It was during a fishing trip to Brazil’s
remote south-western swamplands in 1994 that the Rev Sun Myung Moon hatched his
dream of building a haven for his Moonie sect. "Brazil is huge, with a
small mind. We will open it and show that the Third World can become
rich," he is said to have told his devotees.
So enchanted was he with a marshy region that lies on the
edges of the Pantanal National Park in the state of Matto Grosso do Sul that he
started buying up land. His first acquisition was a 100,000-acre ranch on
shrub-covered flatland on the confluence of two rivers, the Prata and Miranda,
teeming with rare fish. Now, years later, the 82-year-old Korean billionaire,
who founded and heads the controversial religious group formally known as the
Unification Church, has bought up so much land in this remote area that the
authorities are growing increasingly concerned.
Last year the Matto Grosso do Sul state legislature began
to investigate Moon’s activities. His purchase of 500,000 acres spreading
across the border into Paraguay - the area includes an entire coastal town -
has made them especially edgy. He now owns a large sector of the international
border.
Moon has vowed to invest as much as $2 billion in the area
over the coming years, but the governor of Matto Grosso do Sul, Jose Osorio dos
Santos, has called his land-buying quest in the region "a great
worry". The Brazilian intelligence agency has been investigating Moon’s
activities. Military authorities believe his purchases are a threat to national
sovereignty, and voice fears that the controversial sect leader is trying to
construct his own nation in the heart of South America. The Catholic Church in
the area has accused the sect of using cash incentives to lure locals. The
federal police force has launched probes into money laundering by a former Moon
employee, and has confiscated the Unification Church’s banking records in
Brazil.
Lawyers defending Moon’s organisation in Brazil have
dismissed the charges, alleging they amount to nothing but religious
persecution. Regardless of what may come to light through official inquiries,
what seems clear is that the Moonies view this under-populated, barren corner
of South America as an ideal place for reviving their messianic leader’s quest
to change the world and bring "global peace".
Famed for holding mass weddings between Moonies he picks at
random from a pile of photographs - and for his claims to be "the true
father of the world" - the Rev Moon has lost some of his following over
the past years. He founded the Unification Church in South Korea in 1954 and
quickly gained a reputation for accumulating business interests worldwide. His
church is said to have had some 4.6 million members across the globe.
The sect considers Jesus to be a failed messiah and the Rev
Moon the chosen one. Moon’s preaching mixes elements of Christianity,
Confucianism and Buddhism, and focus much on his self-professed
"gift" at matchmaking.
In the 1980s Moon had some 30,000 followers in the US, his
main base. But in recent years numbers have fallen to a few thousand. His
reputation suffered in the 1970s when he was briefly jailed for tax evasion
and, more recently, after a scandal in which one of his son’s wives accused her
husband of being addicted to cocaine.
Moon’s South American venture looks like a last-ditch
attempt to resurrect his sect. He still heads a sizeable business empire, which
includes the Washington Times and a university in the United States. However,
Moon’s investments in the past few years have all gone into his South American
property purchases. In addition to his lands in the backwater region between
Paraguay and Brazil, he owns property in Argentina and a bank, an estate and a
newspaper in Uruguay.
The sprawling ranch where the rivers Prata and Miranda meet
appears to be the centre of the project. Moon has called it the New Hope Ranch.
It is four hours from the nearest big city, and five miles outside the poor
farming town of Jardim. The drive takes you through shrublands dotted with
skeletal cattle, the last part along a pot-holed gravel track. "Welcome to
the Garden of Eden," reads a huge sign hanging over the entrance.
It seems an unlikely setting for a vision of paradise.
While the edges of the Pantanal were once covered in rich sub-tropical forest,
most of it has been deforested by cattle ranchers in the past decade. But that
seems not to have deterred Moon. "We will make from this a fertile haven
where birds and animals can roam," he promised followers - mainly from
Japan, Korea, Spain and the United States - who flocked to the ranch to help in
the task of recreating his Utopian vision.
Protecting themselves from the piercing sun with
wide-brimmed hats, they brave long afternoons by mosquito infested rivers,
planting seedlings in the rocky fields. "We plan to reforest these dusty
flatlands with native species and plant crops and show local farmers that this
area can be resurrected," says Cesar Zadusky, the ranch manager.
Zadusky runs the farm in Moon’s absence - for the time
being Moon commutes between his $10 million apartment in New York and a luxury
estate in Uruguay. But he has said that he hopes eventually to take up
full-time residence in the New Hope Ranch. At present, when he and his wife
visit, they stay in a small wooden hut.
Moon has already spent more than $25 million on the ranch.
The site is made up of a 3,000-seat conference hall, a temple, more than a
dozen identical dormitory buildings to house the 2,000 sect members who live permanently
on the ranch, and another characterless building for visiting devotees.
