Depending on one's point of view, the World Wildlife Fund's financial support of a nature reserve here on the Rio Negro is either part of a laudable attempt to conserve the Amazon jungle - or the leading edge of a nefarious plot by foreign environmental groups to wrest control of the world's largest rain forest from Brazil and replace it with international rule.
In 2003, after signing an agreement with the WWF and the World Bank, the Brazilian government created the Amazon Region Protected Areas program. Since then, more than a score of national parks and reserves covering an area larger than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut combined have been brought into that network and provided with an infusion of new funds.
The program's objective is to set up "a core system to anchor biodiversity protection for the Amazon," Matthew Perl, the WWF's Amazon coordinator, said during a visit to the area last month, a sparsely populated archipelago of 400 islands northwest of Manaus. "It's part of a strategy to buy time, bring each protected area up to certain standards of management and pool resources for monitoring and enforcement."
But that effort has aroused the suspicions of powerful business and political groups in Brazil that want to integrate the Amazon into the country's economy through dams, mining projects, highways, ports, logging and agricultural exports.
"This is a new form of colonialism, an open conspiracy in which economic and financial interests act through nongovernmental organizations," said Lorenzo Carrasco, editor and coauthor of The Green Mafia, a widely circulated anti-environmentalist polemic. "It is evident these interests want to block the development of Brazil and the Amazon region by creating and controlling these reserves, which are full of minerals and other valuable natural resources."
Such views are widely held in Brazil, cutting across regional and class lines. In a survey of 2,000 people in 143 cities conducted in person in 2005 by the country's leading polling organization, Ibope, 75 percent said that Brazil's natural riches could provoke a foreign invasion, and nearly three out of five distrusted the activities of environmental groups.
Winning the battle for Brazilian public opinion is crucial to any global effort to preserve the environment and, by extension, curb climate change. Brazil is the world's fourth-largest producer of the principal greenhouse gases; more than three-quarters of those emissions result from deforestation, most of which occurs here in the Amazon.
But the notion that foreigners covet the Amazon has long been widespread in Brazil, fed in part by anxiety about the central government's tenuous control of the region. Those concerns have been exacerbated in recent years by the Internet, which has become a home for fabricated documents and declarations meant to convince Brazilians that their sovereignty is at risk.
The most notorious example is a widely reproduced map supposedly used in an American middle-school geography textbook. Rife with misspellings and errors of syntax of a type common to speakers of Romance languages like Portuguese, it shows the Amazon as an "international reserve," and describes Brazilians as "monkeys" incapable of managing the rain forest.
Other spurious documents say that both US President Bush W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore made speeches during the 2000 presidential campaign in favor of wresting the Amazon from Brazil. Elsewhere, the documents quote an apocryphal American general, who leads an agency that the Pentagon says does not exist, as saying, "In the event Brazil decides to use the Amazon in a way that puts the environment of the United States at risk, we must be ready to interrupt that process immediately."
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