In The Amazon, A New Mining Frontier For Iron Ore – by Marina Amaral (Huffington Post/Angencia Publica – March 4, 2014)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theworldpost/

Meet Canaã dos Carajás, the new frontier of iron ore mining. It’s in the South of Brazil’s Para, where jobs and mining royalties did not bring as much progress as expected.

Between 1982 and 1985, Brazil’s last military ruler, João Figueiredo, settled 1,551 families through colonization projects around the mining area of the Carajás Forest, in the south of Para state in the Amazon. The project to exploit the world’s biggest high-grade iron ore, discovered in 1967, started to get momentum after the first mine in Serra de Carajás (Carajas Hills) was opened. Today it is a complex that produces about $13 billion worth of iron ore per year, most of which is exported.

The early settlers, however, had no idea that they were going to live on top of the “biggest project ever” of Vale — the world’s second mining corporation.

The goal of the military government was to reduce land conflicts in the Bico de Papagaio (“Parrot’s Beak”) region. The region was the center of the Araguaia guerrilla in the 1970s and is mainly situated around reserves holding an estimated 18 billion tons of iron ore, as well as deposits of manganese, copper, nickel, and gold.

Today, Vale digs 110 million tons of iron ore from the North Hills of Carajás. With the new project, called S11D, the company aims to double the production by exploring the South Hills of Serra dos Carajás until 2016. In June 2012, Ibama, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, granted a provisory license for the enterprise, which is set to receive a $19.4 billion investment. A year later, in July 2013, the definitive license was granted.

When settlers first arrived there however, there were no astronomic values at stake.

“They put us here as watchmen. This wasn’t inhabited by people. When I got here, it was just woods, just the forest. ‘Anyone who gets the land and doesn’t clear it will have to leave’, they would say,” recalls the Maranhão-born worker José Ribamar Silva Costa, known as Pixilinga, waiving away the cloud of mosquitoes invading the balcony of his home in Vila Planalto, 12 kilometers from Canaã dos Carajás.

Like Pixilinga, many people moved to the region and settled in one of the three Centers of Regional Development (CEDERE). One of them, CEDERE II, would become the city of Canaã dos Carajás in 1994. The 30,000-people town is currently going through its second growth cycle. The first one happened with the opening of the mine “Sossego” in 2000. Vale started copper extraction at Sossego in 2004. Between 2000 and 2010, the population tripled.

In the 1980s the Brazilian military already knew that the iron ore reserves in the South Hills of Carajás – where the town of Canaã is located – were even bigger than the ones at the North Hills, whose exploitation started in 1984. So the military leaders tried at once to expel the rural workers who lived off their own land and cattle nearby.

“In these woods, there is a lot of animals to hunt, and also Brazil nuts, mango, banana, jackfruit, cupuaçu, açaí, lime,” says Antonio Maurício Gustavo, from Goiás, who’s known as Tonhão.

In 1979, Tonhão took a three day trip and came walking from Xinguara, in Araguaia.

“Then everyone pitched in, giving a piece of land to build a village, a collective farm, and an orchard,” he says, seated under the shade of a mango tree.

“When we were farming the land, a helicopter came from Vale, and down came the military officers to put up signs: ‘deforestation, selling the wood and fishing are prohibited.’ Then we thought: If Vale wants this area, so do we. And we arrived first. So we broke the signs, hence the name of our city.”

The town of Racha-Placa (broken sign, in Portuguese) is about 80 kilometers from the town of Canaã. The episode that named the town happened in 1984.

The residents ended up making a deal with the military. They gave away an area for official research on the presence of mineral ore, while they went on with their project of building a village. At its peak, the town had 100 families, 2 schools, a health center, churches and even an ice cream shop – a big deal for such a remote area. “But 10 years ago, the people of Vale came back and said: ‘You guys are on top of the largest deposit of iron ore in the world, and we’re going to open the mine. If Canaã is the body, here is the heart of the project,’” Tonhão recalls.

The community decided to resist. Some of the families, however, gave in when Vale went on to pay exorbitant prices for the farmers’ land, and the workers were out of jobs. “Those with more land, like me, who have five children, could live off the farm, but most people depended on other farms for work, so they ended up selling their land to Vale,” shares Tonhão. “They killed us slowly.”

Around him, the scenery is heartbreaking – most houses, the school and stores were demolished and the remains make the tropical landscape ghostlike. “They call us settlers, but all this is federal land, which they occupy too,” points out Tonhão.

The 49 families who resisted Vale’s siege decided to fight. With the help of lawyers of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), they managed to make the company buy an area of 340 bushels to house the families and pay a guaranteed monthly minimum compensation for two years to the families who lost their plantations and who are waiting to move to the new area.

“It was a loss for the entire region. The kids now have to walk 14 kilometers to go to school, the rural workers have nowhere to buy what they need,” Tonhão laments. “They say we’re stopping the progress. We’ll see…”

In addition to denying any irregularities in the process of land acquisition, Vale argues that “the project Carajás Iron S11D will boost the economy with 40 billion reais in investments, besides generating more than 30,000 direct jobs during the deployment phase and approximately 15,000 jobs (direct and indirect) during the operational phase.”

But the people from Racha-Placa are not only worried about jobs. Their entire way of life is at stake.

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