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By Joshua Partlow, Published Tues. October 14, 2008
Porto Velho, Brazil – It is quiet here on the wrong side of progress. Hot wind blows dust across the dry bluffs. The brown river runs wide and placid.
In his painted wooden skiff, Francisco Evangelista de Abreu, a fisherman, motors up-current. Two river dolphins crest and submerge. His mind is elsewhere. The dam is coming.
"I don't know what's going to happen," he said. "I don't have any experience outside of this."
The task he and his neighbors are undertaking is to re-imagine their lives. They cannot stop the dam now. Once the waters rise, Jose da Silva Machado, 45, will no longer ferry schoolchildren across the river, nor fish in its rapids, nor live on its banks. Leonel Pereira de Souza, 61, insisted that his vegetable farm, where he was born, raised his children and grandchildren, is not for sale. Period. Yet he knows that conviction will dissolve in the flood.
"We are peasants. We live off the soil," he said. "They are offering houses in the village. There is no place to plant or fish."
Construction began late last month on one of two massive hydroelectric dams that are to span the Madeira River, a main tributary of the Amazon River and a major waterway that runs from the Andes across the rain forests of South America.
For the Brazilian government, this is prudent preparation, more than six years in planning, for a burgeoning economy's appetite for electricity. The two dams, the $5 billion Santo Antonio and the planned Jirau dam, will eventually produce 6,450 megawatts of electricity, according to the state electric company participating in the project.
"We don't have any problems now. By the year 2012, considering the growth, the economic growth, we will need more energy, and this dam was made exactly to supply this future demand," said Marcio Porto, director of construction at Furnas Centrais Eléctricas, the state company.
But the prospect of damming the Madeira has been widely criticized by social and environmental groups for its potential damage to the environment, river residents and nearby indigenous tribes. The Brazilian company working with Furnas on the Santo Antonio dam, Odebrecht, was recently expelled from Ecuador by the government for problems with a dam built there, which has raised further concern among critics of the projects in Brazil...............
Read the rest of and orignal story: Here
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