Sect members live in army-style dormitories with bunk beds
and work all day ploughing fields, building greenhouses and planting vegetable
gardens. They can be seen washing clothes in seemingly endless rows of sinks
outside their quarters. They do not speak to visiting journalists; Zadusky
speaks for them.
In one corner of the ranch an ostrich breeding farm
equipped with a computerised hatching machine has been set up. Ostrich meat is
a delicacy in Brazil’s business capital, Sao Paulo, and therefore a lucrative
product.
The ranch has a school for 300 children and there are plans
to build a university. Of the 200 or so locals who have joined the sect, most
have done so to ensure a place for their children in the well-equipped school,
which now has 250 children but aims to grow and take more than 600.
"Before we can build a heaven on earth we have to give
an education and training to the poor illiterate locals," says Zadusky.
"We are planning a university and a research centre, to bring the latest
agricultural research to local farmers."
Initially the local authorities saw Moon’s investments as a
way to boost the economy in impoverished cowboy country. Landowners, heavily in
debt, were also keen to sell their mostly infertile pasture lands, the result
of many years of slash-and-burn jungle clearance.
To appease local politicians Moon donated an ambulance to
the local hospital in Jardim and provided funds for a small airport with one
landing strip. Then, in what looked like a plan to boost his local following
among soccer-crazed Brazilians, he set up his own professional football team.
Moon said he proposed to build a giant stadium in Jardim,
where he would host national league games as well as perform mass weddings. But
the plans - along with those to build hotels and foster an eco-tourist industry
- have not materialised. And his moves to expand his territory across the
border in Paraguay have only served to heighten the suspicions of Brazilian
politicians.
"He just does not stop buying and yet his impact on
the local economy has not been that positive," says Governor Santos.
"The main question is: what does he intend to do with it all?"
Moon’s recent acquisition of 500,000 acres of infertile
flatland in Paraguay includes the river port of Puerto Casado, a town of 6,000
inhabitants. Most of the impoverished town’s residents took part in protests
against what they called a "Moonie invasion".
Once a thriving port, the town went bankrupt when the local
logging industry turned non-viable in the 1980s.
Moon has vowed he will "industrialise, fertilise and
commercialise" the poor riverside community. But the local Catholic Church
accuses the sect leader of preying on the hopes of the poor and desperate to
increase his following.
Local politicians say that dozens of luxury yachts have
docked at the river port since the sect’s arrival, claiming it is a sign that
the Moonies intend to expel locals who fail to join their ranks. They are
lobbying the central government in Asuncion to begin legal procedures to
recover ownership of the town. But it is a battle that could take years, as the
sale was made by an Argentine timber company which owns huge tracts of land in
the region and built the town to house plantation workers in the 1950s.
Brazilian and Paraguayan authorities have vowed to
investigate plans to build what they fear is "a sort of Moonlandia".
However, it remains to be seen if they will be able to counter Moon’s plans. He
is, after all, the legal owner of much of this backwater corner of the
continent.
Paradise lost
THE Moonies are not the only sect to have attempted to
colonise a whole area. Others have tried - some with tragic results.
Jonestown
AN ENCLOSED agricultural commune in the Guyana jungle on
the Venezuelan border, this cult was set up in 1973 by Jim Jones, leader of the
People’s Temple. To the outside world, the sect appeared to be both multi-racial
and egalitarian. But in November 1978, 913 of Jones’s followers were ordered to
kill themselves in a mass suicide, by drinking a lethal cyanide-laced grape
punch, after Jones became convinced the commune was about to be raided by the
CIA.
Waco
THE Waco compound in Mount Carmel, Texas, was a religious
commune for the Branch Davidians, set up by cult leader David Koresh. Wanted by
the FBI on weapons charges, Koresh and more than 80 of his followers perished
when the ranch went up in flames on 19 April 1993, after a 51-day FBI siege.
Eatonton
THE United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, led by
"extra-terrestrial" Dwight York, set up a compound in the town of
Eatonton, Georgia, in 1999, calling it their "Egypt of the West".
Main features: two 12-metre-high pyramids, a 1.6km labyrinth, a multi-coloured
obelisk and a giant statue of a sphinx, built despite protests from local
building inspectors.
Aum Supreme Truth Cult
THE Japanese Aum Supreme Truth cult, responsible for the
1995 lethal gas attacks on Tokyo subways, has some 1,600 members living in cult
communes across the country. The sect, which raises funds from its computer
software business, was reported to have around 28 practice halls and 150
accommodation facilities in 15 of Japan’s 47 prefectures by the end of 2001.
Friedrichshof
THE world’s most famous sex commune, Friedrichshof, was set
up in fields outside Vienna by Otto Muhl in the early 1970s, whereafter it
gained a 600-strong following. Muhl was arrested and jailed in 1991 for
under-age sex, but his vision of free love and economic communism still
thrives, with many of the original members living on in the compound, which
features an ornamental lake and a large block of flats. Muhl himself has since
founded a new commune in Portugal.