Interviewed by David Barsamian
KGNU radio, Boulder, Colorado, December 7, 1989
Alexander Cockburn is a columnist for The Nation and The Wall Street
Journal. He is the author of Corruptions of Empire. His latest book, co-
authored with Susanna Hecht, is The Fate of the Forest: Developers,
Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon.
Could we start with the geographic and demographic parameters of the Amazon?
Yes, they are important. Many people who have made a distressing mess of
things in the Amazon haven't looked at them. The principal and basic point
about the Amazon and tropical rain forest is that it's on very poor soil. In
the nineteenth century many North Americans believed that the incredibly
rich soils of the Amazon would produce four crops a year and Amazonia would
be the breadbasket of the Americas. Nothing could be further from the case.
Almost all, although not all the soils of the Amazon, of course, about 7%
are pretty good, and you've got a funnel of river coming down towards the
Andes and gradually narrowing as you get towards _____. Now the extent of
this forest, I think many people, even though they know it's large, don't
quite realize exactly how large it is. We're looking at a distance, if
you're going to fly across Amazonia, as though you were flying from the
Atlantic coast to the California Sierras. We're looking at an immense area
of tropical rain forest of various sorts. The rain forest is fairly varied.
In the northwestern Amazon you've got particularly poor soils, and it varies
as you go around.
I'd like you to talk about the notion of ``vast and open spaces'' and how
that mixes with the imagination of the West, as it were, vast open spaces
being the repository of dreams.
It's vary interesting that the Amazon - and there are other tropical rain
forest areas in the world, like the Congo Basin or the tropical rain forest
of southeast Asia - but it's the Amazonian rain forest that really has
______ people's imaginations down the centuries. There are really two
contrasting sets of vision that you'll find. There are more than that, but
two basic ones. One is that here is the image, this is where nature really
can be found, the first chapter of Genesis or as a Brazilian radical put it,
the last unfinished chapter of Genesis, on the one hand. The Amazon is a
museum, an enormous museum of species which have disappeared elsewhere. The
other one is the Amazon is an enormous space where you can make a fortune,
that you can go in and seize a fortune if you're cunning and strong enough,
if you've got enough capital, or if you're desperate enough - that you can
grab a fortune. The image of Genesis of paralleled in the other by the myth
of Eldorado, the Gold King, in an area so rich that the king was painted
with gold every day. That's the image that's fired men's minds.
In these equations, nature is depoliticized?
Yes, basically. In the first one it's nature, pre-man. Now, oddly enough,
you have this man _____ writing The Death of Nature, that finally man has
overwhelmed nature. Man was overwhelming nature a very long time ago. Karl
Marx, actually, a hundred years ago, said that the nature that preceded man
no longer exists anywhere. Of course you didn't have it serialized in the
New Yorker, or the ________________________________, The two sides of the
equation - the attack on the Amazon and the preserving of the Amazon - of
course produce political visions. The first one, if you think it's a museum,
you'll tend to say, ``How do we save the Amazon?'' We save it with a park,
we make it a park, like they make national parks in the States. Of course,
if you look at the first national park in North America, which was Yosemite,
Moore set it up, and one of the things they did was boot out the Indians,
the ____ Indians. They de-parked them because they weren't ``park-like.'' In
parks in the Amazon - very often environmental groups up here of a certain
kind will look at the Amazon and say, ``Well, let's not have those messy
Indians, those rubber-tappers, those settlers who will only pillage and
destroy.'' That's a very political vision.
On the other hand, of course, the grabbing of fortune from the Amazon is
very directly political because those people trying to extort wealth from
the Amazon were killing indigenous peoples from the word ``go.''
It's a bit like Conrad in Heart of Darkness, where the indigenous people
are, of course, invisible. I think the only word you hear from them is
``Mr. Kurtz, he dead.''
That's right. This whole idea that the Indians couldn't speak for
themselves. Portuguese explorers went down in 1550 and the riverbanks were
lined with Indian villagers, Indians shipping on the water. Then, of course,
you had what they called a ``demographic collapse,'' meaning that the
Indians got exterminated, they died of disease. As late as 10 years ago
people who wanted land were sending people infected with influenza into
Indian tribal areas just to give the people flu, which is viral warfare.
They would got down the banks, they'd see these _____, then these Indians
would die, now people who go down see these empty green banks and they see
things the way it always was. That's nature. Now you're looking at real live
- or real dead - nature, very dead nature because the Indians have gone. But
these Indians had manipulated the forest. People think of forest forever.
