colonists were expected by 1980, but no more than 50,000 came, and of those many gave up and went home. The colonists received so little of the financial and technical help they had been promised that many Brazilians now wonder if the plan was meant to fail. Lately, they call the highway the "Trans-miseriana." In 1974, yet another military president, General Ernesto Geisel, bestowed still another plan on the Amazon-this one giving short shrift to the problem of poverty. Called Polamazonia, it established 15 development "poles" where financial resources would be concentrated, each involving massive industrial, mining or ranching projects. The Amazon was no longer seen as worthy of development for its own sake; rather it would serve as a satellite region, charged with furnishing raw materials for the modern area of Brazil, the center-south, and with earning foreign currency through exports. This change in strategy coincided with the end of the Brazilian "miracle," and the onset of the worldwide recession. Brazil was experiencing 40% annual inflation rates, a growing balance-of-payments deficit and a mounting foreign debt of some $41 billion. The Amazon would have to make its contribution to the drive to raise exports, by producing goods in demand on world markets. Unfortunately for the forest, one of those goods is meat. Through SUDAM's fiscal incentives, the government (and therefore, indirectly, the Brazilian public) has subsidized the creation of hundreds of cattle ranches. Many of the subsidized ranches are enormous, adding to the concentration of landholdings in Brazil, and many are owned by foreigners. Among these are the King Ranch, a 180,000-acre spread in Para; the Suia-Missu Ranch in Mato Grosso, which covers over a million acres and is owned by the Italian firm Liquigas; and the 300,000-acre ranch in Para acquired by Volkswagen. Watching the ranches spread, Amazonians mutter what is fast becoming a proverb in the region: "Onde o boi entra, o home sai." (Where cattle enter, man exits.) And SUDAM's own figures bear out the saying. It takes few workers to run a large ranch; though agroindustrial projects absorbed half the subsidies distributed by SUDAM between 1966 and 1976, they created only 17,000 of the total 70,000 jobs. Ranches are highly efficient, however, when it comes to destroying forest. An American agronomist working for several ranches in Para described the modern system of clearing land: "They take two Caterpillar D-8 tractors, run a 24,000 kilogram chain between them, and just drag it through the forest. It pulls up everything by the roots." According to her, many ranches have already been abandoned, their soils useless, their 34MaylJune 1979 fields smothered by weeds, only to repeat the process in newer ranching areas. Such apparent short-sightedness reflects the investment mentality of the Amazon, where the goal is to make a quick killing and get out. Not a few ranches, in fact, are set up solely to siphon off fiscal incentives from SUDAM, a practice that has given rise to the shell-game known as the "tourist cow," whereby a herd of cattle is rented to occupy a phantom ranch on the day that SUDAM officials come to inspect. But whether the ranches are well-managed, ill-run or largely fictitious, they have the same effect on the forest. No one knows precisely how much of the southeastern Amazon has been devastated since the ranchers moved in, but the area is substantial. Figures from the Brazilian Institute for Forestry Development (IBDF), the agency responsible for protection of the ecology, show that in the state of Para alone, between 1973 and 1977, the government authorized the clearing of some 4.5 million acres of forest. And that is only the expanse cleared with government permission. Brazilian law governing deforestation forbids any proprietor to clear more than 50% of the land and requires payment for the reforestation of an equivalent area. But the law, like so many others, is rarely enforced. THE UGLY AMERICAN Other Polamazonia projects focus on the estimated $1 trillion worth of comercially valuable timber in the Amazon region. Despite warnings from scientists, who doubt the Amazon forest can withstand sustained- yield harvests, SUDAM plans to devote a full one-fifth of the Brazilian Amazon to lumber production. The Amazon project that has garnered most publicity recently is Jari Forestal e Agropecuaria, known as Jari, the stupendous enclave owned by the American shipping tycoon, Daniel Keith Ludwig. The Amazon and Ludwig are well suited to each other; both seem to sprout superlatives. Ludwig is said to be the richest American alive, worth more than $3 billion, a fortune founded in the 1940's on the success of his shipping company, National