[-empyre-] AMAZON IS BURNING

[Lucio Agra]

Hi, everybody.
I've been lurking until now, following the discussion and preferably trying
to do not interfere.  Margaretha, though, has put a good point here.

Today I waked up with a message sent by a colleague  through Whats Up, with
a link to The Intercept ,where a young brazilian journalist, from their
crew, grabbed some information about the plans that the Govern - and
particularly the Army - have been preparing concerning Amazon area. The
militaries basically reedited an ancient doctrine about security on the
Amazon frontier. Among several conspiration theories involving the
construction of an independent country for Yanomoanis in collaboration with
Venezuela, and other klind of misconception there is an intention to get
around ancient plans of roads construction in the region. There is already
a road that connects Cuiabá (in the middle of the country) to Santarem. Up
to this place, there begins the region known as Calha Norte, which was
involved in disputes and projects since Military Dictatorship in the 70s
and 80s. It gave raise to a rumorous situation that involved, in the past,
some militaires and empresarios. Well, here they come again, projecting the
occupation of Indigenous areas with mining and people brought from other
parts of the country, with the aim to avoid a supposed "invasion" of
Chinese immigrants that also supposedly have benn growing in Suriname.
Several detais, including a presentation with maps and some audio
registering the meetings done in the state of Pará, were disclosed by
Intercept. The material is astonishing even to those of us who were born
and in Brazil and to all that live here.
Now I  arrive to the important point Margaretha sustained in her
commentaries. The roads we see in the map, part of it, probably represent
these efforts to open ways up to North Amazon, a place, as an specialst
heard by Intercept says, so isolated that does not demand concerns on
fronteer security. There is indeed a plan to occupy Amazon with roads and
it is really important for some *tactical* reasons: first, because it
increases petrol and cars lobby, second because it was one of the main
politics of Dictatorship in the 70s, through the absurd project of
TransAmazonica road. Nowaday it seems to be a reedition of ancient
positions susteinad by  some falcons from the Army.
If, from one side, says Margaretha, perhaps the world get information that
constructs a "we vision" (from the standpoint of the ones who did not
suffer colonization directly - "seeing from afar") , on the other there is
an analogous situation concerning people that live in  in  southwest or
south parts of the Country, which means also "seeing from afar".
Nevertheless, the same network has been making it possible to have fast
access to such an information as it was disclosed by journalist Tatiana
Dias through Intercept today. Intercept uses the same Network that can
either reinforce distances, either eliminate them. To use a cliché,
information is a crucial tool to this very moment.
Link to the story (I'm afraid it is only in Portuguese):
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/19/plano-bolsonaro-paranoia-amazonia/
Best
Lucio Agra

Em sex, 20 de set de 2019 às 11:13, margaretha haughwout <
margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com> escreveu:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear All,
>
> Hope your day of CLIMATE STRIKE! brings new energy and fresh beginnings to
> the struggle.
>
> Fabi thank you for your posts so full of energy and for a vision of
> agroecology. I share your inspiration for this set of cultivation
> practices, and worry deeply about the ways it can be taken up by
> capital.... But perhaps as you suggest it is a way out, a tear on the edges
> of modernity (Eduardo Gudynas argues the way out of modernity will be
> determined by Latin America....)
>
> I have another question for you Fabi and for Dan. One of the striking
> things about the arial images of the Amazon, are the fishbone patterns we
> see as roads get developed. We can actually see the metabolic pathways of
> capitalism in these patterns. But I'm wondering about the ways 'we' see the
> Amazon from afar -- the technologies we use, and how they themselves are
> implicated in colonial histories and colonial futures that have us leaving
> earth -- could you comment. How do you use these mapping and satellite
> technologies in your own practice?
>
>
> In solidarity,
> -M
>
>
>
> --
> beforebefore.net
> --
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 1:21 PM Dean Wilson <dean at sundialforum.org> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> A lurker here ... thanks for the thread. "A thousand years ago" indeed.
>> Even an eight year interval under the present exploding plastic inevitable
>> airborne toxic event is a lost slave ship of failure. Pankaj Mishra's book
>> review of David French scraped the bulbous lard of privilege and rummaged
>> around thusly back in the day (2011):
>>
>>
>> https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/a-curzon-without-an-empire/270145
>>
>> "Even stranger gaps exist in *India*, which, though subtitled *An
>> Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People*, finds no place for the nearly
>> 800 million Indians who still depend on agriculture for a living. The quiet
>> catastrophe in rural areas—the collapse of water tables, spiralling debt,
>> the poisoning of cultivable land, and tens of thousands of farmer
>> suicides—is absent from *India*. French does talk to one man with a
>> farming background at length; but the latter turns out to be an upwardly
>> mobile adivasi at a Californian-style vineyard owned by Sula Wines.
>> Claiming that Mahadev Kolis “normally prefer” Chenin Blanc and Madeira, he
>> leads French into upbeat speculation about the “democratisation of
>> wine-drinking” in India."
>>
>> Parasamgate bodhi svaha.
>>
>> DW
>>
>> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu



-- 
*Lucio Agra*
Prof. Adjunto • CECULT/UFRB
Centro de Cultura Linguagens e Tecnologias Aplicadas
<https://ufrb.edu.br/cecult/>
http://contemporaryperformance.org/profile/LucioAgra
Se vc tem urgência de falar comigo, me ligue no celular! É mais rápido!
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