Drought Leaves Amazon Populations in Brazil Isolated Without Water, Food and Medicine
Written by Newsroom
Sunday, 16 October 2005
The drought in the Amazon basin which has limited navigation in many tributaries leaving thousands of people short of food, water and medicine has began moving east reported Brazilian authorities.
Although some improvement has been recorded in the west of Brazil as water has began to raise again, particularly in areas close to Colombia, extremely low levels in the port of Santarém, 2,500 kilometers to the north of São Paulo, have grounded vessels in sand banks, said the local port authority.
"Water has gone down 30 centimeters in the last three days and now stands two long meters below normal. With less than twenty meters and sand banks we're having growing problems with shipping," said Captain Gerivaldo Rodrigues Tosta.
"This is very serious because rivers are our highways, our arteries, the only way we can get food, medicine, supplies to thousands of people," added Captain Rodrigues Tosta.
Besides many people along the rivers live on fishing and in the west of the basin, some tributaries have dried up or have become pools of mud.
An estimated 30.000 people are suffering the lack of food and transport, and a fifth of the 1.3 million cattle herd in Amazon state have died, reported the Brazilian news agency Globo.
Amazon state authorities have began delivering food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies by helicopter, but the more distant villages will have to wait until the weekend, underlined O Globo newspaper.
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area.
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy.
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil.
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms.
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis.
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking.
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse.
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose.
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj).
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
I would like to help feed somes of the Babies.
My church is Just God Ministries Inc.