Bulk Carriers. Ludwig is a one-man conglomerate, but Jari is his most extravagant venture to date. While the precise dimensions of his holdings are uncertain, Ludwig claims 3.7 million hectares along the Jari River east of Belem, an estate bigger than Connecticut and Massachusetts combined, the largest private landholding in the Western Hemisphere. Upon this forest kingdom Ludwig has lavished capital estimated at between $500 million and $1 billion. His rice plantations have produced a yield nearly twice as high as the former world record. He is experimenting with soybeans, sugar cane, manioc, maize, dende palms (for palm oil) and with herds of water buffalo. Ludwig owns bauxite deposits in the Trombetas region and plans to build an aluminum plant that would produce 300,000 tons annually. Jari is also rich in gold and diamonds. But the nucleus of Ludwig's plans for his kingdom lies in his conviction that world supplies of timber are running short. He has cleared large areas of forest- nearly 250,000 acres so far, with another 250,000 to go - and planted stands of two fast-growing trees that will be harvested for cellulose, pulp, plywood and lumber. This project was capped last year with a characteristically grandiose feat: Ludwig constructed a gigantic processing plant in Japan, placed it on barges, and had it towed 13,000 miles around South America and up the Amazon to Jari, where it will produce 750 tons of kraft paper each day. In Jari, the development strategy of the generals reaches an extreme, but a logical one. The project is under absolute foreign command-to be specific, the command of an 82-year-old American with no apparent heirs. Virtually everything Jari produces is destined for export. The consequences of destroying so much forest and of planting uniform stands of trees in the Amazon are unpredictable at best, whereas pulp mills of the sort he has anchored on the Jari River are known to be among the most polluting of all factories. The hermetic quality of the operation is enhanced by Ludwig's passion for secrecy. No one visits Jari without permission, which is rarely granted. Journalists in particular are non gratae; even government officials have been sent packing. Ludwig, of course, realizes that such measures have made him unpopular and judiciously has purchased one of Belem's daily papers and a radio station to help polish Jari's image. But the political support most important to Ludwig comes from the highest levels of the regime. During the Geisel administration, Ludwig was a regular visitor to the presidential palace. And the new president, General Figueiredo, apparently plans to maintain the tradition; he has publicly declared that Jari should serve as a model for the occupation of the Amazon. As Professor Davis says, in Victims of the Miracle, "There is nothing inevitable about what is taking place in the Brazilian Amazon." It is not the result of incompetence nor the inevitable product of economic progress. Rather, the ruinous occupation of the world's greatest remaining natural reserve (other than the seas) is the product of conscious policies, implemented by a government that holds power in Brazil only by force of arms. In pursuit of the greatest immediate return, the generals have built ill-considered roads instead of improving river transport; decimated Indian tribes instead of protecting them; subsidized ranches instead of finding more appropriate uses for the land; winked at illegal deforestation by tractor, fire and herbicide. They have chosen a style of development that enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor. They sponsor capital-intensive export enclaves and encourage the concentration of land into huge fiefdoms, but they offer peasants and rural laborers little material support and virtually no legal protection. The rationale, naturally, is that the wealth generated by this "development" will trickle down. In the meantime, which has already lasted 15 years, the guardians of public order do their best to crush any serious resistance. DEVELOPMENT OR DESTRUCTION? Bibliography: 1. F.H. Cardoso and G. Muller, Amazonia: Expan. sao do Capitalismo (Sao Paulo, 1977). 2. Shelton Davis, Victims of the Miracle: Development and the Indians of Brazil. (Cambridge University Press, 1977). 3. R.J.A. Goodland and H.S. Irwin, Amazon Jungle: Green Hell to Red Desert? (Amsterdam, 1975). 4. BettyJ. Meggers, Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise (Chicago, 1971). 5. Darcy Ribeiro, Os Indios e a Civilizacao (Rio de Janeiro, 1970). 6. William Denevan, "Development of the Imminent Demise of the Amazon Rainforest," The Professional Geographer, 25 (1973). 7. Charles Wagley, ed. Man in the Amazon (Gainesville, Florida, 1974).
