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BRAZIL: Bishop on Hunger Strike to the Death Against River Diversion

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 4 2005 (IPS) - If the Brazilian bishop who has declared a hunger strike dies, his burial will also spell “the burial of the Lula administration,” predicted a leader of the movement opposed to the diversion of water from the Sao Francisco River to the country’s semiarid northeast.

Catholic Bishop Luiz Flavio Cappio in Barra, a small city in the northeastern state of Bahía, began a fast “to the death” on Sept. 26 to protest the government’s plan to divert part of the Sao Francisco, which is also known as the “river of national integration” because it crisscrosses the country.

The same “shovelful of lime thrown on Cappio’s grave would bury” the leftist government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, “which is already in intensive care” as a result of the ongoing political corruption scandal, Tomas Balduino, an 82-year-old retired bishop who heads the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission, told IPS.

Balduino and church leaders from several parts of Brazil took part Tuesday in a demonstration of support for Cappio in Cabrobó, a city on the banks of the Sao Francisco River where the flow is to be diverted, and where the bishop is fasting in a chapel.

The organisers of the demonstration, which included mass offered by the bishop, somewhat weakened after eight days of fasting, estimated that 5,000 people showed up, twice the number that had been expected. The demonstrators included 400 indigenous people from ethnic groups that fear the effects of the project, who held their own religious ceremony, called the toré.

Demonstrations expressing solidarity with the movement and protesting the plan to divert part of the flow of the river were also held Tuesday in Brasilia, the federal capital, several state capitals, and cities in the Sao Francisco basin, drawing several hundred people in most cases.

President Lula wrote a letter to Cappio, suggesting talks to discuss the project. But the bishop responded that he would only call off his hunger strike if the whole idea is cancelled. He also said the president would be responsible for his death if he dies “to save the life of the river.”

The resistance to the plan that the government describes as “the integration of the river basins of the northeast” is based on social and environmental reasons and technical, economic and political arguments. The movement involves environmentalists, church groups, trade unions, and local government authorities in the states that the river runs through.

According to the critics, the project, which is being pushed forward by the Ministry of National Integration, will only benefit those who are traditionally favoured by these megaprojects – construction companies, large landholders, and rich elites – and will be marred by the corruption that often accompanies such undertakings.

But President Lula, who was born in the impoverished northeast, where he lived until his extremely poor family moved to Sao Paulo, says the project is humanitarian in nature, and will bring water to 12 million people in the semiarid region – including many people who have to walk kilometres every day to haul home what is often dirty water.

The water to be diverted is equivalent to one percent of the flow of the Sao Francisco River. The Ministry of National Integration says that would not affect the communities along the river, while it would benefit many other communities by improving the management of other river basins in the northeast that dry up in the dry season.

The project represents “a divide between the poor and the economic elites,” said Balduino, who added that “Lula now has a chance to listen to the people.”

The water that is diverted will not reach the poor, and the investment would be put to better use in “popular projects” that help people coexist with the drought conditions in the northeast, he maintained.

He was referring to efforts involving the construction of rainwater collection tanks in poor rural homes, small underground dams that prevent evaporation and other social technologies adapted to local conditions that have already proven to be effective in improving lives in the northeast, Brazil’s poorest region, social activists argue.

ASA, an umbrella group that links some 750 non-governmental organisations, trade unions, cooperatives and church groups, now has government support for its efforts to help impoverished families in the northeast build rainwater cisterns.

So far more than 100,000 tanks have been built, but the shortage of funds makes the goal of one million cisterns by 2008 look unlikely to be met.

Before water is removed from the Sao Francisco, the river should be cleaned up by installing basic sewerage and garbage disposal systems in cities that dump trash and sewage into the river, said Balduino. He added that the effort would also have to include efforts to save those tributary rivers that are not among “the 1,500 that are already dead.”

The diversion of water is “absurd” from both a technical and economic point of view, said Apolo Heringer Lisboa, an environmentalist who heads a project to clean up the das Velhas River, an important tributary of the Sao Francisco.

Lisboa told IPS that the project would hurt a river that is already in bad shape and which supplies many cities and hydropower plants and is a major source of irrigation for agriculture.

He also said the two billion dollar cost of the project is an underestimate, and that it is likely to expand fourfold, “as usually occurs with megaprojects in Brazil, which are plagued by corruption and whose costs are adjusted upwards as they progress.”

By contrast, with just one-twentieth of the investment, one million rainwater collection tanks could be built, the activist pointed out.

Work on the project can begin as soon as a permit is issued by the Brazilian Environment Institute, which is expected to happen next week.

But with Bishop Cappio’s “Gandhi-like” hunger strike, the movement against the river diversion, which previously involved mainly activists, is winning broad support, said Lisboa, who predicted that the project will be “Lula’s Iraq.”