by Paul Theroux
We hit the trail, which becomes fainter until finally, after a couple of miles, we are bushwhacking, slashing through mata de cipò—vine-infested jungle—with machetes. The men appear. They have shot one of the capuchins and a quati, which they leave with the women, and they go off again to keep looking for the pigs. We reach a beautiful spot on a little stream and stretch out on its banks. One of the women bathes, sitting in the water with her curvy back turned to us, like a Gauguin. There really is an emerald forest, and we are in it. But as we are basking in what is left of the afternoon, Uirá is stung by four wasps, and one gets me on my left thumb, which quickly swells. A hundred different things can get you in the emerald forest. The Awá are most afraid of the ghosts of the dead—the bad part of you that doesn’t go to heaven, the anger that you have to have to be able to hunt and kill your brothers and sisters the animals—who are drifting around in the forest and making otherwise unexplainable noises and are responsible for all illness, misfortune, and death.
Muito Irritados
I want to visit Tiracambu and Awá, two of the other, more acculturated Awá villages, but the already barely negotiable road through the invaded part of the TI is washed out, so I take a skiff with a two-horsepower engine down the Rio Carú, the skiff that brought Augustin do Violão to spell Patriolino as chefe de posto last night. Another reason I want to go to Tiracambu is to meet Karapiru, the most famous Awá, the poster boy of Survival International’s campaign. His family was attacked by some ranchers in 1991. His wife and son were killed, another son captured, and he was shot in the lower back but managed to escape and spent the next 10 years alone on the run, until a farmer found him in Bahia, 400 miles south. An interpreter was brought in to persuade him that he would be better off letting FUNAI take care of him—he would eat much better, and his health needs would be taken care of—and the interpreter turned out to be his son, who had survived the assault and recognized his father from the bullet scar in his back. Travassos says Karapiru is a stand-up guy, uma ótima pessôa, supercalm and unassuming. Now in his 60s, he still hunts every day, with his bow.
The river snakes east, describing the border of TI Awá, on the left, and TI Carú, on the right, another reserve, created primarily for the Guajajara, more than 8,000 of whom live there, but also several hundred Awá, including one of the uncontacted bands. The milky river is full of stingrays, caimans, anacondas, and piranhas. TI Awá ends, and the left bank becomes the domain of the caboclos, the mestizo river people who live on the Amazon’s thousands of tributaries. My driver, 20-year-old Jessel, is a caboclo, but he looks completely Indian. I ask him which tribe he is descended from, and he says, defensively, “Sou Brasileiro”—I’m Brazilian. He tells me that the caboclos have nothing to do with the Guajajara, who are good-for-nothing malandros. They have big plantations of marijuana, which came from escaped slaves in the 18th century, and smoke it ritually, to make contact with the spirits.
After two more hours Jessel pulls up to a dock, and we say hello to Jessel’s aunt, whom we find in the kitchen of her mud babaçu-thatch hut. It’s a cozy scene; apart from kerosene lamps and flashlights, a jug for filtering water, and a radio, a step away from the Indians, like a sod-roofed homestead on the American plains 150 years ago. The aunt serves us cafezinhos, little cups of sweet black coffee, and delicious little pink bananas. She radiates the kindness and unflappable calm of the gente humilde, Brazil’s poor people. It is the country’s transcendent quality. You find it even in the urban slums.
Back on the river, every 500 yards there is a stack of maçaranduba—Brazilian redwood—on the caboclo side, waiting to be picked up and taken to the buyers downstream. After three more hours we pass, on the Guajajara side, a dozen long, freshly milled and squared pieces of wood, roughly 20 feet by 30 inches by 30 inches. These must be destined for a more high-end customer, maybe in the States. The trafficking of Maranhão’s timber is going on right in the open, and nothing is being done about it. This is the reality. Logging is the mainstay here, and no one has come up with an economic alternative. The majority of the mayors of the state’s municipalities are madeireiros, and the only trees that are left are in the TIs. This is why the expulsion of the invasores from TI Awá has been taking so long. There is no political will to carry it out.
A few minutes later, we reach São João do Carú, the municipal seat and regional trading center, which is only 19 years old. Before that it was the hakwa, or hunting territory, of one of the Awá’s clans. The settlement of this region was very rapid. Teenagers cruise the main drag on dirt bikes.
I spend the night at a flophouse for ranch hands, and in the morning Cicero Sousa, who runs people and supplies to FUNAI’s posts around the state, shows up in the same spanking-new silver Mitsubishi with unreal off-road capabilities that he drove me down from São Luís in, and we set off for Tiracambu with João Operador, the third of Juriti’s rotating chefes de posto, who is coming along to replace a broken grindstone. After hours of nothing but pasture and cows—and Cicero at one point saving our lives with a last-minute swerve that avoids a head-on collision with a huge truck barreling around a blind curve on the single-lane paved road—we reach the Rio Pindaré, which describes the southern border of TI Carú. The 550-mile railroad to the Carajás iron mines runs along it through what was Awá land. Survival International prevailed on the World Bank and the European Union, which were lending more than $1 billion to Vale do Rio Doce, the company that was building the railroad and developing the mines, to make it a condition that all indigenous tribes’ land in the Carajás railway corridor be demarcated. This resulted in the creation in the early 1980s of the half-million-acre TI Carú and the million-and-a-half-acre TI Alto Turiaçu, to the northwest, which some 50 Awá share with the Ka’apor and the Tembe. Carú and Alto Turiaçu were not contiguous. Between them was what eventually, in 2005, became TI Awá, whose creation was fought every step of the way and dragged on for 20 years. It was at various times going to be about 500,000 acres, then around 130,000, and finally ended up being about 289,000, by which time much of it was devastated.
Every couple of miles there is a little povoado, a town along a railroad that sprang up as people who worked on the tracks brought their families, and then others came, too. A lot of Awá were killed by these settlers. Now the povoados have streets and houses and stores with electricity and running water. We stop at one so I can buy ammo for the Awá of Tiracambu, which I have to do because Cicero and João Operador can’t. This is one criticism I have of FUNAI. It converts the Indians from bows to guns, which makes hunting much easier, but then the game gets depleted, and after a few years the hunters have to make, in the case of the Awá of Juriti, a day’s lope from the village before they can find a tapir or a peccary. Equally insidiously—and in the long run of dubious benefit—the conversion forces them into the cash economy, because they have to have ammo. FUNAI provided the Indians with ammo until last year, when, perhaps fearing their increasing militancy, or to save money, the Brazilian legislature enacted the Indigenous Peoples Disarmament Act. The Indians can keep their guns, but they have to buy their own ammo, and the only way they can do this is by selling their trees to the madeireiros, in the process selling themselves down the river. Putting the Indians in this situation does not seem to have been very well thought out, or humane, or in the best interests of the people FUNAI is supposed to be there for. It brings them into the economy, which they were doing fine—even better—without, then it leaves them high and dry. This is why I have to spring for the ammo, a prerequisite for any visitor. I had to buy some for the Juriti Awá, too, so they can kill more animals and continue to upset the equilibrium they had with their ecosystem when they used bows. But to ask the Awá to go back to bows is no more realistic than asking people in the modern world to give up their cell phones.
A few settlements later, Cicero turns onto a path that goes through the bush down to the river. Tiracambu’s chefe de posto, José Ribamar Silva Rocha, is waiting on a sandbar with a skiff to
pole us across. We walk up a ways to the posto, which has electricity from a line across the river. The modern world is right on the other side: every hour on the hour, 24 hours a day, a two-mile-long train whose cars are heaped with iron ore destined for Europe and China passes. It is a terrible, grating noise. The Awá call it “the Train of Fear” because it has scared all the animals away.
José has an old-time European face and in his black Wellingtons and with his hair in a little ponytail he looks like a character in a Thomas Hardy novel. He tells us that for three years two brothers, Aoréh and Aoráh, lived up the hill. Nobody knew what tribe they belonged to. They spoke uma lingua desconhecida—an unknown language. Maybe they were isolados from around Paragominas. There were several groups until the ranchers wiped out all the forest. Aoréh died in São Luís of cancer of the stomach, and Aoráh is up in Awá Guajá, the Awá village in TI Alto Turiaçu.
After dinner Tiracambu’s leadership, half a dozen young men and a few girls in their late teens and early 20s, come from the village, and Cicero tells them why we are here. I am a journalist from a place very far away called America—it would take at least two years to walk there—and would like to meet Karapiru. And João Operador has brought a new grindstone for the rice huller, the machine that takes the chaff off the grains of dry rice these Awá grow.
Several of the young leaders have three horizontal black lines from the juice of the genipap tree painted on their cheeks, Guajajara warrior lines, which many of the young Brazilians who have taken to the streets are wearing, except that they are green. These slashes apparently migrated from the Guajajara to the national society and have been the insignia of Brazilian protests since 1992.
In the morning, João Operador tries to change the grindstone and discovers it’s the wrong size. The young leadership comes from the village with the answer to our petition. We gather on the porch of the posto, and one of them, who is wearing a monkey-claw necklace over his T-shirt, says no visiting brancos will be allowed into their village or to talk to Karapiru until we talk to Soteiro. Hélio Soteiro, who also came with us to Juriti, is the FUNAI officer in charge of the four Awá settlements and the three isolado groups. He answers to Travassos—he’s Cicero’s boss—and is based in São Luís. Cicero says he has conjunctivitis, which is very contagious to the Indians, so he can’t come to see them until it clears up. Plus he is in charge of the operation to expel the invasores from TI Awá—his main preoccupation at the moment.
“We are going to sell our rifles,” the leader tells us. “What good are they? Because we don’t have ammunition and we don’t want to sell our trees like the Guajajara are doing.” I show them the three boxes of shotgun shells I have brought for them. They are the wrong caliber. These Awá have 12-gauge shotguns, and the Juriti hunters have 20-gauge ones. So my offering does not sway them. The leader continues to enumerate their grievances. They don’t have gas for their chainsaw and generator, and there are six more things. So that’s that. “They were muito irritados,” Cicero says as we head out in the truck.
These Awá boys have been learning about militancy and activism from the Guajajara. FUNAI’s popularity in Tiracambu is clearly not high at the moment. Already the young leadership has thrown out the Catholic missionaries of CIMI, the Indigenous Missionary Council, after deciding that their presence was, all in all, not good for the Awá—the services its missionaries were providing had a hidden agenda, to get them to renounce their animism and their own big guy in the sky, Maira, and to come to the Lord and be saved from eternal hellfire.
FUNAI’s popularity is even lower in the other village, Awá. The young leadership there is even more irritado. A few days ago a woman in the village died of visceral leishmaniasis, which is fatal unless treated promptly and properly, and it wasn’t. So they have taken one of FUNAI’s vehicles as compensation for her preventable death. Cicero thinks there’s no point in schlepping over to Awá, because it would be like walking into a hornets’ nest. According to Uirá Garcia, the village’s 150 inhabitants are divided into the progressives, who are militant and fighting for their rights, and the traditionalists, who are even more traditional than the Awá of Juriti. They go off into the forest for two or three months at a time.