The forest has been manipulated by the ____ over areas the size of France,
they've got agroforestry, once you see that, once you see that the forest
was really a part of, partly derives from human culture, then you see a very
different way of looking at what the future of the Amazon might be.
The ___ is one of the major tribes on the Amazon?
Yes, the ____ on the ____ down south from the mouth of the Amazon. They're a
particularly politically active tribe.
There's an apparatus for knowing the unknown, in the case the Amazon. Edward
Said has suggested that such academic disciplines as anthropology,
sociology, archaeology and so on are rooted in imperialism.
That's a very good point, about anthropology, obviously, most of all in the
Amazon. It's very interesting. In the book that I did with Susanna Hecht, at
the back, there's some interesting reflections by both an Indian, _____, who
is the head of ______, one of the Indian organizations, about
anthropologists. I remember him talking. It was very funny the way he was
discussing how these anthropologists would come in and have ``their'' tribe.
They'd have all these questions. Of course, if an anthropologist went into a
middle-class area in the United States - Lexington, Massachusetts - and
started probing and inquiring and asking about the kinship and mating
practices of the inhabitants of Lexington, they'd get booted out and the
police would be called. Anthropologist go to people who can't fight back and
they then ask them. ______ was saying, these Indians were laughing, saying,
``We have an anthropologist in our tribe and we charge him a buck a
question.'' Then they also laugh, because they'd make up a lot of the
answers, preposterous answers. More seriously, they resented bitterly an
anthropologist coming in. Getting a doctorate out of the tribe and never
putting anything back in. _______, an anthropologist, eventually saw this
and founded Cultural Survival, I think a good organization, as a way of
trying to put something back in. _____, who works with the ______, again in
this book, at the back, he has an excellent statement about what he sees as
the moral duties of an anthropologist. He attacks the so-called
``objectivity'' of anthropology and science. He says you must be scientific,
but that doesn't preclude your acting in solidarity with the people that
you're among.
Could you trace the destruction of the forest?
Just to give one more point on imperialism: Often anthropologist did work
hand-in-glove with construction companies, to say where the Indian tribe
was, they were really the fifth column working from within. I was reading
the directions, it was absolutely chilling, the other day for the Royal
Geographic Society, what to do if you're an explorer and you meet up with a
third-world tribe. It said, very calmly, at the end, make your observations
so you can have some more detail when you make you report to the Ministry of
the Interior. Absolutely. There is all was.
The destruction of the forest really substantially began a near generation
ago. If you had flown over the Amazon thirty or forty years ago, relatively
speaking, of course there were areas that had been deforested for
settlements and larger towns like ___ and ___, but really pretty much the
same. It's really happened - this is the important thing to look at, why did
it happen over the last 25 years. Now a prudent estimate would be in the
Brazilian Amazon that there's about 10% gone from 100 years ago.The
Brazilian government says 5%, there are estimates of up to 18% or 20%, or
50%. I think it's a little premature to say that, unfortunately a little
premature, but about 10% over the last generation, and faster than in the
Columbian Amazon or the Peruvian Amazon. But you have to ask yourself why is
it specific to the Brazilian Amazon.
Precisely leading into this question, the forces propelling the destruction
of the Amazon are not irrational. They are processes with a logic and
trajectory deeply imbedded in the region's political and economic history.
Focusing on Brazil, what is imbedded in Brazil's political and economic
history that has propelled the destruction of the forest?
For instance, the coup, the ____ coup of 1964. Up here, in the first world,
in North America and Europe, you'll hear lots of other explanations, which
people love. In a sense, they're rather imperially derived, that we've done
it, and we can save it. The hamburger connection, which is not true, we're
not eating beefburgers from the Amazon. The Amazon imports beef. It's true a
little bit about Central America, by the way. Other reasons, it's all the
multinationals. There's not much multinational exploitation of the Amazon
anyway. But the real force was the general's coup of 1964, which was
approved and encouraged by the United States, I should add. The generals had
a geostrategic vision. The Brazilian government that took over the 1964 was
a cut above a brief flare-up of bloodletting, some sort of ten-minute thugs.
These were people who had a very far-reaching vision of what they wanted
Brazil to be. They wanted to impose national security on the Amazon. They
were worried. The United States, by the way, had tried to seize a bit of the
Amazon with Bolivia back in 1898, very few people remember. Nearly did it,
forming a joint stock company to run the riches rubber stretches of the
world at that time. They wanted to secure the Amazon, to make sure they
would be no insurgency there, this is not _____ Cuba, and above all, they
wanted to develop it. It's over half the national territory. As General ____
put it, who was the real architect of a lot of this, he said, we want to
inundate the Amazon with civilization. The civilization they had in mind
were large-scale entrepreneurs and businessmen, big business from the South.
