by Norman Lewis
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 o
f 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.
Chapter Twelve
OF OUTSTANDING INTEREST TO me was the trip commissioned by Peter Crookston to study the predicament of the Huichols of the Sierra Madre of Mexico, who had come under the threat of invasions promoted by mining interests regarding them as little more than a nuisance. This turned out to be something of an adventure.
I had already spent several months of 1969 travelling in Mexico, and had run into a band of these rarely seen Indians—befeathered from head to foot and with bows in their hands—when a bus I had been travelling on broke down in the small town of Tepic. Someone told me the Indians lived at the top of the Sierra Madre, about nine days away by mule. They were carrying out some strange ceremony that had flowed into the road, with the traffic missing them as best it could. I got off the bus, made further enquiries and stayed in Tepic that night. Here I further learned that these were the only Indians north of the Amazon who had kept intact their tribal structure and most of their ancient customs, and that they lived in the highest valleys of the sierra where they had managed to keep up the resistance to the Spanish invaders until 150 years after the conquest had been completed elsewhere throughout the New World.
I was determined to know more about these people and was directed to Padre Ernesto Loéra, the Franciscan in charge of the shrine of Zapópan, near Guadalajara, regarded as the Mexican equivalent of Lourdes. The shaman, or leader, of the Huichol people was persuaded to assist him as a healer during the annual festival. Loéra, an educated man, said the healing skills the shaman had demonstrated were phenomenal. ‘Ramon Medina uses spittle and incantations to cure anything that doesn’t call for surgery. Antibiotics don’t come into it.’ He urged me to track down Medina and persuade him to take me to the sierra. ‘Don’t forget the bodyguards,’ the Padre said, ‘also a good automatic rifle. They kill you as soon as look at you up there.’ He added that he himself always made sure to take his trusty old Winchester repeater when engaged on his religious endeavours in the local mountains.
I had flown back to London and told Peter about the Huichols. A week later I returned to Mexico with the photographer David Montgomery, who certainly had little idea of what he was letting himself in for. Having started the ball rolling with Padre Ernesto, it was now only necessary to secure the blessing of Dr Ramos, head of the Institute Indigenista, at first sight a somewhat austere if impressive figure seated behind an enormous desk beneath the double-headed eagle of the Republic. Dr Ramos looked at David’s abundant hair and black shirt with pearl buttons, and asked in Spanish, ‘Is he a hippy?’ I replied, ‘Absolutely,’ and suddenly the Doctor’s wary expression broke into delight. ‘My daughter adores the Beatles … Of course you may go.’ Ramon Medina happened to be in Tepic at that time, and an appointment with him at the Institute was fixed for that afternoon.
The shaman arrived punctually, a remarkable figure even in Tepic where there were plenty of Indians on the streets and not a few of them in bizarre regalia. He was a man of about forty with a small, brown smiling face and penetrating eyes. In his c
otton shirt and trousers embroidered with deer, eagles and jaguars, and his wide hat decorated with pendant ornaments, he dominated the discreet environment of the Institute’s office. He spoke a hundred or so words of Spanish that seemed enough to get by. We asked him if he would go to the sierra with us, and with Dr Ramos nodding approval in the background, he said, ‘Of course,’ adding that we could leave there and then if we wished. I told him we would like to depart on the first plane with free seats. As it happened, one was taking off at six the next morning, and it was this that we boarded. It proved to be a ramshackle single-engined aircraft piloted by a man who had only half his original face left. Several crash landings in areas where airstrips did not exist had resulted in extensive plastic surgery. Despite his notoriously great spiritual powers, the shaman some no more trust in providence than the Padre and some concern that neither David nor I was armed.
We landed on a tongue of tableland across a low precipice and bumped to a standstill. Here the pilot deposited us and, smiling a goodbye with one side of his mouth, took off. We were in the clearing of a forest of oaks, with orchids hanging like coloured ribbons from their branches. The shaman found an automatic pistol in the nest of feathers at his waist, held it out and I took it reluctantly. I cocked it but found that the trigger was so stiff that even under the pressure of both forefingers it could not be discharged. I handed it back and his smile saddened. He now explained that we must walk in single file, distanced from each other by about ten paces to reduce the likelihood of becoming eliminated in a single fusillade from behind one of the many huge boulders strewn about this landscape. With this began the least relaxed three days of my life, by comparison with which the equivalent time spent on the beach-head at Salerno in 1943 seemed relatively calm.
