Two reporters embark on an expedition across Lago Verde, in eastern Amazonia, to observe how scientists and local fishing people join efforts to study and protect the area’s turtles.

Sailing in search of turtles. - Alejandro Kirk/IPS

But it was only after linking up with academic researchers, that this 52-year-old Brazilian tour guide’s environmental work became systematic.

Over the last three years he has been combing the surrounding beaches night after night, from late September through early December, in search of nests containing the freshly-laid eggs of chelonians – a group of animals that are more commonly known by the name of one of their species: turtles.

Tracajás or yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles (Podocnemis unifilis) usually lay their eggs in the evening, between 6 and 10 pm, and pitiús or six-tubercled Amazon river turtles (Podocnemis sextuberculata) lay them later at night, between 1 and 4 am. Their nesting habits have forced Maranhão to spend long, solitary nights on the beach, and almost cost him his marriage.

The nest watch ends almost two months later, when the eggs hatch. Maranhão then takes the hatchlings home to care for them for another two months before releasing them on the beautiful beaches of the Lago Verde lagoon, which are a great tourist attraction, drawing many visitors to the small town of Alter do Chão, located in the municipality of Santarém, some 800 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Amazon river.

All this care is directed at preventing people from eating the eggs and stopping natural predators, such as hawks and fishes, from doing away with the hatchlings. The aim is to restore the population of chelonians, an order of the class Reptilia, which includes turtles and tortoises.

These animals are very prolific. Amazon turtles (Podocnemis expansa), the region’s largest species, can lay more than 100 eggs per nest. But very few hatchlings make it to adulthood, due to heavy predation on the eggs and the young animals before their shells have hardened.

Which is why Juárez Pezzuti, professor at the Federal University of Pará and coordinator of several research studies on Amazonian aquatic fauna, sees management by river populations as a good solution to ensure conservation and growth of chelonian populations. In animals with such high fertility and mortality rates as these, just a small amount of care during reproduction can have a multiplying effect, he says.

A government-led breeding project, which returned tens of millions of baby animals to several Amazon rivers and has protected 115 breeding sites since the 1980s, succeeded in dispelling the threat of extinction that hung over turtles, and in recovering their population and that of other species.

Pezzuti sees community management as a good solution for ecological and social reasons. Brazil banned the hunting or fishing of chelonians back in 1967, along with that of other wild animals.

But the local population still eats these animals’ meat and eggs, in many cases because it is one of their few sources of food. When the larger species, such as tracajás, are in short supply, the population also relies on the smaller species.

Protecting females from being captured as they lay their eggs, for example, eliminates the leading factor in the reduction of certain species. Directing egg collection to nests exposed to flooding, cattle treading or a high concentration of nesting females also favors the abundance of animals, which is also important in meeting the food needs of the local people.

Turtles, which used to be very abundant, played a significant role over the last three hundred years as a source of food in Brazil’s Amazon region. The expansion of the local population and the increasing market value of turtles -as their meat turned into a very expensive delicacy and their oil was used for street lighting- led to overexploitation and endangerment.

Pezzuti, an ethno-ecologist who researched chelonian reproduction in Amazonia for his master’s and doctoral theses, recognizes how valuable the knowledge of the local people is as an input for his studies. Which is why he speaks of joint management and seeks to combine traditional knowledge with academic knowledge.

“Eurocentric” science, he says, tends to ignore popular experience, thus hindering the progress of research and often leading to erroneous results. “My work would not be possible without resorting to the knowledge gathered over centuries by the Amazon peoples,” he admits.

Rachel Leite, another scientist who is working on Lago Verde chelonians for her master’s thesis under Pezzuti’s guidance, also conducts her research with the support of local people like Maranhão and Paulo de Jesus, a boatman and experienced turtle hunter.

In a joint researcher and journalist expedition, de Jesus demonstrated how he contributes to the research work, diving two meters deep in an “igapó” (flooded forest) in Lago Verde and catching five turtles, tracajás and pirangas (Podocnemis erytrhocephala), with his bare hands.

His sharp eye, which allowed him to spot the chelonians where two researchers and a journalist venturing in muddy green waters saw nothing, reveals the skills he developed when he hunted turtles for his livelihood and continues to develop now in his current occupation, catching ornamental fish.