They offered them tremendous inducements to go in: tax breaks, land handouts
of up to one million acres, infrastructure, electrical power, the promise of
dams, the rest of it. That stimulated a rush to the Amazon in the late 1960s
and early 1970s by big business. It's very important to realize that this is
big business, it's not your small settler, your peasant pyromaniac who's
normally blamed for all of this. Settlers have gone in and done some
deforestation. No doubt about it. But if you fly over the Amazon and look at
the large areas of deforestation, it's mostly large-scale so-called
``ranching,'' although ranching with cattle is not really the point. What
the general with this plan unleashed was a pattern of speculative land
acquisition. This was public land, this vast area, mostly. Even the rubber
barons didn't say they owned the land. They owned rights to exploit the
rubber trees on it. So when you get an enclosure of public land into
private, you get an incredible amount of violence, a lot of land fraud, a
lot of competing titles, you and I both rush for the same stretch. We've
both got friends in the government, we both want that million acres. We both
produce our bogus titles and try to murder some Indians on the other end of
it. We show, you or me, that we've got it, or I've got it or you've got it.
We burn off the trees. Then it's your specific piece of ``pasture,'' with a
great sign saying ``Barsamian's'' written on it, or ``____ Barsamian.'' And
you've got it. And now you're open to get government subsidy. You can
exploit its subsurface mineral rights. You can put a few cows on it and call
yourself a rancher. Your friend in government will maybe build a road so the
land will double [in value]. Now you've got inflation, which is reducing the
value of your money in the bank, you've got to put your money somewhere so
it's sheltered in the land. Someone once asked me, because I write about
politics, say, ``Why the Amazon?'' I say, the Amazon is very like looking at
real estate development in California in that sense. That's how the
speculative destructive cycle began.
General _____, the leader of the Amazonian coup in 1964, said ``the
Amazonian occupation will proceed as if we are waging a strategically
conducted war.'' That strikes me quite reminiscent of the internal
imperialism here in North America. An American general could have said that
in the 1820s or 1830s about the West.
Absolutely. Like all generals, they say it's going to be strategically
conducted, but as Klausewitz famously said, it's kind of a cliche, but it's
the ``fog of war.'' In the Amazon's case the fog of war was a tremendous
inrush of forces which the generals couldn't particularly control, gold
miners, people from the South, these small settlers from the South, a lot of
environmental organizations are rather Malthusian, they think it's all
population pressure, if we could only get populations down all will be well,
which I don't agree with at all, I don't agree with a Malthusian approach.
These were people driven off large-scale mechanized estates, soybean farms
in the South. They came into the Amazon. You've got this desperate land
hunger in Brazil because there's no land reform. One of the reasons the
generals drove out ____, with U.S. encouragement, was because he was
proposing land reform. They themselves in the end had to produce a measure
of land reform because the pressure was so great. Then therefore you've got
this torrent of gold miners, settlers, people rushing in.
What have been the roles of the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank in terms of loans to Brazil?
Destructive, as one might expect. The World Bank and the Inter-American
Development Bank, particularly, have financed destructive projects in the
Amazon, roads which have been destructive. I'm not particularly opposed to
roads, but roads which were havens of speculation, which were driven through
indigenous lands, bringing settlers in their wake which would be dividing
literally a particular tribe. Therefore the settlers and the Indians would
be constantly at odds. As ______, the Indian, said, there were a lot more
Indians in the Amazon than people supposed. When they drove a road, every
time a bulldozer entered a new little patch an Indian would have to jump out
of the way.
The Bank did finance these things. One of the areas of intervention
organized by Indians down there, by environmental organizations like EDF,
Environmental Defense Fund, or World Wildlife, up here, were pressuring
Congress to pressure the banks not to do some of these destructive roads,
and they had a measure of success. Even in the World Bank there are some
very good environmentalists. Now the INF: their main duty, of course, is to
act as the banker's cop. They've been just doing INF-like strategies in
Brazil as a whole, curbing public spending, which means kids die in
hospitals because there's no money for drugs, that's standard INF procedure.
These financial institutions are agencies of the North, of the first world.
Certainly, in 1988 for example, Francois Mitterand, the President of France,
had made a rather extraordinary suggestion about what to do with some of
these environmentally sensitive areas.
You mean the internationalization scheme. Yes, there have been various calls
in the North by U.S. politicians and by northern politicians for
internationalization of the Amazon. I think it's just a non-starter. Brazil
is a very large place, it's not a weak little country, and even a weak
little country would be able to object. It's a sovereign territory, the
eighth largest economy in the world, and the idea that the Brazilian
government and the Brazilian politician or military man is ever going to
internationalize some of their territory is nonsense, it's just a non-
starter, it's a waste of time to talk about it.
