Malaria, dysentery and pneumonia are rife. When the kids run round barefoot and ragged, you see the skin lesions and hear the coughs. There is a badly stocked chemist, but no medical post. And yet Repartimento is smack in the middle of one of the largest development schemes ever conceived - the Programa Grande Carajas, or Carajazao. Every year the EC is guaranteed 13 million tons of highest-quality iron ore at what one Brazilian politician calls banana prices .
Japan has a similar deal.
But as I saw myself, the winners are the industrialists, ranchers and entrepreneurs whose projects have been given the go-ahead, the national and overseas bankers who provide the development loans, and the politicians who can line their pockets in return for favorable planning decisions and tax breaks. The losers are the migrants who are sucked into the region looking for work, the tribal Indians who live there already and the forests with their fantastic diversity of wild animals, birds and plants. I had landed in Belem on the southern bank of the Amazon, a few days previously. She is a Brazilian journalist who knows the region like the back of her hand. She had agreed to show me what she could of Carajazao.