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TUCURUI town, some 225km to the north of Maraba, was until 1977 no more than a pin on a surveyor's map. Today over 60,000 people live here amid air-conditioned office buildings, supermarkets, a modern hospital and even green tennis courts; it has a dusty red main street and a tendency to noise, with construction by day and rowdy construction workers by night. The entire city was built by Eletronorte to house the workers building Brazil's largest dam - over 12km long and with a flooded reservoir covering 4000 square kilometres of rainforest, the fourth largest artificial lake in the world. Now on stream, the Barragem da Hidreletrica de Tucurui has a peak power output of 8000 megawatts a year, making it the largest hydroelectric project in the world. The cost of building the dam is unknown, but it's estimated that at one stage three million dollars were being spent every day. Corruption was almost inevitable, and the "Capemi case" was one of the most public scandals of the years of military rule. Rather than simply drowning the vast tracts of forest in the area of the reservoir, Eletronorte invited tenders for the timber to be cleared and sold by 1983. There were plenty of companies with all too much experience of clearing rainforest, but the contract was won, in 1979, by a company called Capemi - a company which dealt mainly with investing military pensions and had no experience of the lumber industry. The decision caused outrage, millions of dollars went missing, and clearance started two years late, succeeding in removing less than a quarter of the high-quality hardwood available. It was a textbook example of the widespread corruption that marked the final years of military rule, and has never been properly investigated: part of the deal by which the military relinquished power was that there should be no investigation of human rights or financial abuses involving military personnel. In human terms the cost was high, too. The lake flooded a section of the Parakanan Indian reserve and necessitated the re-routeing of the Transamazonica through another part of it. It also destroyed the homeland of the Trocara, a group of Indians who had been "discovered" by FUNAI only in 1970. The new city of Tucurui is served by an older settlement about 9km distant. Today this old town is the site of brothels and other entertainment for the region's workers. Many of the people working and living in the old town are refugees from the flooded area, and their number grows steadily as year after year floods strike the region, causing roads to be cut and washing away homes. There's not a great deal in Tucurui, and although it's only 350km from Belem it's not really on the way to anywhere. Nevertheless, the dam is spectacular and worth the trip. For permission to visit the dam , phone 091/787-2010 at least three days in advance for a guided tour (at 8.30am Tues, Thurs & Fri).
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