You've noted in your book, The Fate of the Forest, that since 1985 some
1,000 union leaders, peasants, workers have been murdered in the Amazon. The
most well-known victim is Chico Mendez. Time magazine has called him the
``world's most celebrated environmental martyr.'' In your book you describe
him as an ``extremely radical political militant.''
Which is the truth. This is an interesting point about how people up here
look at the Amazon. Here Chico Mendez is described by Time in these glowing
terms and he was a great environmentalist, but what does he mean? Does it
mean he was the St. Francis of the forest, or does it mean that this guy,
who was extremely militant, one of the last things he scribbled on a piece
of paper, which we quote in the book, was a note to the children of the
world: ``I dream of world revolution by the year 2020.'' I don't think
you'll see that printed up in Time magazine with ``The World's Greatest
Environmentalist'' printed underneath it. He was a militant. The rubber
tappers really began organizing as militant organized labor. They were
trying to get workers' rights: the right not to get murdered by the goons of
either the rubber barons or the land barons. The rubber barons were leaving
by the end of the 1970s, but the land barons were coming in to seize the
land, to exploit it. The right to be able to sell that product, the rubber,
which they collected at a decent price. The right to have control over their
asset, which was the trees. If you look at the back of this book at the
manifesto which they, the rubber tappers, drew up last March at the forest
people's conference with indigenous peoples - who had, by the way, this was
in itself tremendous because they had been hardened enemies for decades,
because rubber tappers and Indians had been battling it out for resources.
It's a socialist manifesto. I don't think Time magazine would - well,
they're dumb enough not to see what it says, but they wouldn't print it with
any great joy. When you get to say what is environmentalism in the Amazon,
you're looking at saving species, the rubber tappers say, ``Sure. I want to
save species. I want the forest to stand.'' In this case the equation is a
job is a tree for a rubber trapper, or for an Indian, my home is a forest.
For the rubber tapper my home is a forest. The environment has a politics
right away. This is the central point which many people don't realize.
I wonder if you're not promoting a kind of romantic vision about Indians and
the rubber tappers as somehow being more sensitive to nature. Is there
evidence to show that they have any more sensitivity to the forest than land
developers?
Yes, there is. If you go to an Indian stretch, the sensitivity is there.
First of all, they've been there for thousands of years or over a thousand
years and the forest is still there. There's a sensitivity which you can
open up your eyes and just look at. Another sensitivity is their situation.
The rubber tapper is in the forest; the forest sustains him and his family.
He's more sensitive than - I remember driving down a road in the Amazon and
in fairly short order you could see a disaster, a good little farm which had
been ruined by a dam that had raised the water table and flooded the land. A
sensitivity just because if you're sensitive and manage the resource
properly, you're going to survive. If you're insensitive ______ you could be
an absentee landlord a thousand miles away, saying ``Burn that forest off. I
think I could sell it to a guy who wants to open up a filling station.''
To return to this first world/Third World polarity in relation to the
Amazon, wouldn't it be quite fair for a Brazilian land developer, an
industrialist, to say, ``Look, we want to create wealth from our natural
land, our resources. You've done it in North America, you've pillaged your
land, you've destroyed your rain forest. Why shouldn't we be able to do
it?''
I can appreciate that. I think a Brazilian who watches these U.S.
politicians come running down telling him what to do, thinking, supposing I
went up to Colorado or Oregon or Minnesota and said, ``Stop clearing old-
growth forest,'' or ``Stop clear-cutting.'' How far would they get if they
started buttonholing Senator Mark Hatfield and said, ``Why are you in
cahoots with the lumber companies?'' It's also true to say, why degrade
land. One could say to a Brazilian, ``Yes, you have a right to develop your
resources, but why degrade land, preside over a system of exploitation which
is not yielding a good return and it's not like rational development. I can
appreciate someone saying, ``Look, we want a road. You don't want a road.
It's our territory.'' There are a lot of people out there, and I've met
them, who say, ``Yes, sure, we'd like a road.'' When you always walk along a
muddy path through the rain forest, you cease to be romantic about forest to
the extent that you want to be able to get your little products to market. I
can go with that. What you can reprove is just stupidity. These big degraded
pastures I'm telling you about. You remember when you burn down the forest,
you get a little nutrient flush for a while because all the nutrients are
held in the leaves or the roots, not in the soils. You burn it down and
these things go into the soil, maybe for two or three years, and then
they're leached away by rain. Then you've got degraded soil and it's not
good for much unless you put in very costly amounts of fertilizer. You can't
just stop for five years and say the forest will come back either. It won't.
