OUTSTANDING IN THE LONG string of tragedies engulfing much of the South American continent at one time or another since the Spanish conquest, was the near-annihilation in the late sixties of the native races of Brazil. It came as a surprise that this was brought to the notice of the outside world by the Brazilian government itself, which offered no excuses, and described with absolute frankness the dimensions of the tragedy that had taken place. Murder, said the government report, had been committed on a huge scale. No-one knew precisely just how many had died out of sight and beyond reach of help in the measureless depths of the forests, but it might have been half the Indian population. And who had slaughtered all these innocents? The government’s own Indian Protection Service, the report confessed, by the employment of gangs of professional killers. The lands thus freed were then sold off, and the money embezzled by agents of the service.
In 1968 the Attorney General, Jader Figueredo, broke this news to the nation and the world, adding the information that the ex-head of the service, Major Luis Neves, was now to be tried for forty-two crimes, including several murders. A further 134 functionaries were charged with similar crimes, and Senhor Figueredo doubted whether, of the Service’s 1,000 employees, as many as ten would be finally cleared of guilt.
According to the reports, outright brutality of the old-fashioned kind existed alongside the most sophisticated methods of extermination. Professional bravos who normally shot the victims through the head or hacked them to pieces with machetes might be accompanied or replaced by men of science versed in the techniques of bacteriological warfare. Some tribes had simply disappeared. Once they had been there in the thousands and now they were gone. Sometimes figures could be supplied. Of the recently counted 19,000 Munducurus, only 1,200 were left. The Guaranies were reduced from 5,000 to 300. Decimation had left the Carajas with 400 out of 4,000. The Cintas Largas, estimated in 1966 to have totalled 10,000, had since been attacked by an overland force and from the air with their reduction to an estimated 500. The Government White Paper detailed an endless list of atrocities:
The Maxacalis were given fire water then exterminated by the killers with machine-gun fire when they were drunk.
The worst slaughter took place in Aripuana where the Cintas Largas Indians were attacked from the air using sticks of dynamite.
To deal with the Beiços de Pau, an expedition was sent carrying foodstuffs for the Indians. These were mixed with arsenic and formicides. Next day a great number died, ‘due’ it was announced ‘to an epidemic’. Most of the Tapaunas were wiped out with gifts of sugar laced with arsenic.
Two tribes of the Patachos were exterminated by doctors giving them smallpox infections.
Pioneers in league with corrupt agents of the Service issued clothing to the Indians impregnated with the virus of smallpox, and having thus eliminated them took over their territory.
In the Ministry of the Interior it was stated that crimes committed by ex-functionaries of the IPS amounted to more than 1,000, ranging from tearing out Indians’ finger nails to allowing them to die without assistance.
These things happened during a period when the Sunday Times set out to gain ground over its competitors by an extended coverage of world events. The editor of the magazine, Peter Crookston, had liked my report on the trial in Sicily of leading mafiosi, and so he asked me to investigate what was happening in Brazil.
In Rio de Janeiro the co-operation I received was immediate and total, and there was no doubt that the daily airings in the press of the mechanisms of genocide were received with a degree of horror equalling the reaction in Britain or any other country. Huge areas had been emptied of their human population by the methods described, yet a scrutiny of the small ads revealed that ‘cleared land’—meaning those areas from which any human presence had been removed—still fetched more in the market than those where the clearing remained to be done. Among these advertisements was one by Amazon Adventure Estates couched in poetic style with allusions to monkeys and macaws and the ‘occult’ glitter of gems in the banks of ‘mighty rivers sailed by ships of the explorer Orellana’. A Brazilian deputy revealed that Prince Rainier of Monaco had bought a presumably cleared estate twelve times the size of the principality.
A single statement in the White Paper’s panorama of catastrophe astounded me in a way more than all the rest. There had been half-hearted explanations rather than excuses for the Service’s collapse based on starvation of financial backing and—in this colossal country almost the size of Europe—the demoralisation of underpaid agents faced with unthinkable isolation in their living tombs among the trees. An assistant secretary at the Ministry of the Interior spoke of the Service having to face ‘the disastrous impact of missionary activity’. A journalist friend of his on O Jornal do Brazil took me to what was left of Bororos’ Santa Criteria reserve to explain what was meant.
