Brazil police crack down on Amazon logging

About 450 officers retook the town of Tailandia on Saturday, patrolling on horseback and in pickup trucks and standing guard outside sawmills.

At least 2,000 enraged residents burned tires, blocked roads and forced Environmental Protection Agency workers to flee the area on Tuesday. The force sent in Saturday allowed the seizure of the wood to resume while preventing any new violence, federal police officer Fernando Alberto Silva told Globo TV.

“Order was re-established peacefully,” he said.

Huge trunks of precious hardwood were loaded onto flatbed trucks to be taken away and auctioned off by the government, which plans to spend the proceeds on rainforest protection. So much wood was seized that it will take authorities nearly three weeks to cart it all away. Its value was estimated at estimated at US$1.8 million (euro1.2 million), Globo TV said.

The Tailandia campaign is part of a larger government push to prevent an apparent rise in illegal logging and burning that threatens to reverse three straight years of declines in deforestation in the Amazon.

But many of last week’s rioters work in the area’s saw mills, which could suffer as a result of state efforts to audit companies and mills suspected of illegal logging, Brazil’s Environmental Protection Agency said last week.

Before the unrest, inspectors had audited 10 of Tailandia’s estimated 140 sawmills, fining seven for stocking wood of unknown origin and selling lumber without authorization, the agency said.

To help keep the peace, an additional 157 officers from Brazil’s elite National Security Force will be sent to the area on Sunday, the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo reported on its Web site.

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