As Brazilian Logging Slows, Frontier Towns Begin To Evaporate - Guardian

[hatrack]

It was midnight at the Charlooe Drinks Bar and business was flagging. Dozens of prostitutes, some barely 12, were hovering outside the main avenue of Castelo dos Sonhos (the Castle of Dreams), an isolated town in the northern state of Para that until recently was at the centre of Brazil's illegal logging trade. Scantily clad girls signalled nervously at the occasional pick-up truck passing by. The sound of competing jukeboxes from the street's brothels gave the false impression business was booming. In reality there was hardly a punter in sight.

Inside, leaning against the bar's garish pink wooden walls, its 41-year-old madame puffed her cheeks. "The city's finished," said Marina Ketts, an immigrant from the southern state of Paraná. "The thing that brought money to Castelo was wood. Now that's all gone."
During the timber boom, Ms Ketts said, the bar made up to R$2,500 (£615) a week in alcohol sales alone. Now it struggles to bring in R$100. "It used to be one big whorehouse around here. Today, as you can see, there is nothing."

The tale of Castelo dos Sonhos's economic decline is the downside of the Brazilian government's success in trying to protect the world's largest rainforest. Until recently, when authorities began clamping down on illegal deforestation in the region, the town was at the centre of a timber boom as lucrative as it was illicit. But the introduction of the national deforestation combat plan in March 2004 brought the industry almost to a halt, leaving thousands of immigrant workers unemployed across the region.


EDIT

Illegal logging has not been completely eradicated. When night falls on Castelo dos Sonhos's potholed streets lorries laden with wood emerge from what is left of the surrounding forest and head on to the BR-163 highway, a dirt road cut through the Amazon rainforest in the 1970s by the military dictatorship. But it is on a much reduced scale - most of the 30-odd sawmills in Castelo dos Sonhos have stopped production. With no alternative economy and little support from the authorities, such communities are falling apart.

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1952908,00.html