Stinging attack over Amazon destruction

Press, 5 April 1989, Page 10

Stinging attack over Amazon destruction

NZPA-Reuter Mexico City Latin American intellectuals issued a stinging attack yesterday against the Brazilian President, Jose Sarney, for claiming worldwide action to halt destruction of the Amazon rainforest would jeopardise national sovereignty. “Ecocide and ethnocide cannot be excused with patriotic language. “In Brazil, and in any part of the world, they are barbaric acts,” said Mexico’s Group of 100, in a two-page letter to Mr Sarney handed to the Brazilian Embassy in Mexico City. “To invoke national sovereignty to justify crimes against nature seems to us puerile and dishonest,” it added. The letter, whose signatories include the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez and famed Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, urged the United Nations to oversee protection of the Amazon basin and

demanded prosecution of anyone damaging the environment. Mr Sarney, head of the Third World’s largest debtor nation, has countered earlier attacks by saying that Brazil must regard economic development of the Amazon basin as more important than the environmental concerns of world leaders. The letter accused the Brazilian Government of promoting “massive deforestation” in the Amazon basin by allowing multinational construction companies and domestic cattle raisers to clear vast tracts of forest. Indigenous Amazon communities also face extermination, the letter said. Destruction of the Amazon rainforest, often referred to as “the lungs of the world,” threatens the global ecological balance and has spurred calls from foreign leaders for international moves to protect the environment.