Today he puts his skills at the service of science, which may be why he is reluctant to answer when asked if he would ever eat turtles again.

Leite, who has been studying chelonians throughout Lago Verde since September, identifies, measures and marks the animals they find, and then releases them at the same spot where they caught them. She recalls how at first the task “seemed hopeless; we just couldn’t find any animals.”

But later, the fishermen explained that the animals were “buried in the mud,” due to the ebb tide, when water levels can drop as much as six meters.

Now, with the Tapajós river — which feeds the lake — at flood level, it is easier to spot them: on trees, sunbathing or under water. Leite’s study will estimate the population of the five species found in Lago Verde and their geographical and seasonal distribution. The measurements and the marks on each animal’s shell will enable her to monitor the animals’ growth in subsequent recaptures, the biologist explains.

To study the animals’ reproduction, she relies on Maranhão, another practical expert who can spot nests where few can see any alterations on the sand. In his night rounds he not only finds the nests, he also erases the traces left by the females, so that hunters cannot find their eggs.

Maranhão’s calling has also turned him into an environmental educator, taking children and tourists to see baby turtles hatching. The effectiveness of this experience is evident in Roberto Santos, the boatman that transports the team of researchers and journalist to observe five nests, two of which contain 10 hatchlings that Maranhão takes back to his “crib.”

Santos is “moved” by the sight of the hatchlings and declares that the experience has turned him into a “protector of turtles.” “Seeing them being born has opened my eyes to something I wasn’t aware of,” he says.

The World Social Forum ended its ninth edition Sunday in Belém with its “Assembly of assemblies” adopting dozens of resolutions and proposals to be the subjects of a programme of mobilisations around the world in 2009.

The 21 thematic assemblies thus broke the apparent WSF taboo on taking common political stands under pressure from thousands of civil society groups anxious to seize the opportunity opened by the global economic crisis to progressive change.

A week of demonstrations and awareness raising will take place between Mar. 28 and Apr. 4 to press for drastic change in the world’s political balance and urgent measures to stop climate change.

Key target of this initiative is the G-20 summit of industrial countries scheduled for Apr. 2 in London, taking place in the midst of the deepening global economic crisis.

G-20 members Argentina and Brazil, both led by progressive governments, are expected to voice WSF demands such as the disbanding or deep reform of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.

March 30, the Palestinian Day of Return to their land, is another important mark in the program, aimed at imposing a trade boycott, international sanctions and disinvestment policies, to force Israel to stop military assaults against Gaza and engage in true peace negotiations.

Under a light rain on a soaked lawn at Belém’s vast Federal Amazonian Rural University campus, a spokesman of the WSF’s Assembly of Social Movements itemised some of the wider programmatic contents of the mobilization:

– Nationalisation of banks;

– No reduction of salaries at enterprises hit by the crisis;

– Energy and food sovereignty for the poor;

– Withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq and Afghanistan;

– Sovereignty and autonomy for indigenous peoples;

– Right to land, decent work, education and health for all;

– Democratisation of media and knowledge

On Oct. 12, anniversary of the day on which Spanish conquerors reached the Americas, another worldwide set of actions will honoor “Mother Earth” and vindicate the rights of indigenous peoples around the world.

This is the closest the WSF has yet come to becoming a global political force, a dilemma it has faced since its inception in the city of Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, in January 2001 as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Foreign correspondents and local media have underlined the sharp contrast between the vibrant atmosphere in Belém and the somber faces of corporate bosses and Western leaders in Davos, where Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown went so far as to admit the crisis has no precedent nor any reliable forecast.

The conservative newspaper Folha de São Paulo, in Brazil’s financial capital, observed Sunday that while the planet might not become the “extravagant” other world dreamt of in Belém, neither will it remain the current one, “so many times optimistically celebrated by Davos.”

“As economic ultra-liberalism and current international decision-making mechanisms are both being questioned. Issues so diverse as environmental imbalances, terrorism, drug-trafficking or ethnic and religious regional conflicts overwhelm the intervention capacity of one single power or the exclusive club of most developed countries,” says Folha’s editorial.