You've deforested very large areas. These ____, when they do burns, they're
selected. It's careful. It's properly maintained and supervised. But if you
burn off a million acres you're basically creating a desert.
Brazil is a multi-racial society. What dimension does racism play in this
picture?
I think the fundamental racism is the racism against Indians, indigenous
peoples. There were people that had the racist views, these are The Other
that are inferior to ourselves. The massacre of Indians down the centuries,
we're talking a reduction from at least 5 million to 200,000. As I say, by
active extermination, by disease - you name it. There are other forms of
racism, as you rightly say, multi-racial in the extreme in Brazil. The
grammar of racism is fairly complicated because you've got the Portuguese,
the African slaves, the Indians - a lot of Brazilians are
____________________________________. Mixing that level I don't think the
racism is as bad as in other areas, but if you want to look at the central
fact of racism, it's the massacre of the indigenous peoples.
You've made connections between the situation in Central America and the
Amazon. You alluded to it a bit earlier in the interview about land reform.
Could you talk more about that?
It's ______ to me that people think that the forest is other than the
struggles further north in El Salvador. Here's a time when the Jesuits were
murdered, horrifying circumstances, why were they murdered? They were trying
to say to the government, ``You must talk to the FMLN. Negotiations now.''
What's the FMLN about? In very large part it's about land reform, because
the resources of El Salvador are probably more closely held and more
viciously exploited than anywhere else in the Americas. Why was Chico Mendez
murdered in the Amazon? He was murdered because he and his fellow rubber
tappers had won the principle of extractive reserve, of the use right to the
land, against the righteous, and so the righteous killed him. He died
essentially for the same reason. The problem of the rain forest is the
problem of common ownership of resources, exploitation of resources. That's
the situation in El Salvador and throughout much of the Americas. I do see
the fight for the Amazon very much in that context.
How might someone listening to this interview affect the situation in the
Amazon?
Again, if someone came from the Amazon here and said, ``What can I do for
the forest here?'' you'd say, ``Look, you've got a lot of forest in the
Amazon. You've got to build up a movement here which is similarly protecting
resources.'' We're facing the greenhouse effect. The First World adds a lot
more to greenhouse gases than the Third World ever did. You could struggle
on that level. You could form ties with a group, let's say you're in
Rainforest Action or I think one of the interesting left Green outfits that
are beginning to emerge, which I think is a tremendous political development
here. I'm for the red and the green, to put it in brief. You can establish
ties like I mentioned, Cultural Survival, based in Cambridge. You send money
to them for Indians and rubber tappers who really need it, and a lot of
money supposedly raised doesn't really get down there. Cultural Survival
will send them money. They're also trying to develop markets for forest
products. If you believe in a sustained forest, and one that isn't a museum,
you've got to be able to sell stuff out of it, ___ ice cream, Brazil nuts,
____ oil, stock your forest shop now, there's plenty of stuff you can sell
from the forest. But I think above all, see this thing in a political light,
be active for the politics of the environment, and see it in a context of
the Americas. That's the wider vision. Or join the World Bank and work from
within. You could always do that.
You've said when you look at the forest the word you really have to use is
``justice.''
I think that's true: justice towards nature, justice towards people. That's
the way the forest has to be seen and saved.
And what took you, after years of media-bashing and making fun of McNeil-
Lehrer and these other dignitaries on TV and mainstream media, what took you
from that area to the Amazon?
If you go back, I've always been interested in trying to reconcile
environment with politics. I did a book with Jim Ridgeway ten years ago
called Political Ecology, a collection of stuff. If you looked in my deepest
biography, you'll discover that my aunt - she was a gold miner in the Amazon
back in the 1930s - gave me all her handsome Edwardian camping equipment,
which as a kid I used to take camping all the time, so maybe there's some
kind of familiar history there. My mother was active in making language maps
in the ____ rain forest in the Congo. I got together with Susanna Hecht on a
smaller project. Susanna's work is the backbone of this book. For ten years
she's been an agronomist of sorts, she's worked among the _____, she's spent
much of the past ten years in the Amazon. She teaches at UCLA. The science
in the book and the politics, a lot of it comes out of Susanna's decade-long
experience in the Amazon. We got together and saw that we had a rather
similar take on how you should look at the Amazon and this is the book that
resulted.
For information about obtaining cassette copies or transcripts of this or
other programs, please write to:
David Barsamian
1814 Spruce
Boulder, CO 80302