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Brazilian Police Retake Amazon Town In Crackdown On Illegal Logging

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By ALAN CLENDENNING, The Associated Press

Published: February 24, 2008

SAO PAULO, Brazil - Heavily armed federal police swarmed an Amazon town and seized more than 500 truckloads of illegally cut hardwood that were confiscated but abandoned last week when rioting residents and loggers drove out environmental authorities.

About 450 officers retook the town of Tailandia on Saturday, patrolling on horseback and in pickups and standing guard outside sawmills.

At least 2,000 enraged residents burned tires, blocked roads and forced Environmental Protection Agency workers to flee the area last week. The force sent in Saturday prevented any new violence, federal police Officer Fernando Alberto Silva told Globo TV.

"Order was re-established peacefully," he said.

Huge trunks of precious hardwood were loaded onto flatbed trucks to be taken away and auctioned off by the government. So much wood was seized last week that it will take authorities nearly three weeks to cart it all away. Its value was estimated at $1.8 million, Globo TV said.

The Tailandia campaign is part of a government push to prevent an apparent rise in illegal logging and burning that threatens to reverse three straight years of declines in deforestation in the Amazon.

Many of last week's rioters, however, work in the area's sawmills, which could suffer as a result of state efforts to audit companies and mills suspected of illegal logging, Brazil's Environmental Protection Agency said last week.

Before the unrest, inspectors had audited 10 of Tailandia's estimated 140 sawmills, fining seven for stocking wood of unknown origin and selling lumber without authorization, the agency said.

To help keep the peace, an additional 157 officers from Brazil's elite National Security Force will be sent to the area today, the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo reported on its Web site.

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