14 DAY TRIAL // After the recent riot that took place in the city of Paragominas, when a 3,000-large mob destroyed governmental buildings, stole confiscated wood, and used a tractor to assault the hotel where environmental officials and inspectors were spending the night, the Brazilian government cracked down on illegal wood cutters once again, stating that it would not be intimidated by such acts of vandalism and civic disobedience.
Carlos Minc, the nation's Environment Minister, went on the scene on Thursday, surrounded by police officers and inspectors, in charge of a more thorough operation of tracking down and confiscating illegally-chopped wood, taken from Brazil's protected rain forests. Farmers and cattle growers in the area cut down the trees themselves, or pay Indians in protected reservations to do it, so they can expand their business in the freshly-deforested areas.
"These acts (of vandalism) won't remain unpunished. Everything is impounded and the environmental criminals will be punished," Minc stated, at the site of a discovered illegal saw mill, where law enforcement officials captured more than 3,000 cubic meters (105,900 cu ft) of rare wood that had been readied for transport. This quantity would have easily filled 150 trucks, to be distributed throughout the country, and even across the borders.
"They pay off Indians to get the wood out. Unfortunately there are still loggers who don't obey the law, but they are the minority," Paragominas town hall secretary Francisco Antonio da Silva, told Reuters in an interview.
Minc says that his efforts to stop illegal logging in Brazil will continue to become even harsher, especially now that federal efforts have been met with brute force and even gunfire. Since May, when the new Minister was sworn in, he has been leading a never-ending campaign to stop this widespread phenomenon, though his funding is still very low, and other governmental projects promote deforestation. However, illegally-chopped timber quantities are enormous each year, and Minc vowed to bring statistics as low as possible.