Although the traditional peoples and local social movements are vehemently opposed to the implementation of the hydroelectric plant of Belo Monte, on the Rio Xingu; despite many scientists and experts pointing out the impacts on the forest, river, fishing and region; despite IBAMA technicians having issued an opinion in opposition to the construction of the plant; despite the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the State questioning the legitimacy of the licensing process; despite the uncertainty about the viability of the project due to the large flow oscillation between periods of flood and drought; despite Brazilian legislation and the ILO Convention 169 being, once again disregarded; and in spite of the companies interested in bidding on the plant claiming that the cost of manpower is not $ 16 billion, as the government states, but $ 30 billion, and are already threatening to abandon the project if the government does not increase the cost cap, the president of BNDES, Luciano Coutinho, said last February 18 that the Bank is ready to finance the winning bidder Belo Monte.

 

"BNDES (National Bank of Economic and Social development) is prepared to fund the project in scale and volume that the possible winner of the contest demand," said Coutinho. He further said he hoped the conditions offered are attractive to provide a competition that gives validity to the auction.

 

With this statement, Coutinho makes more explicit than ever that the Bank does not consider the demands and needs of communities and organizations of civil society. It does not even consider the lives of people who will be directly affected by the works, which the Bank funds, with public money (always important to remember).

 

There are many protests against the construction of Belo Monte. Even before the issuing of the preliminary license for the work, organizations, networks and social movements in Brazil and abroad expressed, in the most varied manner, an overwhelming rejection of this mega project. The indigenous peoples warned President Lula that the Xingu River will become a river of blood if the work begins. Countless letters, articles, manifestos and campaigns made explicit that this work is not feasible in all aspects: social, environmental and economic. In fact, the mobilization in defense of the Xingu and its people began over thirty years ago. Moreover, this logic of pharaonic construction projects that favors mega companies at the cost of depredation of nature and people is characteristic precisely of military dictatorships.

 

This entire resistance to Belo Monte is not for nothing. The work will flood 51,600 hectares of forest, will build two channels 500 m wide and 30 km long – with a volume of soil to be removed and the concrete lining for them that outweighs that of the Panama Canal – 100 km of dry river bed, submerging the Volta Grande do Xingu, dislodge some twenty thousand people and will bring about a hundred thousand people to the region, causing immeasurable and irreversible environmental impacts.

 

With this position, the Bank does not yet have an environmental policy and acts as a major instrument for the continuation of a model in which the profits of multinational corporations is an absolute priority. It is a model where the profit is private (privilege of a few), while the costs are shared. Of course, within this logic, the most vulnerable populations are most affected.

 

Considering the funding record, so far, for the controversial hydroelectric plants of Santo Antônio and Jirau, on the Madeira River and the funding for the nuclear plant Angra 3, it can be stated that, at present, the BNDES is the main financial vector in Brazil for a prohibitively expensive, environmentally disastrous and destructive and socially unjust and unfair model of development. And as said Bishop Erwin Kräutler, there is a risk that "Lula will go down in history as the great predator of the Amazon and as the gravedigger of indigenous and riverine peoples on the Xingu”.