A mob led by loggers prevents Greenpeace activists from leaving Brazilian government offices ©Greenpeace/Rodrigo Baleia
There's been further friction in the Amazon between Greenpeace staff and angry loggers and townspeople. It's all ended peacefully but the situation was tense and they were holed up overnight under police protection. This from Reuters:
Police escorted a group of Greenpeace activists from a remote town in the Brazilian Amazon on Wednesday after hundreds of loggers and townspeople besieged them overnight in protest against an anti-global warming campaign, the environmental organization said.
The incident, the second time in two months that Greenpeace activists have been harassed in the Amazon jungle, underscores the conflicts over natural resources between farmers and loggers on one side and peasants and Indians on the other.
Hundreds of people, including dozens of loggers in trucks, cars and motorcycles, had blockaded the activists since Tuesday in the offices of the government's environmental protection agency Ibama in Castelo dos Sonhos, northern Para state, a Greenpeace spokesman said.
They forced the activists to abandon a 13-metre (43-foot) tree trunk they were transporting to an exhibit on global warming in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Loggers had used two trucks on Tuesday afternoon to block the Greenpeace convoy, forcing the environmentalists to seek refuge in the Ibama office.
The stand-off ended peacefully when police escorted the eight activists out of town, Greenpeace's Andre Muggiati said by telephone from Manaus, the Amazon's main city.
