Editor’s note: The most common form of inter-city transportation in the Amazon is by boat. The wooden ships that carry passengers and cargo are often unsafe and often travel at over capacity. Shipwrecks are all too frequent. This article doles out the blame for one in May 2008.
Blame for shipwrecks in the Amazon like that of the Comandante Sales recently should be placed on the owner of the boat, the crew, the passengers and, above all, officials who fail to provide proper oversight.
Of course most of the blame for the cadavers that once again piled up on the bed of the Solimões River in Amazon state in the early morning hours of May 4 falls on the owner of the boat, Francisco Alves de Sales. His unequaled love of easy profits blinded him to the predictable tragedy that would result if the ship took to the water with too many passengers and without a properly trained crew. A fair amount of blame must be attributed to crew members who able neither to steer the boat nor to take stock of their irresponsibility in taking jobs they couldn’t handle. It could be argued that they were ignorant and, unlike their boss, didn’t fully understand the risk to which they were submitting the passengers, who would have little chance of saving themselves in the event of an accident.
But as practically every time that such a tragedy has struck in the cloudy waters of the basin with the largest volume of navigable water on the planet, to speak in terms of an accident is to join in the complicity for the genocide that has been practiced systematically in that abandoned region. In defense of the crew, you could say that they went down with the passengers and that some of them perished. (Editor’s note: the owner also numbered among the fatalities.) This argument fails. Just as suicide cannot be justified, neither can the not-so-smart hide behind their lack of intelligence when they try to be clever. Blame, albeit not so much, must be attributed to those who took a chance on sailing in a boat that clearly lacked the capacity to carry so many people. These idiots of insight that, correctly, Nelson Rodrigues despised so much would respond that all boats in the Amazon sail overweight and that they usually arrive safely at their destinations. But the numbers of deaths in the all too frequent disasters belie the cynicism in this argument.
Even more cynical, my friends and enemies, to quote Manuel Bandeira, is the Port Authority that complains that the owner of the boat failed to comply with the regulations after promising to do so. This is a serial crime, like others before it. Officials in charge of the oversight of ships in the Amazon Basin are the leading accomplices. Boats like the Comandante Sales sink because of the greed of their owners, the irresponsibility of their crews, the recklessness of their passengers and especially the incompetence and ineptness of indifferent and incapable authorities.