Candido Grzybowsky, head of iBase, a Brazilian NGO, and a key WSF player, has insisted that on the one hand the crisis has proven -as tacitly admitted by Western governments- that the many warnings issued by social movements over the years were right.

Yet, he warned this week in Belém, while this crisis represents a historical opportunity to democratise states, economies and the international scene, if not seized it may lead to a capitalist recovery “even worse” than the fundamentalist paradigm now in pieces.

While exposing different approaches to achieving social justice, equality and people’s participation, the presidents of Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay and Venezuela, meeting in Belém, shared this week the same persuasion: the crisis must lead to a different global set-up.

Brazil’s Luiz Inácio da Silva Lula put the accent on protecting working people through regulation and promoting heavy state economic investment, a statement the IMF would have reacted to with threats not long ago.

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, an economist, was bolder: the answer to the crisis is socialism, he said, through people’s control of political social and economic bodies, backed by a state committed to become a decentralized channel for democratic participation.

Hugo Chávez, of Venezuela, called for the WSF to go on the offensive now that the centers of capitalist power seemed to be perplexed and disoriented.

To organizers, the ninth World Social Forum was both a political and organizational success.

At a closing press conference on Feb. 1, Grzybowsky told a press conference that 115,000 people took part, representing social movements, NGOs or attending as individuals. On top of that, the Youth Camp received 15,000 youngsters, plus 3,000 children and teenagers. In total, 133,000 people participated, coming from 142 countries, although Brazil was by far the best represented.

The Amazon basin was an important issue at the ninth WSF; the Forum was attended by 1,900 indigenous people of 190 ethnic groups and tribes, plus 1,400 “quilombolas” (descendants of runaway slaves).

Participant organisations numbered 5,808, of which 4,193 from South America, 489 from Africa, 491 from Europe, 334 from Central America, 155 from North America and 27 from Australia and New Zealand, Grzybowsky said.

The Brazilian state of Pará, an active supporter of the Forum, invested 11 million dollars in infrastructure (roads, communications and sanitation), which will now benefit the community, in particular the slums surrounding the university campuses, spokeswoman Ana Claudia Cardoso said.

Despite having been dismissed many times by the media as a fading left-wing carnival of wild dreams, sex and marijuana, with no political teeth, the WSF seems to be alive and well. Its “teeth” may be the strength gained just by being together, or, in the words of Friar Betto, a Brazilian theologian, by “refuelling” for the year ahead.

It has been said that the next WSF will take place in Africa, two years from now. By then, it is likely that present uncertainties, hopes and goals will have taken shape for better or for worse.

By Alejandro Kirk
BELEM, Brazil, Jan 26 2009 (IPS)

Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues that community radio and alternative media are the only platforms that can compete with corporate media. In an interview with TerraViva’s Alejandro Kirk, de Sousa Santos stressed that the current crisis requires that participants at the World Social Forum (WSF) take a unified political stance.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

IPS: Do you stand by your ideas about the nature of the World Social Forum in the context of the global crisis of capitalism that we are experiencing? BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS: That is a very important question at this moment. I believe that the changes that have taken place over the past few months have created a new situation. As you know, since its inception, there has been a discussion at the WSF about whether it should be an open space for all progressive tendencies that fight against neo-liberal globalisation – a space for coming together and nothing more. Some have argued the contrary: that it should have a stronger role and intervene, present proposals and organise global political actions – intervention for change.

In some way, this requires that I modify my position. For a long time I have defended the idea of an open space because I believe that it is important to maintain a place in which people can come together without a specific agenda. But over the past two years my view has changed somewhat. I believe that the WSF should continue to be an open space but that we should identify some topics about which there is consensus so that the Forum can present political and thus programmatic positions.

IPS: What topics are you thinking about? BSS: The WSF should have a proposal to reform the United Nations. It is a process that has been discussed for a long time and one that we also have discussed at the WSF, but there is no common position.

The second issue is the financial crisis, which has created a new situation over the past few months because at the WSF we always criticised neo-liberal globalisation – and especially the predominance of financial capital – which has led so many countries to ruin.

The financial crisis that exploded in the United States and Europe is a crisis that the countries of the so-called Third World have been suffering for 30 years. All of these countries have proposed solutions that are very similar to the ones that the United States and Europe are implementing: nationalizing banks and so on.

