Brazil: might is right! | France 5 | Les Routes de l'Impossible

In the state of PARA, in Brazil, a convoy of tanker-trucks loaded with fuel, drives into the Amazonian forest along a broken-down highway that was illegally plowed by bulldozers! The aim of these truckers, greedy for easy profits, is to supply diesel to the gold diggers who are destroying one of the most precious forests in the world with their high power hoses and their diesel engines. Just a few miles away, Cecilio and his family, KAYAPO Indians, are driven from their homes. Their ancestral territory is being flooded by the vast artificial lake (now being filled) for the gigantic BELLO MONTE dam. Disoriented, forced within a few days to become “homeless people”, the KAYAPO family wanders the highways in search of some hypothetical shelter. These two crisscrossing journeys paint the unsentimental portrait of one of the most threatened regions in the world. Revealed by satellite observation, the illegal roads of Amazonia (nearly 120,000 miles) provide access to the most isolated tracts of the forest and are not recorded on any map. The states of Mato Grosso, Para and Rondonia contain 90% of all the illegal roads in Amazonia. The invasion is a rapid one: researchers estimate that this illegal road network is expanding by around 1200 miles per year. Along these unsupervised roads, thousands of Brazilian colonizers, often poor and prepared to do anything, penetrate the jungle in search of easy riches. Their destructive behavior knows only one law: might is right; and one aim: a fast buck. Along these gaping holes, farmers, large landowners and every sort of smuggler also drive into the forest and loot it under the pretext of development. Precious woods and gold are what lures their greed. Nothing stops them, even the most difficult of obstacles. After a few years, when the colonizers have settled in huge numbers, the Brazilian State legalizes the land and paves the main roads. However, the lands that are cleared for pasture soon become exhausted and ten or twenty years later they are deserts. So, every year, the colonizers and the smugglers get back on their bulldozers to plow other illegal roads. They invade more land, which they burn by millions of acres to provide pasture for their herds. And every second Amazonia’s agony increases.