It was midnight at the Charlooe Drinks Bar and business was flagging. Dozens of prostitutes, some barely 12, were hovering outside the main avenue of Castelo dos Sonhos (the Castle of Dreams), an isolated town in the northern state of Para that, until recently, was at the centre of Brazil’s illegal logging trade.
Scantily clad girls signalled nervously at the occasional pick-up truck passing by. The sound of competing jukeboxes from the street’s brothels gave the false impression that business was booming. In reality there was hardly a punter in sight.
Inside, leaning against the bar, its 41-year-old madame puffed her cheeks. ”The city’s finished,” said Marina Ketts, an immigrant from the southern state of Parana. ”The thing that brought money to Castelo was wood. Now that’s all gone.”
During the timber boom, Ketts said, the bar made up to R$2 500 (US$1 140) a week in alcohol sales alone. Now it struggles to bring in R$100. ”It used to be one big whorehouse around here. Today, as you can see, there is nothing.”
The tale of Castelo dos Sonhos’s economic decline is the downside of the Brazilian government’s success in trying to protect the world’s largest rainforest. Until recently, when authorities began clamping down on illegal deforestation in the region, the town was at the centre of a timber boom as lucrative as it was illicit. But the introduction of the national deforestation combat plan in March 2004 brought the industry almost to a halt, leaving thousands of immigrant workers unemployed across the region.
Few question the effects on the region’s ecology. When President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced recently that deforestation in the Amazon rainforest had fallen to its lowest levels since 1991 even the government’s fiercest critics were united in their praise. ”We are trying to repair, in a short period of time, the carelessness that existed for so long,” Lula said, pointing to a 30% drop in deforestation since last year.
Illegal logging has not been completely eradicated. When night falls on Castelo dos Sonhos’s potholed streets lorries laden with wood emerge from what is left of the surrounding forest and head on to the BR-163 highway, a dirt road cut through the Amazon rainforest in the 1970s by the military dictatorship. But it is on a much reduced scale — most of the 30-odd sawmills in Castelo dos Sonhos have stopped production. With no alternative economy and little support from the authorities, such communities are falling apart.
Fourteen kilometres to the north, down another dirt track off the BR-163, is Nova Brasilia, a community of landless peasants who scratch a living from a patch of land clawed from a wealthy owner. Ask them to explain the region’s sudden decline and they respond: ”Dorothy Stang”.
Stang was an American nun, known to some as the Angel of the Rainforest, shot dead on February 12 2005 because of her fight against illegal loggers.
Stang’s death is seen as a watershed by many people. Spurred on by the massive international reaction to the murder, authorities stepped up the fight against Amazon destruction.
On February 18, six days after the killing, Lula’s government ordered the creation of two vast conservation areas in Para and declared a freeze on logging in an area of eight-million hectares around the BR-163, including Castelo dos Sonhos. Almost all of Nova Brasilia’s inhabitants were employed by the loggers and, with the new regulations, they lost their jobs.
”The death of Dorothy was a disaster for us,” said Eugenio Sibulski, (46), an immigrant from Rio Grande do Sul in the south of Brazil, who worked with his son Maicon (18) in a sawmill in nearby Mil, earning R$450 a month, and was sacked after the crackdown. In search of work he moved his family to Castelo dos Sonhos, to no avail.
Unable to pay their monthly rent of R$120, the family squatted on the side of the BR-163 before moving to Nova Brasilia, where they eke out an existence from a barren patch of cleared forest, flanked by field after field of charred tree stumps.
”All of the sawmills shut because suddenly there was monitoring,” said Sibulski, who lost his means of supporting two children and a grandchild virtually overnight.
Immigrants who had benefited from the logging also suddenly found themselves out of pocket. ”If they hadn’t have killed Dorothy maybe we’d still have a piece of land. But the economy has all gone,” said Joao Zemnichaq (58), a lorry driver who says he spent R$12 600 on land near Anapu, where Stang was killed, only to have it confiscated by the government.
The knock-on effects were not unforeseen by Brazilian authorities. In March 2005, as the ban extinguished much of the logging around Castelo dos Sonhos, such concerns were outlined in a white paper promoting plans to pave the BR-163 as a means of bringing development to an isolated and notoriously lawless part of Brazil. The paper outlined the urgent need for ”social inclusion”, in particular job creation, healthcare, education and social services.
Yet in Castelo dos Sonhos and its surrounding area there is little sign of such aid — not for the landless peasants or their children, who are almost all out of school; not for the elderly men who eke out a perilous existence in the area’s goldmines; and least of all for the luckless prostitutes, who act out the same dismal spectacle each night.
Immigrants continue to arrive looking for work. Some don’t stick around, while others find themselves forced into slavery on the region’s farms, earning as little as R$10 a day, or prostituting themselves for a similar price. With seven police, one understaffed health clinic and two state schools, Castelo dos Sonhos, a once wealthy town of 12 000, has been brought to its knees.
With 2am approaching, the Charlooe bar was still without a single customer. ”If these people who won the elections paid a little bit of attention, Castelo wouldn’t be this misery you are seeing,” said Ketts. ”I came here because of the fame this place had. I thought this would be a city of dreams. Now just look around you. There is nothing here.” — Â