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Edited on Sun Jan-13-08 11:40 PM by Leopolds Ghost
THE AMAZON REGION IS AN AREA ABOUT 9/10THS THE SIZE OF THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES. It reaches into seven countries, but most of it is in Brazil. According to the book The Last Forest, by journalists Mark London and Brian Kelly, about 3 percent of the Amazon had been deforested in 1980, before the international movement to curb the Amazon's destruction gathered force. Now, about 20 percent is gone. A study released late last year by the Woods Hole Research Center -- in collaboration with the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research -- used deforestation estimates released by the Brazilian government to conclude that 55 percent of Brazil's portion of the Amazon would be cleared, logged or damaged by drought by 2030.
Inside the Amazon itself, not a lot of tears are being shed over the loss.
A lot of Brazilians look at places such as the United States or the British Empire and detect a common thread: Those countries cashed in on their resources to position themselves at the top of the world economy. Meanwhile, Brazil's cities are buckling under the weight of shantytown growth and violence. So, to a lot of Brazilians, it sounds like rank hypocrisy when outsiders tell them that their own resources should be off-limits to development.
A 2005 survey conducted by Brazil's top polling organization, Ibope, found that nearly three out of five Brazilians distrust the activities of international environmental groups. Nowhere is this sentiment expressed more forcefully than in Rondonia. A lot of the politicians in the young state come from its founding industries of logging and ranching, and exploiting the antipathy toward environmental groups makes political sense. Even though Funai is part of the Brazilian government, local ranchers considered the Guapore Contact Front an extension of an international environmental movement designed to make their lives hell. Without help from the ranchers, the team often tried to turn to the ranch hands, low-paid peones who for years lived in splintery shacks near the forest and often didn't share their bosses' contempt for Funai's work.
Through the older workers, the Funai team learned that the ranches in the immediate vicinity had a long history of violent conflict with local tribes. In 1985, a bloody battle between farmers and a tribe on a nearby Indian reserve launched public debate as to whether the government should extend the reserve and limit farming there. According to the peones, the owner of another nearby plot of forested land took note of the problem and decided that if no one knew about the Indians on his land, he'd be better off. He instructed his pistoleros to distribute some "gifts" around the Indian village in the woods: bags of sugar laced with rat poison. Later, the trigger men were sent back to the Indians' area with orders to shoot anyone who might have survived, and to raze and burn any vestiges of their village.
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Days later, the team returned to the site with Vincent, whose camera was rolling when Hercules Dalafini and a couple of his employees arrived with two police officers. Marcelo and Altair explained that Funai was authorized by the courts to be on the land. But Vincent, though he used to work for Funai, wasn't on the payroll anymore.
"I want him arrested," Hercules Dalafini said ...
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After much coaxing by Vincent, Maria Elena told him that she and her husband had been hired by the brothers to clear and burn the land in early 1996. She said gunmen had also been hired to kill three Indians believed to still be living on the land. She didn't know if the gunmen found the Indians or not. Shortly after she started working there, she said, she got scared, quit and moved to Xupinguaia.
Vincent knew the information was explosive, and he continued interviewing peones, corroborating Maria Elena's story. Some said they heard that the pistoleros had chased three Indians out of the area, perhaps killing them. Vincent began to sleep behind the door of the rented room, afraid someone might burst in during the night and try to do the same to him.
"You have to be careful," the teacher told him. "People are asking about you. Don't walk around alone at night."
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"Various reports confirm that in January of 1996 the rancher hired a contractor to clearcut the area in the month of January. The contractor entered the village shooting, pulled down and burned the longhouse, and destroyed the garden of corn and squash . . . Later, a bulldozer opened an access road for the deforestation and attempted to cover up the vestiges of the village . . ."
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According to J¿lio Olivar, editor of the regional newspaper, Folha do Sul, the state's elected representatives voted, 23 to 1, to declare Marcelo a persona non grata in Rondonia.
"They said he was an enemy of progress," Olivar said.
The very idea of an individual man living completely cut off from the rest of human civilization stirred debate in Rondonia. Some people subscribed to a romantic concept of "the noble savage," which essentially argues that any contact with someone who has never been exposed to civilization corrupts an unspoiled innocence. Others believed that denying him assistance to make his life easier was itself a form of cruelty.
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Altair had discovered a nearby piece of property where some trees had been cut without permission, and he noted the sign forged in metal over the ranch gate: Property of Amir Lando. He recognized the name as that of a senator in Brazil's national legislature. Because Lando had worked in the agency in charge of doling out the region's lands in the 1980s, he was prohibited from owning land there. Altair snapped a picture of the sign.
The senator denied owning the land, and the land records backed him up -- the land was registered in the name of a relative.
By the end of 2000, Marcelo decided he needed to take a break from the pressures of Rondonia, leaving the team in the hands of Altair. Shortly thereafter, Altair received some unwelcome news from officials in the national capital, Brasilia: His services were no longer required. If he wanted to remain with Funai, he would have to do so from a reassignment thousands of miles away. The editorial page of Folha do Sul linked the decision and Altair's public squabble with Lando, who was on the Senate appropriations committee in charge of federal budgeting decisions.
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DURING ANOTHER EXPEDITION, ALTAIR FOUND A SMALL BOW INSIDE THE INDIAN'S HUT. It was too small for the fluted arrows that most of the isolated Indians in Rondonia used to hunt pigs, monkeys and birds. It almost looked like a toy -- the same kind of bow that Purá's 5-year-old nephew often toted around to practice his aim by shooting at tree trunks.
The Funai team members thought about that bow for a long time. It couldn't have had a practical purpose.
"I think he must have had a child at some point," Altair said. "Or at least there had been a child in his tribe that he cared for. He couldn't have used the bow himself. It had to be a memento. Something made to keep a memory alive."
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