The Bororos had been a great people celebrated by the account of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who had lived among them for several years. Lévi-Strauss had been led by his studies to form the conclusions of structural anthropology, including the proposition that a primitive people is not a backward people and indeed ‘may possess a genius for invention or action that leaves the achievements of civilized people far behind’. Writing of the Bororos, he said: ‘Few people are so profoundly religious’ adding that they were obsessed by their relationship with the dead, a concern manifested—in the manner of the ancient Egyptians—in lengthy and most elaborate funeral rites. It is this excess of spirituality that gets the Indians of Latin America into trouble with the missionaries, who so often appear as the representatives of a material world. The Bororos, left to themselves and seemingly unable to part with their dead, bury them twice, and this custom is the emotional basis of their lives. In the first instance—as if in hope of some miraculous revival—the body is placed in a temporary grave in the centre of the village, and covered with branches. When decomposition is advanced the flesh is removed from the bones which are painted and lovingly adorned with flowers, after which the final burial takes place in the depths of the forest.
The American fundamentalist missionaries who had flooded into the country at the end of the war would have none of this, and were even able to have all such activities banned by law throughout Brazil. At this time only a single reservation maintained by the celebrated brothers Vilas Boas had been able to keep them out, and shortly before our arrival the Teresa Cristina Reserve given to the Indians ‘in perpetuity’ had been invaded by mobs of armed land-grabbers, with whom the missionaries had gone along. Thus their funeral rites were at an end, and with them, as it was to turn out, earthly pleasures of every kind. With the loss of their land the Bororos became instantly dependent on the missionaries, who forbade dancing, singing, smoking, and ‘heathen’ decorations of the body, offering in return a little work rewarded with handouts of food and clothing provided by charity organisations. By the time of our visit the reservation had become a typical forest slum. The Indians’ cows had been sold off by the agents of the Indian Protection Service, and the Indians were reduced to the normal hard-times diet of lizards, locusts and snakes. The reservation, said my journalist friend, had been divided into two farms, one run with slave labour. On this there was a mill for crushing the sugar cane, and to save the horses they used four children to turn the mill. ‘The missionaries’ he said, ‘have raised no objections to these things. “We were sent here,” they tell you, “to save souls, and this we are doing.” They started a school here which the Bororos children were compelled to attend. My paper has published instances of the young girls being prostituted, and in one case even given away. When I protested to the head missionary, he said, “She has witnessed for Christ, and that is all that matters. She will receive compensation in Heaven.”’
It was the testimony of Diego di Ribeiro of O Jornal do Brazil, and what I saw on the Santa Cristina reservation with my own eyes, that brought about the change in my attitude to these Protestant fundamentalists. Previously I had contented myself with emphatic disagreement, but from this time on I opposed, and there was nothing in my subsequent experience of these destructive sects that did anything to lessen this opposition.
No-one could have been more forthcoming in such lugubrious affairs than the upper echelons of the Brazilian police, and I was given immediate access to Federal Delegate Senhora Neves da Costa Vale, a slightly perfumed, sharp-eyed and elegant lady sent to Belen, close to Brazil’s border with Peru, to look into the matter of the near disappearance of the Ticuna tribe. She told me that they had fallen under the influence of a missionary who convinced them that the world was about to come to an end, and that they would be safe only on the estate of one Jordao Aires. There the Indians were promptly enslaved, being chained hand and foot in such a way that some had become lepers with the loss of their fingers. She confirmed the existence of an island called Armaça where Indians too old or sick to work were concentrated by Aires to await death. One extraordinary aspect of this business was that a senior police official should have been obliged to use a missionary plane in order to reach her destination in Belen.
At lower levels the police fell over themselves to offer what help they could and I was whisked away by plane to talk to a hired gunman, Ataide, who had been awaiting trial for four years for multiple homicide. He was a small man with a wolfish triangular face and a deeply depressed expression shot through with occasional flare-ups of hope. Ataide had gained nationwide fame for spectacular and much publicised outbursts of remorse. He had participated in the overland expedition against the Cintas Largas and later allowed a priest to tape a confession of his involvement in the atrocity, parts of which he was happy to describe for the benefit of visitors such as myself. The attack, he explained, had been planned to coincide with the Indians’ annual feast of the Quarap. This, lasting a day and a night, was a theatrical representation of the legends of creation (remarkably similar to our own) interwoven with those of the tribe itself, plus a family reunion attended not only by the living but by the ancestral spirits.
