Space Invaders: Brazilian Villagers Launch Protests of Rocket Base
MAMUNA, Brazil -- For 200 years, descendants of slaves have preserved a distinctive way of life in this village near the Amazon jungle. Amid the stone ruins of plantations, they farmed communally, played drums made of tree trunks and revered spirits in the wilderness.
But then, not long ago, Mamuna was shaken by some strangers: Brazilian and Ukrainian rocket scientists. The scientists said that they intended to use land near the village to expand an aging rocket base into a world-class space center capable of launching commercial satellites.
One day in February, a work crew clearing land for the new site suddenly encountered a log roadblock manned by about 60 Mamuna inhabitants, carrying machetes and scythes. "We weren't giving up our lands to outsiders -- not even brilliant scientists," says Militina Garcia Serejo, a community leader who helped bring the crew's work to a halt. In September, a federal judge backed the villagers' action, issuing an injunction halting further construction on the space project, pending a decision on who should have title to the lands.
In Mamuna and hundreds of other places throughout Brazil, a more assertive black-rights movement is battling for recognition of
quilombos, settlements founded by runaway or freed slaves. But with Brazil's economy surging in recent years and land coveted for development, the territorial push is triggering a flurry of conflicts with businesses, farmers and the armed forces.
Anthropologists estimate that Brazil has around 3,500 quilombos. The settlements are an important part of the national saga of a country in which roughly half the population is black or mixed race. Each Nov. 20, on Black Consciousness Day, Brazilians commemorate the life of Zumbi, a slave who escaped from Portuguese colonizers and led a vibrant 17th-century quilombo called Palmares.
Brazil's 1988 constitution, ratified at the end of a military dictatorship, guaranteed land titles to quilombo inhabitants. But titling was such an arduous bureaucratic process that in the next 15 years fewer than 100 quilombos received titles. Residents of the rest of the quilombos were vulnerable to being kicked out of their homes.
In 2003, Brazil's newly inaugurated leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, faced demands to recognize quilombo lands from the country's increasingly energized black-rights movement. Along with other concessions to black Brazilians, such as university quotas, Mr. da Silva issued a decree that made it easier for quilombos to obtain legal land titles. That triggered a surge in land claims -- and resulting court clashes.
Slave descendants have been battling Aracruz Celulose SA, a New York Stock Exchange-listed pulp producer, over 42,000 acres, three times the area of Manhattan; vying with the Brazilian navy for control of Marambaia Island, site of a naval base; and fighting property speculators in western Mato Grosso state for land that's believed to have gold deposits.
This year, amid pressure by agribusiness, Mr. da Silva backtracked, and issued rules that make it harder for quilombos to obtain titles. But many quilombo residents are still fighting.
Grim ReminderThe most high-profile struggle has pitted Mamuna and neighboring quilombos against the rocket base located on a peninsula in the Atlantic Ocean near the town of Alcântara. In the 18th century, the area was a center for cotton and sugar plantations, located near a major port of entry for African slaves.
A grim reminder of the slave era is the whipping post in downtown Alcântara, now preserved for tourists. In the early 1800s, cotton prices collapsed and slave holders on the peninsula began abandoning their plantations. Ex-slaves took over the lands, leading to the emergence of most of the 100 or so quilombos, with roughly 16,000 inhabitants, that survive on the peninsula today.
While quilombo residents keep their own palm-thatched houses, farm land is considered communal property. Decisions on who farms where are made by community leaders, a number of whom are women. Many quilombo dwellers also believe in
encantados, spirits existing in nature. Mamuna residents say one encantado inhabits a rock outcropping on a beach, from which a drumming sound is said to emanate.
Reuters
A rocket is launched off the Alcântara Launch Center in 2007.
The space program entered the picture in the early 1980s, when the military government announced it was expropriating a large swath of the peninsula to build a rocket base. Alcântara was selected as the site because of its proximity to the equator, where the Earth rotates faster, reducing the amount of fuel needed to launch rockets.
The construction of the base, in 1986, forced more than 300 families to resettle from quilombos to smaller parcels far from their fishing grounds. Sérvulo de Jesus Moraes Borges, a leader of a local opposition group to the base, says the space program hasn't created many good jobs for peninsula residents due to an "intellectual apartheid" between well-trained space workers and quilombo residents who often lack access to basic schooling.
In 2003, a public prosecutor filed a class-action suit on behalf of the peninsula's quilombo residents, urging that they be granted land titles and chastising the government for "creating innumerable obstacles for [residents'] continuity and cultural reproduction."
In court filings, the Brazilian Space Agency has noted that the base has brought benefits to the peninsula, hastening the arrival of basic infrastructure like electricity and telephones. José de Ribamar Alves, a congressman from the area, adds that the base is geopolitically vital. "We have to think of the national interest," he says.
Disturbing the SpiritsPlagued by tight budgets and conflicts between military and civilian managers, however, the Alcântara base has struggled to do more than launch suborbital research rockets. The biggest setback came in August 2003, when a satellite rocket blew up on an Alcântara launching pad, killing 21 scientists and technicians.
In 2006, the Space Agency moved to revitalize the base by starting a venture with Ukraine's government, which would supply its proven Cyclone rocket. The binational company, Alcântara Cyclone Space, would offer services for commercial launches, planners said. The company planned a 12,000-acre expansion of the Alcântara base that would include a shopping center, staff living quarters, university classrooms and research laboratories. In an interview, Volodymyr Lakomov, Ukraine's ambassador to Brazil, said he thought the arrival of the "industry of the 21st century" would remake the peninsula for the better.
But Mamuna residents say they simply want to preserve a lifestyle rooted in the 19th century. The villagers confronted the Alcântara Cyclone work crew this year after it cut a 15-foot-wide road and dug holes in a palm forest where Mamuna residents say they traditionally gathered fruit, according to the public prosecutor's petition for an injunction against the project, filed in May. The suit also cited an anthropological study asserting that workmen had disturbed Mamuna's "rich immaterial patrimony" -- that is, the encantados, or nature spirits.
Roberto Amaral, director general of Alcântara Cyclone, says the crew never set foot on Mamuna's land and that the dispute is a "false conflict." He says tensions are being stirred up by nongovernmental groups, some of whom, he suggests, may be doing the bidding of wealthy nations that don't want Brazil to advance as a space power.
The Brazilian judge sided with Mamuna, however. Alcântara Cyclone says the expansion is off for now, but it will try launching a Ukrainian rocket from the existing base in 2010.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122351030853317377.html
אינדקס
ברזיל חדשה את תוכנית החלל שלה
Alcantara Launch Center
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centro_de_Lan%C3%A7amento_de_Alc%C3%A2ntara