Now that the crisis is in the United States and Europe, in the heart of the global capitalist system, the measures that those same central countries strongly rejected – through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (FMI) – for southern countries are being adopted. That is where the crises of Asia, Argentina, Brazil and Russia came from. So I propose that the WSF assume a visible international position on how to resolve the crisis.

The WSF should demand the elimination of the FMI and the World Bank or their radical reform. These positions have been discussed ad nauseam and there is consensus. Why don’t we transform that into a policy position?

IPS: And you can’t forget Palestine. BSS: Yes, in the third place, the crisis in Palestine. This aggression is an Israeli occupation that is more brutal than before. Right now war crimes and crimes against humanity are taking place and are being perpetrated because there is the certainty of total impunity. I think that the WSF has to take a very clear, internationally visible position on Palestine.

Though we have not done so directly in the Forum, we have fought for peace. The Assembly of Social Movements called for a world protest against the invasion of Iraq and I do not believe that we should limit ourselves to protests this time.

IPS: Do you believe that this attack was launched in an attempt to achieve something before Barack Obama assumed the Presidency of the United States? BSS: Yes. This aggression was a premeditated provocation on the part of the State of Israel. The international media never mention this. The first violation of the cease-fire [between the government of Gaza and Israel] was at the beginning of November, and it was an Israeli bombing. In response, Hamas requested a renegotiation of the cease-fire, which Israel rejected. That’s how it started.

Israel has three direct objectives. The first involves internal politics. The central-right coalition that governs the country is at risk and wants to recover its electoral leadership. Second, the Army wants to make people forget their complete defeat by the Hezbollah organisation when it invaded Lebanon in 2006. The third objective is to create a fait accompli before Obama was sworn in.

These are the three factors that have led to a war of aggression that has nothing to do with Gaza. It is extermination. Months ago, the Vice Minister of Defence of Israel [Matan Vilnai] threatened the population of Gaza with the word Sho’ha, which means ‘holocaust’ in Hebrew. That was announced months ago. It is horrible, because they don’t realise that the Jewish people were victims of a Sho’ha in Europe, and history shows that the ‘final solutions’ always come back on those who have tried to implement them.

IPS: Is there a way out of this? BSS: Very serious things are happening. People who have always defended the existence of the State of Israel are now asking themselves if in these conditions – I repeat, in these conditions – the State of Israel maintains that right to exist.

It is notable that when you read the founding texts of Israel, like the writings of Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, it is really clear that they understood that their State was an occupation that would always come up against the resistance of the occupied and that there would therefore never be peace. The two-State solution was a hypocrisy negated by the facts – by so much Jewish presence in the West Bank that made it impossible.

It would be a serious problem if the WSF met in this context of global crisis and we did not emerge with a position from the International Council or WSF Assembly. My fear is that people will come away with the impression that the Forum didn’t do anything. That is why I have proposed voting.

IPS: But voting would be complicated at the Forum. BSS: There could be an electronic voting process each night. It is very easy to do. I have been told that we are not representative of the world. Of course we aren’t – but there are 100,000 of us.

IPS: The Forum no longer receives as much attention from the traditional media. Is this because of censorship, or a lack of professionalism, or has the Forum simply lost validity? BSS: This is an important issue given the power of the media in the international context. The mainstream media is a great instrument of global capitalism, of opposition to progressive politics. You can see that the media are opposed to change in countries throughout Latin America right now.

The absence of the media at the Forum doesn’t have to do with weaknesses. At one point the WSF was a novelty for the corporate media because we started as an alternative to the Davos Economic Forum – an inverted mirror. That created the curiosity that brought the media to the first two forums. When they realised that the Forum had a counter-hegemonic bent, they lost interest.

For our journey, the most important thing is the alternative media, the free press. This time a world forum of free media will be held in Belem.

I work a lot in Bolivia and Ecuador, and I can tell you that the community radios, the alternative press, are the media for bringing progressive knowledge to the people.

The Forum’s Communications strategy has not always been a strong one, but now I think that the WSF is aware that if we do not give all the weight to the alternative media – the free press that fights to bring different information to the people – we will not get far.

(*This report was published by TerraViva, an independent IPS daily, at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil.)

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