‘As soon as we spotted their village,’ Ataide said, ‘we surrounded it and waited for the dawn when the Indians started to come out of their huts. I got the chief with the first shot from my old carbine and the fellows finished off the rest with their tommy-guns. I have got to say that I was all against what happened next. There was a young girl with a kid of about five yelling his head off. Chico, our leader, started after her and I told him to stop, and he said, “Our orders are to get rid of them all.” We were both religious men and I said, “You can’t do this. What are the padres going to say about it when we get back?” He shot the kid through the head, then he tied up the Indian girl, hung her head-downwards from a tree, legs apart, and chopped her in half right down the middle with his machete. “What was the point of that?” I asked him, and he said, “If I’d have left her in one piece all the boys would have been at her and discipline would have gone to pot. I’m the boss here and without me none of you bastards would ever get back.”’
This interview took place in Cuiabá, capital of Mato Grosso. Along with Ataide, my police escort informed me, 1,000 criminals were awaiting trial there. The local lock-up only accommodated some fifty persons (all ages and sexes were kept together). So murderers galore on provisional liberty roamed the streets, and after the meeting Ataide was allowed to return to the sweet stall by which he normally made his living.
My investigation was inseparable from journeys to distant places, conducted for the most part by buses through unending forest gloom and early floods. The President’s report on the Commission set up to deal with the atrocities listed in lurid detail some of the felonies perpetrated by the Protection Service agents and the land-grabbers with whom they were in league. A case attracting particular attention in the press was one in which Indians in the 7th Inspectorate Paraná were tortured by grinding the bones of their feet in the angle of two wooden stakes driven into the ground. A husband and wife were singled out as having taken turns in this operation, but by the time I arrived they had vanished. ‘We suspect a spontaneous public reaction,’ a police inspector said. ‘They had few friends. I do not believe we shall hear from them again.’ Little more came out of this journey apart from a meeting with an agent who had been struck by a poisoned arrow. ‘It is a poison that compels you to laugh,’ he said. ‘You laugh, then you scream, then you die. I did not die.’ He was on a charge of setting fire to the cabin in which his aggressor had taken refuge, and in which he had burned to death.
A short break by the sea came as a relief from a blood-soaked environment and I went to Port Seguro, five hundred miles north of Rio de Janeiro, drawn to this place where the first Portuguese expedition landed four hundred years ago, leaving a scintillating account of the circumstances of a first contact between European adventurers and the innocents of the New World. The newcomers were enchanted by their reception, and Pedro Vaz de Caminha, official clerk to the expedition, noted in the minutest detail all the incidents of this encounter in a letter to the king that crackled with enthusiasm. By chance they had come ashore precisely at the spot where a number of village girls had been bathing, and, emerging from the water, they paraded quite naked on the beach, indifferent to the hungry stares of the Portuguese soldiery. Caminha was clearly on terms of unusual intimacy with the Portuguese monarch, for, as though taking by the elbow a crony from his home town, he launched immediately into a description of these ladies’ private parts. The Indian girls, he said, were devoid of bodily hair. And although it was proper for all such letters to begin with a description of the climate and produce of the newly discovered country, such prosaic details were thrust into the background in this case while Caminha concentrated on those aspects of their discovery which interested both men most. ‘Sweet girls’ he writes, overbrimming with enthusiasm. ‘Like wild birds and animals. Lustrous in a way that so far outshines those in captivity they could not be cleaner, plumper and more vibrant than they are. Their genitalia would put any Portuguese lady to shame.’ Such raptures are not to be wondered at bearing in mind the fact that in those days most Europeans rarely washed (a treatise on the avoidance of lousiness was a bestseller), and it was to be supposed that the Portuguese were verminous in the regions on which Caminha concentrated his attentions.
