Today Carajás has good roads, a modern airport and neatly planned towns where miners and technicians live, and is entirely unlike the rest of Amazônia. There are no villages strung out along the roads, no roadside vendors, no bars or cheap hotels and no bus stations. The explanation is that no one without a permit may enter: along the roads are police checkpoints, and outside them huddle the familiar shantytowns filled with people hoping for work within the officially declared Mineral Province of Carajás. Carajás itself is effectively a no-go zone: supplied by air, sealed off by road, with a permanent cheap labour pool to be admitted as needed and then expelled. Within the region, the massive privatized mining company CVRD (Companhia do Vale do Rio Doce) is in complete control. In the past, as a state-owned civil body, it could and did call upon military and police support whenever it needed it. Now a privately owned concern, there are even fewer controls on its activities.

The scale of it all is hard to comprehend: apart from the sophisticated open-cast mining operation itself, extracting iron, manganese, bauxite, copper and gold, a completely new network of power generation, transport and processing plants has been created, with a rail line to the coast connecting with new port facilities and aluminium factories, and an enormous hydroelectric scheme at nearby Tucurui. The original plan was for a total investment of 62 billion dollars – a substantial proportion of Brazil’s current foreign debt. Under military rule construction targets were met, but at an enormous environmental and political cost.

Communities living in the path of the development were moved (usually without compensation) or ignored. The rail line, for example, cuts through the Gaviões Indian reserve – a problem which was solved by simply getting dispensation from FUNAI to build there – and some 22,000 people were moved from their homes, without compensation, to allow the construction of the Alcoa aluminium plant at São Luís. Resentment in São Luís is fuelled by the plant’s thirst for water and electricity: power to the plant comes from lines direct from Tucurui, which stop at the factory, keeping it brightly lit even when the city is suffering one of its frequent power cuts.

More recently, attention has switched to the sem terras, the landless rural workers who face eviction from a number of fazendas in the province to make way for large-scale mining and agricultural projects. Their plight hit the headlines in April 1996, when 1200 protestors blockaded the PA-150 highway near Eldorado do Carajás, some 100km south of Marabá, in protest against legal moves to expel them from a local fazenda. After two days of protest, military police responded to the stones and chants of the sem terras with a two-hour volley from automatic weapons, killing 19 protestors (including 2 babies), and wounding 69 others. The massacre brought a wave of international outcry, and bolstered the cause of the Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (MST), yet the trial of those responsible for the massacre will probably end only in the year 2010. A small memorial museum, a red road sign and 19 wooden crosses mark the site of the massacre, 9km north of Eldorado.

Meanwhile, in the serra itself the lands of several thousand Indians, and a huge chunk of rainforest, are being transformed into a giant industrial park. Hundreds of Indians have already died, and others are now suffering as a result of disease, pollution, deforestation and land invasions on the fringe of the project, while landless settlers moving up from Marabá are also laying claim to their lands and destroying brazil-nut groves vital to the local economy. In the Xikrin Indian reserve, which lies close to the central mines, garimpeiros who have managed to penetrate the cordon have polluted local rivers with mercury, used to separate out gold after panning.

For more regional information on the Southern Pará, go to:

• Marabá
• Tucurui