Amazon: Greenpeace Logging Activist Receives Death Threat
Copyright 2001 Environment and Energy Publishing, LLC Greenwire
October 11, 2001
By April Reese, Greenwire staff writer
A Greenpeace activist who has spoken out against illegal logging of mahogany on indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon has received a death threat, according to the group.
Paulo Adario, coordinator of Greenpeace's Amazon campaign, received a telephone call last week at his home in Manaus, Brazil, from an unidentified person who threatened to kill him, the group says.
Adario believes the threat is linked to his work to stop illegal logging in the region. Two weeks ago, Greenpeace presented Brazilian public prosecutors with satellite images and aerial photos it says is evidence of large-scale illegal logging operations in remote areas of the Amazon belonging to the Kayopo Indians. A government-imposed moratorium on mahogany logging has been in place since 1996, but Greenpeace and other environmental and indigenous groups suspect that logging companies that hold long-standing legal permits are using them to mask illegal activity. "It is clear that our recent work exposing illegal logging of mahogany in the Amazon is at the base of this threat," said Adario, who has moved to another part of the country. "In Brazil it is well known that most of the mahogany trade is controlled by criminals, who for too long have been allowed to operate with impunity."
Although the amount of mahogany taken illegally is unknown, the Brazilian government estimates that at least 80 percent of all logging in the Amazon is illegal.
The group's Scott Paul, who campaigns on logging issues from Greenpeace's Washington, D.C., offices and has worked in Brazil, says the group has received death threats before, but that most turn out to be a hoax. The group fears this one is real. "Greenpeace is naming names, and now we have a very serious death threat against us," he said. Adario and his family have fled to another part of the country, he added.
Brazil's minister of the environment, Jose Sarney Filho, issued a statement yesterday expressing concern over the threat. "I would like to say that I take the death threat made to the Greenpeace member as if it was directed to me .... They have all my support in assuring the physical safety of the Greenpeace campaigner," he said.
Although the caller has not been identified, Paul suggests the threat may have come from illegal logging barons angered by the group's recent efforts to halt unlawful mahogany operations in a remote area of the Amazon. Last month, the group presented satellite images and other evidence of illegal mahogany logging in Kapayo indigenous lands to government officials. "They've been doing this for a long time, and nobody has really messed with them," said Paul, suggesting that the threat against Adario is an unfortunate but clear indication that the group's ramped up efforts to shine a spotlight on illegal logging in the Amazon are having some success.
Greenpeace Executive Director John Passacantado says the death threat will not stop the group's work in the region. "We will do everything in our power to protect our people in the Amazon, but we will not be intimidated into stopping our work," he said. "We will not be silenced."
The death threat against Adario follows the assassination of another environmental activist working in the region. Ademir Alfeu Federicci, the coordinator of the Movement for the Development of the Transamazon and Xingu Region and a leading opponent of illegal logging and dam construction in the Amazon, was killed in his home on August 25th, according to Greenpeace.
Although human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have documented human rights violations in Brazil, the groups do not keep a separate tally of environment-related abuses in Brazil or elsewhere. But Paul suspects the killing of Federicci and the death threat against Paulo may be emblematic of a larger trend of violence against environmental and social justice advocates in the region.
"Assassinations are not uncommon in the Amazon," Paul says. "The last one anyone's ever heard of here [in the United States] is Chico Mendez a decade ago, but they still go on."