The Europeans were overwhelmed, too, by the magnificence of the Indians’ manners. If they admired any of their necklaces or personal adornments of feathers or shells these were instantly pressed into their hands. In later encounters it was to be the same with gold trinkets, and temporary wives were always to be had for the taking. Encouraged by welcoming smiles, the bolder of the women came and rubbed themselves against the sailors’ legs, showing their fascination at the instant and inevitable response that not even a doublet could conceal.
Indian generosity and lack of concern for personal possessions dazzled the newly arrived representatives of an almost fanatically acquisitive society. Carried away with enthusiasm, Caminha filled page after page with a catalogue of Indian virtues, before terminating the letter with the conventional recommendation of the times. All that was necessary to complete this image of the perfect human society was the knowledge of the true God. And since these people were not circumcised it followed that they were not Mohammedans or Jews, and there was nothing to impede their conversion. When the first Mass was said the Indians with characteristic politeness knelt beside the Portuguese and, in imitation of their guests, kissed the crucifixes that were handed to them. As discussions could only be limited to gestures the Portuguese suspected that their missionary labours were incomplete and when Pedro Alvarez Cabral’s fleet sailed, two convicts were left behind to complete the natives’ religious instruction.
Pondering Caminha’s letter in a later century, Voltaire formulated his theory of the Noble Savage. Here was innocence—here was apparent freedom, even from the curse of original sin. According to Caminha’s further reports and those of other early Portuguese arrivals, the Indians knew of no crimes or punishments. There were no hangmen or torturers among them, and no poor. They treated each other, their children—even their animals—with constant affection. It later became fashionable to deride Voltaire’s theory, but since this is an autobiography I feel called upon to disclose my own opinions upon this subject, and I am persistently and increasingly of the opinion that Voltaire was right.
Making enquiries in the Porto Seguro area, I learned that a few descendants of the Indians seen by Caminha and his friends still lived on precariously in the neighbourhood. It turned out that a journalist on the staff of the highly respected O Globo covered this area and lived nearby and he immediately offered himself as a guide. These Indians, now named the Patachós, were well known to him and he had reported their misfortunes in his paper on a number of occasions. They had gone to earth in odd corners of their original land, Vicente said, until the late fifties when a doctor had been sent to vaccinate them by the Indian Protection Service. He had injected them with the virus of smallpox. This achieved the desired result, and the usable land left vacant by the epidemic was immediately absorbed into neighbouring estates. That this remnant had been left in the first place to struggle on as they did was a mystery, for they had been preyed upon by ‘pioneers’ and bandits of every description and ravaged by tuberculosis, venereal diseases, malaria and influenza. But they were tough and adaptable. They grew small quantities of excellent vegetables on clapped-out earth fertilised by their own excrement, which was devoid of odour, practised a little magic, made up herbal recipes for neurotic townspeople who visited them in secret, and at worst eked things out with a little prostitution and theft.
We went to look for them on a rat-scoured patch of land the colour of iron with a railway track running through. A few scarecrow figures came up out of the ground and moved towards us. Caminha’s pretty girls might have been among them but it was impossible to tell their sex.
‘They seem unnaturally dark,’ I said, wondering if these Indians had managed in some way to come by a little black blood.
‘That’s dirt,’ Vicente said. ‘The nearest water’s four miles away.’
‘Why are they smiling?’
‘They like us. Better not let them kiss your hands.’
An old man who was blind in one eye had appeared at the mouth of a cave and addressed us in broken Portuguese. ‘Please come in, gentleman,’ he said. ‘My house is yours. The woman will bring you something to eat.’
‘As you see,’ Vicente said. ‘They are very polite.’
My first meeting with Don McCullin took place shortly after I had delivered the enormous report on genocide in Brazil to the Sunday Times. Peter Crookston told me that in the meanwhile the paper had decided that it was essential to obtain the best possible photographic coverage, and that McCullin had agreed to leave for Brazil straight away. This delighted me for I had seen some of his pictures and regarded them not as mere photographic journalism but as high examples of photographic art. Don was in his twenties, and this was to be his first assignment of such magnitude, yet although he appeared understandably nervous, he showed abounding confidence. I was sure, as was Peter, that he would put everything he had to give into the job. I took an immediate liking to him. He said he hoped that we should be able to work together again, and intuition prompted me to assure him that we would, and that we would see a good deal of the world together. This proved to be the case, for a working collaboration and a friendship followed that has lasted to this day.
