Posted on 08/15/2005 12:17:08 PM PDT by the anti-liberal
A poll found 75% fear a U.S. invasion motivated by desire for natural riches.
BELÉM, Brazil - Afghanistan was the first to fall. Iraq, with all that oil, was next. And Socorro Leite says she has a fair idea of what else lies in the sights of the Americans.
"Soon," she warns, "their target will be the Amazon."
Insidious plots are afoot to snatch the rain forest from Brazil and declare it an international protectorate, the 45-year-old political aide believes. Foreign scientists and environmental activists are secret fronts for nations bent on laying claim to the region's abundant riches. American schoolchildren are being prepped on their right to control the Amazon.
"A lot of things are happening that we don't know about," Leite says darkly.
It would be tempting to dismiss Leite, a lifelong resident of this Amazonian city, as a crackpot if a large number of her fellow Brazilians did not share her theories in one form or another.
Many are convinced that foreign powers, in particular the United States, plan to take over the world's biggest tropical forest to secure the rights to its seemingly limitless natural resources, from gems to medicinal herbs. In a national survey released last month, 75 percent of Brazilians polled feared a foreign invasion provoked by their country's natural riches.
Rare issue of agreement
Opposition to international "meddling" in the Amazon is one of the rare issues that Brazil's political right and left can agree on - from nationalistic groups convinced of a foreign plot to keep Brazil down to Marxists long hostile to U.S. influence in Latin America, which included support for the repressive military dictatorship that once ruled Brazil.
As evidence of malign intentions, they cite the large-scale foreign business ventures that have tried, and largely failed, to exploit the ...
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
BugMeNot.com is your friend..
Somehow the Jews are involved, I just know it.
Ol' Soccoro had better worry about the UN doing that.
Does this mean I have to shop at Barnes and Noble?
I can't tell if the rest of the world is horribly misinformed, or if they're just f***ing stupid.
??? The fact that she is surrounded by crackpots does not mean that she is somehow not a crackpot.
today the amazon... tomorrow barnes&noble! lmao...
I knew there had to be another hidden level in Grand Theft Auto.
Paranoid academia are sometimes amusing. This one is just pathetic.
Have you seen the international news media? It is unreal.
I've seen more accurate news coverage of the US in hardline communist countries than in some nominally moderate western democracies. Some of the reporting is so twisted that I do not even recognize the US from its description. One would get a very strange impression of what living in the US is like if you watched the foreign news media.
When your government is found to be crooked or failing, change the the issue to how bad the USA is.
Works for Germany and France.
It would be tempting to ridicule one lunatic wearing a tin-foil hat if it weren't for all the other idiots keeping Reynolds Wrap in business.
I thought Canada or France was next?
Not with Halliburton pulling for Iran to be next.
Is it sad that I thought Amazon.com, and only remembered that the Amazon rainforest existed halfway through reading the article?
Well they got this much right...
They figured me out! Damn. I was gonna go in under the cover of darkness, cut down all the mature Brazilian rosewood trees in the Amazon rainforest, and make a mint selling quartersawn hunks at wildly inflated prices to guitar builders.
I vote for the latter.
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