In the last half century, Brazil has taken the lead in a leap forward as a food producer. If in the 19th century it was coffee, now it is soybeans, corn and meat that feed the population and guarantee the inflow of foreign currency. That revolution was the result of a policy of State support that began in the years of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), continued in democracy and materialized in the creation of a powerful agrarian lobby.
The reverse of this transformation has been the conflicts over land, the depopulation of the interior, the displacement of the poor and indigenous people to the outskirts of the cities and the destruction of the Amazon and the Cerrado savannah with associated activities, the illegal mining and deforestation.
Two books bring us closer to this front line where both the future of the planet and human dignity are at stake. In La Amazonia, viaje al centro del mundo, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum explains the destruction of the Xingú villages, a tributary of the Amazon, driven from their lands by the construction of the gigantic Belo Monte dam. The result is an intense chronicle of the violent harassment of indigenous peoples in a unique book, with a special lyricism born from the pain of the witnesses who describe how they see their world disappearing. Brum, currently the best activist in defense of the Amazon and its inhabitants, will be in Barcelona this autumn at the invitation of the CCCB and will be able to explain it first hand.
The path followed by Francesc Escribano is very different. He traveled to Brazil in 1985 to meet Pere Casaldàliga, a Catalan priest installed since 1968 in São Félix do Araguaia, in Mato Grosso. Having just arrived, the Claretian gets involved in the resistance of his neighbors against the violent colonization imposed by the landowners and becomes one of the references of liberation theology. Escribano will return to Brazil more times to understand what he has seen. From the last journey, November 2022, was born The Earth and the Ashes, through which the fragile inhabitants of São Félix, the evangelist spiritual colonization, Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro, among many other things, parade.
The Amazon transformed Brum from top to bottom. Escribano traveled to São Félix and could no longer get the country out of his mind. Brazil does not leave anyone indifferent.