On this particular trip I was surprised that such a relatively inexperienced traveller, as he was at that time, should have shown himself capable of penetrating the most remote fastnesses of a vast and relatively unexplored country, and returning with certainly the most impressive collection of photographs to have come out of it. The most remarkable of them were studies of so-called ‘unreached’ Indians, in particular that of three Kamaiuras who had never seen a white man before. They were playing their enormous flutes, eyes closed in ecstasy. ‘We speak to our gods with the sweet music of flutes’ one of them was able to explain through an interpreter.
Travel in these remotest of backwoods was possible only by missionary plane. At the insistence of the Brazilian Ministry of the Interior, one of these had carried Don to photograph what was left of the mounted Kadiweus—often referred to as the Indian Cavaliers. In 1865, the Portuguese Emperor Pedro II had appealed to 2,000 of their ancestors to save their country from invasion by the psychopathic dictator of Paraguay, and they had taken their spears and ridden naked, bare-backed and impeccably painted at the head of the Brazilian army to rout the invaders. For this they were given two million acres of the borderland in perpetuity. Donald photographed what was left of them, ‘a pitiful scrounging band’, he called them, led now by what appeared to be a grandmother on a broken-down nag, although she was only forty, and entitled as chief to wear a loin-cloth sewn with precious stones also donated by the Emperor.
At the Ministry someone had clearly blundered, for apart from their leader, all Don saw of the Cavaliers were a few sick and starving women and children who rode their skeletal horses each morning down to the mission house to beg for scraps. The missionary seemed indifferent to their plight. He was lost in a single all-absorbing task, the translation of Paul’s ‘Epistle to the Galatians’ into Kadiweu. He had given ten years of his life to this, he told Donald, and expected to finish the work in another ten years. ‘Won’t they all be dead by then?’ Donald asked.
‘Yes, they will,’ the missionary agreed.
‘Then what’s the point of the whole exercise?’ Donald wanted to know.
The missionary thought about this. ‘It’s something I cannot explain,’ he said. ‘Something I could never make you understand.’
The article ‘Genocide in Brazil’ was published in the Sunday Times in February 1969. At 12,500 words it was the longest piece ever to have been published in the paper, and such was the interest created that separate staff were required to handle correspondence and telephone calls.
The following are extracts from a letter from the Campaigns Department of Survival International, dated June 1995:
Survival International is the only worldwide organisation supporting tribal peoples through public campaigns. It was founded in 1969 after an article by Norman Lewis in the Sunday Times highlighted the massacres, land thefts and genocide taking place in Brazilian Amazonia.
Today, Survival has members and supporters in sixty-seven countries. It works for tribal peoples’ rights in three complementary ways: campaigns, education and funding.
It runs worldwide campaigns to fight for tribal peoples. Our campaigning forced the Brazilian government to recognise Yanomami land in 1992. In 1989, Botswana’s government was forced to halt plans to evict Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve within weeks of Survival issuing an Urgent Action Bulletin.
Campaigns are not only directed at governments, but at companies, banks, fundamentalist missionaries, guerrilla armies, and anyone else who violates tribal peoples’ rights. Survival was the first organisation to criticise the World Bank for its destructive projects. As well as letter-writing, we organise vigils at embassies, lobby those in positions of power (political or economic), put cases to the UN, advise tribes of their legal rights and advise on the drafting of international laws.
Survival also plays a major role in ensuring that humanitarian, self-help, educational and medical projects with tribal peoples receive proper funding. A good example is the Yanomami Medical Fund, which succeeded in virtually eliminating malaria in some Yanomami areas.
Since 1969, the ‘developed’ world’s attitude to tribal peoples has changed beyond recognition. Then, it was assumed that they would either die out or be assimilated; now, their wisdom and experience are held in high esteem. Survival has forced tribal issues into the political and cultural mainstream. This, perhaps, is our greatest achievement of all, but there are many barriers of ignorance, prejudice and greed which we must still overcome.