It took decades of study and eleven years of work to build Belo Monte, the fourth largest dam in the world in the Amazon rainforest. However, on Wednesday, November 27, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro dispatched his inauguration in a few minutes and in silence. It is difficult to plait the praises of an achievement that does not fulfill any of its promises and that Felicio Pontes, the regional prosecutor of the Republic, in charge of Belo Monte, describes today as "A monument to waste and madness".
The dam, which is locally called "Belo Monstro", is indeed a financial chasm estimated at 10 billion euros and financed more than 80% by the public money. Expected to produce 11,000 megawatts (MW) of power with an eighteenth turbine commissioned this week, it has not, to date, produced more than 4,571 megawatts per year since 2016. A poor result that the dealer, Norte Energia, eventually acknowledged, despite the repeated denials of his communication team.
This would indeed be the reason for the dozens of scientific and technical studies that warn for years of the non-profitability of the mastodon. The original project of Belo Monte in the 70's was different: it included six dams flooding 20,000 km2 land to produce 11,000 MW of electricity. It was against this site that the Indian leader Raoni had risen, helped abroad by the singer Sting.
Pots of wine
"The huge surprise was to see President Lula resume a project of the dictatorship in 2010 and sell it to us as a good thing"says Sheila Jakarepi, one of the opponents of the dam with her people, the Juruna. For this second project, the leftist government had taken care to spare Indian territories. The flood is "limited" to 500 km2 with a single dam, but the planned capacity remains of 11,000 MW. " A lie "Philip Fearnside, a researcher at the National Institute for Research on the Amazon (INPA) in Manaus, says: "Belo Monte will never produce this energy and if it succeeds, it will be with other tanks installed in the future. " Experts have long known that the dam will be almost dry for at least four months of the dry season, when the flow of the Xingu River is significantly reduced: "Only a turbine works in this season and it will get worse with climate change"says Fearnside, who is also an expert on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"I have always alerted the government to the work of experts who all said that this dam was not profitable, adds prosecutor Felicio Pontes. Their stubbornness was incomprehensible. Today we know that there was a pattern of corruption with this dam. This may be the reason for this madness. " As part of the "Lava Jato" survey, the construction companies that built Belo Monte, recognized in 2017 that they paid 1% of the cost of the structure in bribes. A very late admission, when the dam was already in operation. The public prosecutor's office almost stopped the work by filing twenty-four legal actions. In 90% of cases, the judges agreed with the parquet floor, "But the concessionaire has systematically made a provision, dating from the military dictatorship, and suspending a court decision if it is contrary to development and the national interest"explains Mr. Pontes.
Altamira, among the most violent cities in Brazil
The legal battles continue to force the concessionaire to limit the socio-economic consequences set out in the impact study. But the dam has had worse effects than expected: 40,000 people have been displaced; unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, suicide … all indicators are rising, and in particular that of violence. Altamira has been, for six years and until 2017, the most violent city in Brazil and is still one of the five most violent municipalities in the country. Since 2013, the city also held the sad record of deforestation in the Amazon, and this summer it was very affected by forest fires. For the federal police, there is no direct link with the dam, but the region is experiencing heavy land speculation.
After Belo Monte, here is Belo Sun, an equally attractive name for an open-air gold mine that would be the largest in Brazil. A mine that will be well fed by the dam. Belo Sun Mining Corp., part of the Canadian financial group Forbes & Manhattan, hopes to mine 60 tonnes of gold in 12 years on 346 hectares. In 2017, the court denied him the operating permit for not consulting the indigenous people. But Bolsonaro has promised to open mining in Indian territories and a bill will soon be presented in this direction. It will no longer be necessary to consult with Indians before exploiting their territory, as the Constitution still requires.
