RFUS program director goes to Altamira July 2010.

Altamira, Brazil – July 16, 2010

Altamira is a town of about 100,000 people in the Brazilian Amazon state of Para. It was also where the Kayapo gathered hundreds of supporters, in 1989, to protest government plans to build an enormously destructive dam in the region. That meeting, and subsequent organizing by indigenous peoples and their allies (including the Rainforest Foundation, which was founded soon thereafter) brought the project to a halt, at least temporarily. Today, the town is booming, with new people arriving daily to find work on the latest incarnation of the dam, now scaled down and called Belo Monte.

The dam hasn't even started, however. Construction is still months away, if indeed it moves forward. Yet people are arriving in droves, and the social problems many have feared are already beginning. You now have to lock your bike, and several people I've met have had their motorcycles stolen. Apparently, the biggest hospital in town would be flooded by the dam's reservoir, and at a meeting today, people worried about what would happen when the town's even-now inadequate supply of hospital beds is diminished – and the population doubles. These questions, and many others, remain to be answered.

Belo Monte would flood about 500 square kilometers if built, including the lower-lying parts of the town of Altamira and beyond. But it will also dry out about 100 kilometers of the Volta Grande, or Big Bend, below the dam. I went to visit both yesterday with leaders of the Xingu Alive Forever Movement, which RFUS has been supporting in their efforts to provide communities with information and promote their participation in discussions around the dam.

At this time of year, the Volta Grande is spectacular: it's the dry season, so it is shallow and full of rapids and islands. Trees that are under water the rest of the year are blooming, and there are beaches good for swimming and fishing. As we made our way to the indigenous communities of Arara de Volta Grande and Paquicamba, we passed small settlements and houses.For the first half of our trip, all that we saw would be under water if Belo Monte is built.For the second, it would be dried out. Such is the case for the two indigenous communities we visited, who depend on the river for transportation, food, and water.As Seu Leoncio, the oldest man in the Arara village put it, “One day in the future [if the dam is built], young kids will ask us, 'was life always this hard'?, and we'll answer 'no, in the past we lived in abundance, with plenty of fish and everything we needed'”. The past he was refering to is today, not a day in the distant past.

We're not talking about supermarket abundance here, but entire ways of life will be forever altered. People have called the Xingu home for dozens, if not hundreds, of years. Every stream, every island, every turn in the river, has a name and history, and as we travelled, my colleagues pointed out places and told me stories. We saw petroglyphs on rocks in the river and heard about still-recent memories of fights between indigenous peoples and the rubber tappers and small-scale miners who adventured to the region over the past century and somehow found an equilibrium. Late in the day, as we sped back to Altamira through the sunset skies, we were silent, each of us appreciating what could be lost should the dam be built.