The Amazon's Indian wars

The Amazon's Indian wars
Brazil's Indians

Jan 15th 2004 | BOA VISTA From The Economist print edition

AFP

A battle over an Indian reservation encapsulates the arguments over whether and how to develop the Amazon
THE Amazonian state of Roraima has a whiff of impending civil strife. Earlier this month, foes of a proposed Indian reservation blocked roads leading to Boa Vista, the state's capital, and occupied the offices of the agencies for federal agrarian reform and Indian affairs. The dispute has not only polarised Roraima. It also sheds light on wider struggles between environmentalists and enthusiasts for traditional culture on one side, and advocates of economic growth on the other.
Brazil is dappled with Indian reservations. These are often vast tracts containing few people but abundant resources, from wood to gold to water. The land and what lies beneath it belong to the federal government, but the Indians control access and economic activity. Most outsiders who care about such things consider this fair. Reservations look like bulwarks against forces that might imperil both the Amazon, where the biggest ones are, and the rights of a weak minority. This view has powerful supporters, such as international NGOs and Brazil's Catholic church.
But to farmers, miners and lumbermen, this looks like a conspiracy to thwart development. Paulo Cesar Quartiero, a rice planter, says the controversial reservation in Roraima is an act of "extermination", missing only the crematoria. Though arguments over resources can often be bloody (a score of Indian leaders are thought to have been killed last year for their wealth) they are usually local. This dispute, however, is rousing an entire state.
The trigger is the impending declaration by Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of a new indigenous territory covering 8% of Roraima, the 1.7m-hectare (4.2m acre) Raposa/Serra do Sol. "Disintrusion" must follow. That means removing the non-Indian population of several villages and a small town-the number of people is disputed-plus several large rice plantations, Mr Quartiero's among them.
To its advocates Raposa/Serra do Sol is restoration, not expropriation. For decades, the area's 15,000 Indians have been trying to reclaim their land from miners and farmers, who brought drink, dirt and prostitution. Manuel Tavares, of FUNAI, the federal Indian agency, brandishes packages of agricultural poison that he says were found on one of the rice farms. The final cleansing will come when the reservation is ratified.
That prospect evokes little sympathy in Boa Vista, home to over half the state's population. The local mascot is not the indigenous Brazilian but his arch-enemy, the garimpeiro, who polluted and mined what are now Indian lands for gold and diamonds from the 1930s to the 1980s, and now survives largely as a gold-tinted monument in Boa Vista's main square. The governor, Flamarion Portela, complains of administering a "virtual state", where half the land is Indian and most of the rest is controlled by a federal agency. This frustrates dreams of partaking in Brazil's soyabean boom, and of exploiting road links to Venezuela, Guyana and beyond.
Boa Vista has an ethnically charged atmosphere more characteristic of the Balkans than of Brazil. "People either like Indians or hate Indians," says Ana Paula Souto Maior, a pro-Indian lawyer. "There is no middle way." The idea of putting parts of the state off limits to non-Indians seems unBrazilian to many.
Yet some Indians are among the most vociferous critics of the reservation in its proposed form. The reservation's supporters claim that these critics are in the pay of the rice planters, but the critics themselves say that the church and the NGOs are foisting on them a simplicity and isolation Indians no longer want. Instead they want "TVs, cars, everything", says Gilberto Makuxi, president of Arikom, an Indian group. If Raposa goes ahead as planned, he adds, "there will be a war among us."
The state's gravest problems are self-inflicted. Its population exploded from 41,000 in 1970 to 360,000 today. Minerals lured some, but many came for government jobs and subsidies. Half the workforce is on a government payroll. Many are being dismissed, partly because it emerged that some were hired so that politicians could skim off their salaries. This is not an economy that can shrug off the loss of the bulk of its rice farming, an industry accounting for 10% of state income.
The planters and their Indian allies want to exclude plantations, roads and settlements from becoming part of the reservation. Mr Portela hopes the federal government will turn over non-Indian federal land to the state. But that would not save Mr Quartiero's plantation. Backers of Raposa hope the fight will end once the reservation is declared. Its opponents say that is when it will really begin.

The Economist, 15/01/2004