The Amazon: assaulted wonder

The Peruvian president Ollanta Humala, his ministers, artists, countless citizens (by foot or laptop) and even Sergio Markarian, Uruguay's national squad manager, applauded the election of the Amazon as one of the '7 natural wonders of the world'. The title has a special taste of victory, which should be taken as a patriotic and passionate manifestation for the Amazon. The winners were announced on November, 11, by the New Open World Corporation. It was the result of a massive Internet poll.

That is precisely the first thing to draw attention to: the possibility of voting for a place that you know little or nothing by one click. A report by the Colombian NGO Alianzas por la Sustentabilidad states that 7 out of 10 Colombians don't know much about the Amazon. The same is true to other Amazonian countries, as in Peru, where I'm from.

It's not to say they have no right to do conduct a virtual poll on the Amazon. Considering that the goal is to attract investors and promote tourism in the region, it is admirable the support citizens gave to a global marketing case of their 'natural resources'. However you can't ignore the gap there is between the real and the virtual, which somehow still leads us to look at the Amazon as the promising 'El Dorado'.

Bottom line is what is there to cheer about if, back in the tropical land, the basin is under threat by road construction, hydroelectric, mining concessions, deforestation and an increase in poverty that spreads specially among indigenous tribes? Several experts – the Peruvians, at least - agree that no tourist or natural area can be properly valued when insecurity, decay and injustice still predominates.

Copy this code and paste it in your personal page:

It is adamant to curb deforestation and not to compromise the survival of indigenous peoples in the Amazon. If those are not taken care of, no matter how wonderful the Amazon is, it will turn into ruins, something that unfortunately is already taking place. The data on deforestation up until 2005 accounts for 857.666 square kilometres.

The main problems are, depending on each country, road construction, mining, unsystematic farming, disorganized and irregular occupation of public land (close to roads, for instance). If pressing the key to convert the Amazon to the title of 'wonderful' (as if it were not wonderful before) comes without the awareness of all these facts, all that it will do is to encourage the massive influx of tourists and bring it closer to the logic of deterioration than conservation.

Those problems become even less virtual when expanded to the human ecosystem. A constant in Latin America and the Amazon is that the indigenous peoples are the poorest sector of the population, fact that gets even worse when it comes down to women. The same is for the riparian communities. In Bolivia, citing the worst case, infant mortality rate is 73 per 1.000 births.

In Peru, a country that has 77 different ethnicities (of which 75 are Amazonian), 81% of all its 332 thousand indigenous peoples live in poverty and 41% in extreme poverty. The same goes for Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and even Brazil, where if the case is less intense it still shows little quality of life. That, of course, will be barely visible if we think the Amazon region only as valuable or spectacular.

Around the basin the presence of mining and oil companies can still be felt. We can also notice the trail left by hydroelectric (which have the intent of generating power to maybe light up other "wonders"). In Brazil there is Belo Monte, putting the Kayapo, Asurini, Arawepé and other ethnic groups under warning; in Peru, about 70% of the Amazon is allotted for hydrocarbon exploration.

Even a proposal as the one to preserve the Yasuni National Park, in Ecuador, aiming at creating a fund to avoid the drilling of oil from under the ground where the park is, thus preserving the area and helping tackle climate change, was accepted with difficulties. Just recently it achieved the target of 100 million dollars set by President Rafael Correa as needed to carry on with the project.

All these do not disqualify the Amazon of the full "wonderful" title. It is nevertheless necessary to put it into perspective and not only foster a mere poetic vision, almost colonial, which sees the biome as the promised El Dorado, full of riches, forgetting how delicate its peoples and its ecosystems are. And which ignores that governments and even the population have been turning their backs to it.

The Amazon is wonderful and precious, no title needed. It is the largest tropical ecosystem and perhaps the world's most beautiful. Its conservation does not depend of just one click and ravings on big investments in tourism, especially if bulldozers and chainsaws keep making their way into it. A return to sustainable development, awareness, sense and sensibility is what is needed so that this new wonder of the world is to be indeed real.