Many Dangers Facing Native Populations
6/11/98
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Title: Many Dangers Facing Native Populations
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyrighted, contact to source reprint
Date: 6/11/98
Byline: Michael Christie
BRASILIA, June 11 (Reuter) - Malaria, poison darts and the high-velocity
rifles of drug runners and renegade loggers are not the only dangers
encountered in trying to protect Brazil's decimated native Indian
population.
"Sometimes I come home after a year in the jungle and have to pause because
I cannot remember the name of my youngest son," said Sydney Possuelo, one
of the world's top experts on native populations and Brazil's leading
"contacter" of isolated tribes.
Possuelo, who turned 57 on National Indian Day on April 19, laughed away
his lapse of memory over his five-year-old son's name. Indeed, a dark
humour shows constantly as he cracks jokes about catching malaria 36 times
and chuckles through his ragged beard at photographs of assistants with
Indian arrows poking through their shoulders but still able to walk.
He is currently trying to draw the boundaries of what would be Brazil's
second largest Indian reserve, in the often-violent Javari Valley bordering
Peru where last October he made "white man's" first friendly contact with
the Korubo tribe. It is a dangerous job contacting isolated tribes whose
only knowledge of whites has been past conflict with invading Europeans or
recent battles with "garimpeiros," as wildcat gold and diamond miners are
known in Portuguese.
"Every white man is a potential enemy. But the Indians' aggression is only
the result of constant attacks by whites. In the frontier zones the Indians
have been in what amounts to a state of war .... for decades," Possuelo
said.
He is a former president of Brazil's National Indian Foundation (Funai),
which is responsible for looking after the 300,000 that remain of the five
million Indians who were living in Brazil when the Portuguese first arrived
in at the start of the 16th century.
RESERVATION THE SIZE OF PORTUGAL
The 20.5 million acres (8.3 million hectares) of the Javari Valley -- the
size of Portugal -- contains some eight tribes, three of which have yet to
be contacted by outsiders. Once legally demarcated, the Javari reserve
should be Brazil's second largest after the sprawling Yanomami reservation
on the Amazon border with Venezuela, which Possuelo is credited with having
demarcated when he was Funai's leader.
The process of demarcation is fraught with danger. Apart from the Indians
themselves, whom Possuelo tries to seduce through the time-honoured
tradition of giving presents such as knives and mirrors, there are business
interests at stake.
Local timber merchants in the area have enrolled political allies in
Brasilia to try to stop Possuelo and police have warned him there is a
contract out on his head. "It's safer in the jungle than in the cities,"
Possuelo said with a wry grin.
"The only reason they haven't lynched him yet is because I have told them
not to," said federal Deputy Euler Ribeiro of the government-allied Liberal
Front Party (PFL), a self-appointed spokesman of the Javari business
community. He has written to the government asking that Possuelo be fired.
Ribeiro says he is not against Indians, he simply does not like the way
Possuelo is keeping non-Indians from entering the Javari and he thinks
whites are being discriminated against.
"This Sydney guy better not upset the drug smugglers, that's all I can
say," the deputy told Reuters.
DANGER FROM DRUG-SMUGGLERS
Drug smugglers are a danger Possuelo is aware of. He knows of several
clandestine air strips in the Javari Valley used to fly in narcotics from
Peru, Bolivia and Colombia for transhipment down the Amazon river.
"I will protect the Indians from whatever devil comes their way," he said.
But he acknowledged with a rare twinge of nervousness that the rifles of
his anthropologists and Indian scouts were no match for the traffickers'
automatic weapons.
Possuelo estimates there are at least 30 areas in the vast expanse of the
Amazon river basin that may still hold unknown tribes. That means another
30 expeditions, each of which take an average of two years to bear fruit,
before the extent of Brazil's indigenous population is trully known.
But resources are limited, especially at a time when the government is
desperately trying to rein in a gaping public sector fiscal deficit.
Possuelo charges that President Fernando Henrique Cardoso is not committed
to Indian affairs and current Funai managers seem more concerned with
marketing themselves abroad than with concrete results at home, a criticism
many Indians themselves share but which Funai President Julio Gaiger hotly
refutes.
Nearly 10 percent of Brazil's territory has been recognised as Indian land.
Yet, with foes ganging up against the demarcation of the Javari Valley,
Possuelo feels it is appropriate to issue a reminder to his political
bosses about what is at stake.
"The moral responsibility weighs far heavier on our conscience now than it
did on the Conquistadores," he said, referring to the Spanish and
Portuguese invaders who first took over South America and laid waste to its
native peoples. "They did to the Indians what they were doing to themselves
back in Europe, killing and massacring for profit and gain. It's not like
that anymore and we have no more excuses."
(c) Reuters Limited 1997
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE