A Voice in the Wilderness

A Voice in the Wilderness
André Villas-Bôas has helped the Amazon's tribes protect a quarter of the earth's freshwater and its largest remaining rain forest for decades. Now, as they face their most powerful foe, the future of the planet could hang in the balance-ADAM PIORE reports

By Adam Piore
Adriano Fagundes
December 2011 Issue
22nd Annual Condé Nast Traveler Environmental Award Winner: André Villas-Bôas

In 30 years of helping the Amazon's indigenous tribes peacefully defend their lands from outsiders, André Villas-Bôas has been in plenty of tight spots. But it wasn't until 2008 that he saw the sharp end of a machete headed straight at him.
The weapon, wielded by an angry Kayapó warrior, was aimed at an engineer who had just given a presentation defending a massive dam project that the Indians feared would destroy their villages. Villas-Bôas had leapt from his chair in an attempt to shield the engineer from machete blows, but it was too late to prevent bloodshed. The other tribesmen were already upon them. Screams echoed through the cavernous gymnasium in the dusty frontier town of Altamira, as one of the bare-chested Indians ripped the engineer's neatly ironed shirt off his back, and another pushed him to the floor. The angry mob struck him with their war clubs and machetes. "Don't do this," Villas-Bôas shouted, his palms outstretched as he pushed into the scrum. "This will be very bad for you!"
As one of the founders of the leading Brazilian environmental and indigenous rights organization Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), Villas-Bôas had played a key role in organizing that day's protest against the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, an 11,000-megawatt dam that would be the world's third largest. The demonstration had attracted several thousand people to protest a project many feared would have disastrous consequences for the Xingu River, the Amazon's largest tributary and a vital source of food and water for the thousands of indigenous people who live along it. But now the situation was degenerating into just the kind of violent fiasco Villas Bôas had spent his career working to avoid.
Though Villas-Bôas would later maintain that the engineer's life was never in any danger and that the Kayapó had only intended to humble him after a very arrogant speech, others present credit the activist with defusing a crisis that might easily have ended fatally. "I thought they were going to kill the engineer," says Marcelo Salazar, one of Villas-Bôas's colleagues. Antônio Melo da Silva, a leader of the movement to stop the dam, says that the incident would have been much worse if Villas-Bôas had not intervened. "They respect him, they listen to him," Melo says.
It's a trust Villas-Bôas, 55, has earned during his 32 years fighting, in the media and in the courts, alongside the Amazon's indigenous tribes to protect-and sometimes reclaim-ancestral lands from speculators, colonizers, and ruthless and well-armed loggers and ranchers.
But today, Brazil's tribes are facing new threats that are even more insidious and intractable. Agricultural conglomerates continue to make incursions into the Amazon Basin, and the country has developed a voracious appetite for electricity to fuel its industrial expansion. Belo Monte is likely only the first of many new dams that could destroy the very lands that Brazil's indigenous populations rely upon for survival. As a trusted adviser, advocate, and middleman to the Indians, Villas-Bôas is more important to them than ever. But at stake, he argues, is something far greater than preserving the rights and traditional lifestyles of Brazil's indigenous communities: The Amazon is the source of one-quarter of the world's freshwater, the planet's largest area of remaining rain forest and biodiversity, and one of the last defenses against global warming. "The Indian lands in the Amazon are immense," says Villas- Bôas, "and they have a great impact on the world's water and climate."
The heartland for many of Brazil's native populations and the setting for much of Villas-Bôas's work is the Xingu Indigenous Park, a 6.5-million-acre preserve in the Amazon's Xingu Watershed that is home to 16 ethnic groups.
Not long after I met Villas-Bôas in the town of Canarana, 1,200 miles from São Paulo and deep in the country's interior, he made his priorities clear. "This is a short trip, and I will be very busy," he told me pointedly. With him at the wheel on a bonejangling three-hour drive over primitive, rutted roads to the Xingu reserve, I got a firsthand view of the encroachment of the modern world.
It was August, the height of Brazil's dry season. And as the final outpost of civilization receded behind us, the parched, fallow soybean fields outside town presented a vast, desolate tableau that stretched as far as the eye could see. Though the first colonizers arrived in the area 39 years ago, the land was not considered especially fertile until trade with China picked up in the 1990s and local farmers began to feed Asia's insatiable demand for soybeans. Then, in the early 2000s, large agricultural concerns realized that the terrain was perfect for growing soybeans, and the pace of development exploded. Even ten years ago, much of these monochrome plains was still covered with the impenetrable green growth of the rain forest. But for most of the ride, all I saw were the solitary burned out husks of long dead trees.
After several hours of driving, a wall of green appeared on the horizon and Villas-Bôas announced that we were approaching the Xingu Indigenous Park. The electric hum of cicadas and the whirring and chirping of birds greeted us as we stepped out of the truck. On the edges of the road, thick walls of vegetation grew 20 to 30 feet high.
The park was established in 1961, after anthropologists argued for an area ten times as large that would protect the region's many tribes from the slow march of modernity inching ever closer. But once the reserve was established, anthropologists and the government convinced many tribes to relinquish lands outside the newly established park boundaries. Eventually, farmers moved onto the abandoned lands, burned down the jungle, and planted crops. A few years ago, Villas-Bôas told me, the lush terrain we were standing on was as bare as the fields that surround it. But after he helped the Kisêdjê tribe win back some 250,000 adjacent acres, they relocated from the interior of the park and the jungle grew back around them. "These lands," Villas-Bôas said, "are fundamental for the survival of these Indians. Not only for their resources but for their culture."
Villas-Bôas pointed out that the indigenous people here also protect the environment from exploitation. "You can confirm that with satellite photos," he said. "The areas where the indigenous live are preserved."
As I looked at the barren fields from which we had just emerged, and at the explosion of life around us, I had no doubt that what he said was true.
Comprising 60 percent of Brazil's land mass, the Amazon Basin is so vast that the idea that man could ever tame it-let alone destroy it- once seemed preposterous. For much of Brazil's history, the jungle was a forbidding blank spot on the map, an impenetrable frontier far removed from the populous center of gravity of cities like São Paulo and Rio. Villas-Bôas came of age during the era when all that began to change.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brazil's military government launched a major effort to penetrate and colonize the interior of the country, warning that if land was not occupied it was vulnerable to expropriation by foreign powers. They offered tax incentives to entrepreneurs, promoted a migration of poor peasants, and carved roads deep into the jungle. It was during this colonization that many of the nation's indigenous tribes first came into public view. Growing up in São Paulo, Villas-Bôas was captivated by pictures of tribes in the news."It was a very mysterious world, and I felt drawn to it."
After college, he landed a job with FUNAI, the national organization charged with protecting Brazil's indigenous groups. He packed a knife, a Winchester .22, a flashlight, and a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls and drove deep into the jungle to teach the fierce Xavante tribe how to write in their native tongue and to introduce them to the Portuguese language and Brazilian customs.
The Xavante were eager to learn and provided Villas-Bôas with a hut in which to instruct his first students. After three months, the elders summoned Villas-Bôas to the center of the village and sat him down in front of the fire to ask him one urgent question: When, they wanted to know, would he teach his students how to build an airplane? "It was another world, with a very different cultural reference," Villas-Bôas recalls. "I was a middle-class boy from the city and full of fantasies. I loved it."

A Brief History of André Villas-Bôas's Work in the Amazon
By Adam Piore
December 2011 Issue
The Dam
Government planners originally proposed a massive hydroelectric project of up to seven dams that many feared would devastate thousands of acres of indigenous lands. A 1989 protest organized by Villas-Bôas and his allies drew hundreds of tribesmen and led the World Bank and IMF to withdraw funding.
In 2007, Eletrobras, the state-owned utility, unveiled a scaled-back plan for the Belo Monte Dam that would divert the Xingu River along a 60-mile path and flood an estimated 20,000 acres, drying up a tributary that at least three tribes rely upon for fishing and transportation. Villas-Bôas says the dam is a "Trojan horse," since Eletrobras can meet its 11,000-megawatt target only by constructing additional dams upstream.
The Man
André Villas-Bôas: Now 55, Villas-Bôas grew up in São Paulo, earned a degree in social sciences, and then headed into the Amazon to teach the Xavante tribe. He has worked to expand Brazil's protected areas, most notably helping the Panará, Kisêdjê, Waura, and Naravute tribes win back lands that were unlawfully taken from them. Known for shunning the spotlight, he prefers to play the role of strategist, negotiator, and advocate.
On his conservation work: "The Indian lands in the Amazon are so immense that their condition impacts that of the global environment," says Villas-Bôas.
On the tribes he works with: "These societies are socially complex and based on traditions that help them equitably distribute resources and live in harmony with the environment," he says. "We could learn important things from them."
The Land
Xingu Indigenous Park: A 6.5-million-acre reserve in the interior state of Mato Grosso, it is home to 16 different indigenous groups.
Terra do Meio: In 2006, after a years-long fight led by Villas-Bôas and his allies, the Brazilian government recognized a series of protected areas, including parks and reserves, that complete a "socio-biodiversity corridor" extending over 108,000 square miles and connecting the Xingu territory to lands of the Kayapó tribe farther north. This "Terra do Meio," or mosaic of land, includes a massive extractive reserve that allows descendants of rubber tappers to continue to harvest latex and generate income as their families have done for generations, but in a sustainable way. They are also now safe from the criminal syndicates that previously used force and intimidation in an attempt to expropriate the land from the tappers.
The Tribes
Villas-Bôas has worked with many of Brazil's indigenous peoples, including . . .
The Kamayurá: Nearly wiped out by a 1954 epidemic, the tribe has clung fast to its lands in the face of ranches and farms that are closing in.
The Kayapó: Warriors notorious for ruthless treatment of colonizers, the Kayapó managed to hold on to more than 40,000 square miles of forest, the most of any tribe. Now they fear that much of that land is threatened by the construction of dams in the Amazon.
The Kisêdjê: These hunter-gatherers, known for their many ceremonial songs and laments, numbered just 62 members by the time they were moved into the Xingu reserve.
The Panará: Villas-Bôas helped this displaced tribe win the right to return to its land in the 1990s and secured for it more than $500,000 in damages.
The Threats
Land grabs: Over the last 30 years, some 800 people have been murdered in the province of Pará alone, as speculators and ranchers push small farmers from their lands and clear-cut wide swaths of the rain forest. The victims include the American nun Dorothy Stang, who was working to protect the land rights of peasants.
Agribusiness: Soybean farms, where the crops are bound for China, are expanding dramatically, accelerating the pace of deforestation and causing erosion and pollution in the rivers of the Xingu watershed.
Hydropower: Last year, Brazil's electricity use increased almost eight percent, and it suffered 91 major blackouts. Many see hydropower as an easy answer, but environmentalists fear that new dams will alter ecosystems and dry up tributaries tribes rely upon for fishing, irrigation, and transportation.
João Pavese, courtesy Socioambiental

Condé Nast Traveler, dez., 2011

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