While we are pondering our next step, Cicero gets a call from Soteiro and announces that the mission is aborted. We have to return to the posto de vigilância immediately. The posto de vigilância was built six months ago at the entrance to TI Awá and is where the expulsion operation, if it ever happens, will be run out of. Things are heating up. Four truckloads of invasores have gone to São Luís to protest to their deputado about their impending eviction. They’re asking that 8 of the 12 miles they’ve invaded be given to them—there’s nothing left of the forest, so what good would they be to the Indians?—claiming that where they are isn’t in the TI anyway, and demanding that the whole thing be resurveyed. This is what happened in 2011 when the government issued the decree to dismantle their houses, fences, roads, and other works: the invasores made a lot of noise and threatened violence, and the government backed off. We have to go back because there are only two people at the posto, and Cicero has to supervise the repairing of the road so Salgado—who is on a tight schedule and can’t take the river—can get out.
I was hoping to interview some of the invasores, but Cicero doesn’t think this is the moment. It could be dangerous because they are superirritados. It sounds like I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, and another Amazon adventure has concluded. Cicero drops me off at a place where I catch a van to São Luís, and from there I fly down to Rio, my 10 days among the Awá already seeming like a dream—but an unforgettable one.
Cult of Progress
My thoughts keep returning to the isolados. How unified are they in their resolve to have nothing to do with the modern world? Do they have arguments about what to do? Their conversations, their campfire stories, must be very interesting.
In March, a FUNAI team went up the Igarapé Mão de Onça to check on the isolados there for the first time since 1997, when there were nine of them, and found evidence—a recent fire and a lean-to with fresh babaçu fronds—suggesting they were still there. In June, the team went back and could find no sign of them, but discovered new logging trails only a few miles away. Leonardo Lenin, the leader of the FUNAI team, fears the worst.
Back in Brasília, there are encouraging signs that Justice Minister Cardozo may enforce the expulsion decree. In June, 300 soldiers and 46 vehicles were brought in to shut down the madeireiros in TI Alto Turiaçu. Seven illegal sawmills were decommissioned, and thousands of logs were destroyed. Cardozo says the soldiers will next be moved to TI Awá and reinforced with the troops who carried out the long-delayed and only partially successful expulsion of the invasores from the Xavante’s territory last year. Operation Awá, the eviction of the 1,500 families, will be carried out by the end of the year.
I hope so. I would love to come back and learn more about the Awá’s amazing cosmology and record the birds and the monkeys and their flawless imitations of them. Brazil can’t afford to lose the Awá. Mankind can’t let any of these last tribal people who live off the bounty of their forest, reef, or desert and are an integral part of their ecosystems, along with all the other species, disappear. These last 350 Awá are precious. As Octavio Paz observed, “The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.”
GARY SHTEYNGART
Maximum Bombay
FROM Travel + Leisure
IT’S 5:41 A.M. and I’m headed from the airport into the city formerly known as Bombay. In the next two weeks I will hear its current name, Mumbai, spoken exactly zero times, so I’m going to stick to Bombay. Bleary-eyed and tired after 15 hours aboard Kuwait’s intriguing and completely dry national airline, I am staring at the ramshackle temple by the side of the road with these beg
uiling words stretched across its façade: Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known god.
What the hell does that mean?
We are puttering down a series of dying streets and highways in a tiny, ancient Fiat that would have made an East German Trabant look sturdy, dodging an obstacle course of mopeds, fellow Fiats, and the occasional resigned-looking bullock. Suddenly I am feeling spiritual. My usual liberal arts agnosticism is difficult at a time like this. I want to trust in a known god for the duration of my stay in the city. In short order, we pass by the Status Refine Gourmet, the Palais Royale skyscraper, and the Happy Home & School for the Blind. A sign instructing the reader of THE SYMPTOMS OF MALNUTRITION (“If your child complains of constant lethargy perhaps malnutrition is to blame”) hangs next to a gleaming Porsche dealership. I am silent, and a little stunned. My driver is honking every other second, as is everyone around him. But it feels less like a plea to get out of the way than an affirmation of one’s existence. The honking says I’m here! Which is what everyone in this impossible, ridiculous, and addictive city wants you to know. They’re here! And they’re coming right at you.
