Monday – 11/01/2016
FROM LINHARES TO COLATINA Departing from Regência, Arana, Vladimir and I go on for more than 60 kilometres along the river, through abandoned and parched cocoa farms. Ancient clearings today frame a landscape of decrepit and abandoned properties, all the way as far as Colatina, largely due to the witch’s broom19 disease. The vigorous production of the past has given way to old workers and their descendants living off the remnants of the earlier productive process. Farmhouses and former workers’ villages are often occupied by sparse families. Before reaching the BR101 highway, there are more than ten large farms, in a state of total abandonment, where some of the families, now without access to water, live in poverty. Many live on what grows even with scarce irrigation, and some insist on fishing for what are now reddish fish, one of the few sources of protein, although possibly poisoned.
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In a state of intense dryness due to the drought, the scenario resembles the semi-arid20 areas of our northeast region, which is frightening because the entire region was originally covered by the Atlantic Rain Forest21. The wide alluvial plain that extends for kilometres around the mouth of the river allows its floods to reach enormous proportions, a reality that is worrying. The water channel opened by Fibria22 is also located in this region, taking a huge amount of water to cool its machinery, many times preventing the flow of the river from being sufficient to reach the sea. To generate public acceptance, it has been named after Caboclo Bernardo, displeasing many.
