Paving the way

Highway BR163, a track running through the Amazon forest, is set to become a proper road. Jan Rocha picks up its trail

Castelo dos Sonhos (castle of dreams), on highway BR163, owes its name to its origin as a wildcat gold prospectors' camp. Today it is a flyblown frontier town, still dreaming of better days when the BR163 becomes a tarmac road. Under pressure from the agribusiness lobby, paving the 1,000km dirt road - which runs north from Mato Grosso, Brazil's major soybean producing state, to the port of Santarem, on the Amazon river - is planned to begin in 2005. The Brazilian government seems to be taking the environmental consequences seriously. President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has set up a committee to examine the impact of paving the road.

At Castelo, the dirt highway is lined with stores, bars and billiard saloons. The night we arrive, a man is stabbed in a drunken brawl at a bar. But the heyday of the Amazon goldrush is over, and many of the ex-prospectors have gone to work in one of Castelo's 52 sawmills. Now it's the trees that provide the wealth, not the gold.

The local rural workers' union leader, Almir Sampaio dos Santos, sits in his office under a large photo of his predecessor, Bartolomeu da Silva. Da Silva was a very popular man in Castelo, but two years ago he was abducted in the main street. The next day his mangled body was found on the BR163. His legs had been broken and his body dragged behind a car. His offence was to denounce the landgrabbers who were evicting smallholders from their land. Since then, several other activists have been killed.

The violence of the landsharks is compounded by the inefficiency of the official land agency, the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (Incra), in distributing plots to small farmers. A list of more than 400 families waiting for land hangs on the union's office wall. Yet there is no shortage. A 100km band of land on either side of the BR163 belongs to the federal government, but it has done nothing to stop large landowners and loggers invading it to clear trees and rear cattle.

Leaving Castelo, the BR163 is just a ribbon of red mud running north through what was once prime Amazon rainforest. On either side of the road, the trees have already been cleared as far as the eye can see. Tall lonely skeletons of giant Brazil nut trees stand out among secondary growth babassu and buriti palms. Humped white cattle graze among the tree stumps. The land is hilly, with few flat areas suitable for growing grains. The only lorries on the road are carrying timber, treetrunks or sawn planks. We trundle carefully over rickety bridges.

It starts to rain. Our Toyota skids and slides over mud as slippery as glass, passing lorries labouring up steep inclines or leaning at crazy angles where they have got trapped in giant ruts of soft mud. One articulated lorry has rolled right down a steep bank into a river. It takes all the driving skills of Mauricio, the leader of our band of government researchers, to keep us on the road.

We have been travelling for two days, but at the height of the five-month rainy season, which is just beginning, the journey can take weeks, as bridges collapse and vehicles get stuck in the mud. Intrepid lorry drivers and bus passengers who decide to risk it often spend up to 20 days sleeping in their vehicles, cooking over fires at the roadside, waiting for a tractor to get through and pull them out.

We stop at a petrol post where a dilapidated bus has parked by the roadside. Under a tree 10 men are gathered hungrily around a selection of cooking pots bubbling over a gas stove. They tell us they come from Minas Gerais, central Brazil, and travel the road for weeks at a time, selling homemade remedies, living and sleeping in their bus. I buy a pot of arnica gel for aches and pains, useful after 12-hour days of bumping in the Toyota.

On the opposite side of the road from a huge sprawling sawmill we notice a small cemetery with a number of fresh, unmarked graves. A man at the sawmill tells us they are the graves of men killed during tree felling, when accidents are common. Many of these anonymous workers come from poorer states such as Maranhao or Piaui, and are known only by a nickname - their bodies go unclaimed. After five days we reach the banks of one of the Amazon's great tributaries, the Tapajos. We roll aboard the ferry and, under a bright new moon, cross the river to Itaituba, another former gold town that has become a loggers' centre.

At the hotel Apiacas, the dining room is full of ruddy-faced businessmen from Brazil's southern states - Rio Grande do Sul, Parana and Santa Catarina - descendants of 19th century German and Italian immigrants. They are all talking land. The prospect of the road being paved is encouraging a land rush.

A regional airline has just begun a daily flight from Cuiaba, the Mato Grosso capital. Although there are few flat areas suitable for soybeans along the road, it will make access easier to previously untouched areas, where land is still cheap.

The next day, officials from Brazil's environment agency, Ibama, show us a handwritten note, delivered a few days before. In thick black letters, SIMASPA, the loggers' union warns that "the situation is serious, conflict is inevitable". Encouraged by environment minister Marina Silva, Ibama has been giving the loggers a hard time, confiscating illegally logged timber. This attempt to impose law and order on the sector has infuriated the powerful loggers, who are used to doing as they like in the region. Some threatened to set fire to Ibama offices.

The loggers have built their own clandestine road network of more than 20,000km through the forest to take out the trees. But Elza Gomes e Silva, a geographer who works for Ibama, says "paving the BR163 would help us to control the logging".

After travelling the road you realise that the challenge is not so much development versus conservation but whether the government can impose law and order in a region that has grown used to the law of the gun and to an absence of government. Inaccessibility has encouraged landgrabs, illegal logging, deforestation, slave labour and the intimidation and murder of union leaders. A paved road will bring cheaper exports for soybean farmers, but will it also bring the rule of law?