This is a very good and recurrent question for people working in Brazilian Amazon, where you come to know many different people, including indigenous tribes, small farmers and rural workers settled in some areas for a long time, recent immigrants, large scale soy-bean farmers and cattle ranchers, environmental activists, health, environmental protection, drug-fighting, agrarian-reform, and revenue agents ...

Maybe because of the experience of working in the Amazon, I can't help reading that "It is well known that during field campaigns local communities are willing to cooperate with people doing environmental studies" with a touch of humour

My work is related to deforestation, forest preservation and land zoning institutions, carbon balance, and climate change, and I think to have found very small genuine interest in my work; while I have always found significant difficulty in engaging in dialogue by attempting to show people the importance of my work for their lives, I have found more people willing to share their difficulties with us, researchers, than people having hostile or mistrusting attitudes towards us; I had to manage with a number of quite tense situations because of people mistrusting us, but all of them happily ended in amused exchanges among all (maybe because, in the end, researchers like us are funny specimens to get acquainted to; maybe because we were just lucky).

I'm not sure that I can easily summarize my experience in just a few words. However, working in the region showed how diverse the Amazon is, and suggested how easily we researchers go into the region with preconceptions about the importance of our work, about their universe and life, and about people's capacity to be critical about all this. Needless to say that, the more often and widely we travel in the Amazon, the bigger our confidence that we finally grasped the diversity of conditions and problems of the region ... and the larger the number of good, humourous stories we can collect about our prejudices :-)

There is, perhaps, a strong bias in this judgement because of our large focus on carbon cycle and climate change, which hardly are part of the everyday problems lived by people. There are many other areas (public health, rural sociology, ethnology and ethnography, agricultural extension, for example) where researchers have completely different experiences.

When I was an undergraduate, a part of completion of the Geology program at my university is to go and stay for 1 month during summer time up in the mountains of Lebanon. Fortunately at the time i went (2007), i met some very nice and hospitable locals. They offered us fresh fruits, coffe, rides on their tractors...

Unfortunately 2 years later, 4 of my younger colleagues were fulfilling the same mapping course in the same area. They got hold up by several young persons pretending to be officers and detectives. Apparently they were outlaws, affiliated with a auto theft gang. My friends had a Kia Sportage SUV, they got kidnapped along with their car, under the threat of guns. They got released few hours later far away from the place of abduction after they have been deprived from all their belongings.

This incident was all over the news, and we knew later that the thieves got in a gun fight with the police and some of them got shot.

Thank all of you for taking time for sharing your thoughts. The reason I asked this question is because recently I have been involved in a situation like this. A few colleagues and I went to Villahermosa, Tabasco, in the southeast part of Mexico as part of a team studying the environmental consequences of an oil-well caught in fire after an uncontrolled gas leak on the well´s head, the last week of October (see picture below). We were tracking the combustion plume with a mobile remote detection system driving along narrow roads in the middle of nowhere. The oil well is located 20 km north from Villahermosa City in a region surrounded by marshes all over and just a few roads are available for us to drive, the ones built by companies to access the oil fields. Small villages of poor people emerge scattered along these roads and fishing on the marshes is the way they earn life with very limited opportunities to a better life. Historically these people complain against Pemex, the national oil company, claiming economical indemnification as restitution for caused damages on their property or losses in fish-catch due to impacts of regular operations or accidents in Pemex.

The day when the oil well caught fire, a dark thick smoke column rose 500 m above ground level when upper winds dispersed it away. The people in the neighborhood got scared; the closest town is roughly 1.5 km away from the well. The noise coming from the jet of gases escaping from the well´s head increased fear in people. After the incident, representatives of the community got in contact with spokespersons of Pemex but nothing has been settled yet.

Pemex on the other hand, in critical events like this, appeals to deliver food and live chickens among the population to relief the turmoil. However this time these actions were not enough and people begins to retain all kind of vehicles, state owned or from private companies working for Pemex. We were part of those retained. At first we were scared because we were escorted by a group of men towards the Jimenez town and forced to park the vehicle alongside the road. We then realize that personnel of other companies were there and their vehicles withheld also.

In summary, the community told us that we were free to go but vehicles will remain there as assurance for negotiations with Pemex. Until now all vehicles still remain in the community and Pemex is saying in the news that will not compensate economically communities with cash.

At the end, situations like this are not properly managed by Pemex disregarding deliberately the community´s needs and avoiding its social responsibility with community and the environment.

Sorry, here is the picture.

Dear Diogenes,

I really enjoyed reading your comments and experiences you have had in the Amazon. I am sure the commitment you and your colleagues have to preserve as much as possible the biggest rain forest in the world is what indigenous tribes acknowledge and, at the end, they are willing to open their hearts and let you get in.

Caro Gustavo, I also enjoyed reading your account. Allow me add to that that, initially, I thought your problem was related to environmental-impact assessment PRIOR to exploration, a common problem for my colleagues from Petrobras. Such assessments are similar to the kind of work that we usually organize, in the sense that they take local people as the object (or as part of the object) of study, in most cases. I see that your experience has nothing to do with that class of problems as it really envolved all parts.

Saludos from San Pablo.