Brazil police resume crackdown on Amazon logging, retake city where residents rioted

Heavily armed federal police swarmed an Amazon town and seized more than 500 truckloads of illegally cut hardwood that were confiscated but abandoned earlier this week when rioting residents and loggers drove out environmental authorities.

About 450 officers retook the town of Tailandia on Saturday, patrolling on horseback and in pickup trucks and standing guard outside sawmills.

At least 2,000 enraged residents burned tires, blocked roads and forced Environmental Protection Agency workers to flee the area on Tuesday. The force sent in Saturday allowed the seizure of the wood to resume while preventing any new violence, federal police officer Fernando Alberto Silva told Globo TV.

"Order was re-established peacefully," he said.

Huge trunks of precious hardwood were loaded onto flatbed trucks to be taken away and auctioned off by the government, which plans to spend the proceeds on rainforest protection. So much wood was seized that it will take authorities nearly three weeks to cart it all away. Its value was estimated at estimated at US$1.8 million (€1.2 million), Globo TV said.

The Tailandia campaign is part of a larger government push to prevent an apparent rise in illegal logging and burning that threatens to reverse three straight years of declines in deforestation in the Amazon.

But many of last week's rioters work in the area's saw mills, which could suffer as a result of state efforts to audit companies and mills suspected of illegal logging, Brazil's Environmental Protection Agency said last week.

Before the unrest, inspectors had audited 10 of Tailandia's estimated 140 sawmills, fining seven for stocking wood of unknown origin and selling lumber without authorization, the agency said.

To help keep the peace, an additional 157 officers from Brazil's elite National Security Force will be sent to the area on Sunday, the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo reported on its Web site.

A January government report detailed a suspected rise in deforestation, prompting President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to send extra federal police and environmental agents to Tailandia and 35 other areas where deforestation seemed to have jumped dramatically.

Environmentalists say increased demand for agricultural products, particularly soy and beef, has prompted farmers to raze rainforest land for fields and pastures. Brazil is the world's top beef exporter, and second to the United States in soy exports.

Silva insists his government is taking illegal deforestation seriously, but said no one can be blamed for the increase until investigations are concluded.

Other measures announced last month include a ban on new logging permits, fines for people who buy anything produced on illegally deforested land and requiring thousands of farms to reregister to ensure they do not sit on illegally cleared land.

The January report indicated as many as 7,000 square kilometers (2,700 square miles) of rainforest were cleared between August and December of 2007. At that pace, Brazil would lose 15,000 square kilometers (5,790 square miles) of forest during the year ending in August — a 34 percent increase over the previous 12-month period.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/24/america/LA-GEN-Brazil-Amazon-Crackdown.php