by Gerard Colby
“There were two fazendas [estates], one called Teresa, where the Indians worked as slaves,” a Borôro Indian girl had testified.
They took me from my mother when I was a child. Afterwards I heard that they hung my mother up all night.… She was very ill and I wanted to see her before she died.… When I got back they thrashed me with a raw-hide whip. They prostituted the Indian girls.… The Indians were used for target practice.’60
The Borôros were in such a state of despair that the women took a secret plant that temporarily rendered them sterile.61
The litany of murdered Indians seemed endless. The Nambiquára had been mowed down by machine-gun fire, the Patachós had been injected with smallpox when they thought they were being given a vaccine, the Canelas had been massacred by hired guns, and the Maxakalís had been given firewater and often shot when drunk. “To exterminate the tribe Beiços de Pau … an expedition was formed which went up the River Arinos carrying presents and a great quantity of foodstuffs for the Indians. These were mixed with arsenic and formicides.”62
Of the 100,000 to 200,000 Indians who were estimated to be living in Brazil in 1957,63 fewer than 50,000, some anthropologists claimed, had survived. Albuquerque Lima and Figueiredo promised justice. First, the FUNAI was created, and a civilian, José de Queiroz Campos, was named its first president. Second, the Xingu National Park was expanded from 22,000 to 30,000 square kilometers. Third, three new Indian parks were established: the Aripuanã Park in western Mato Grosso and Rondônia, the Araguaia Park in the Ilha do Bananal, and Tumucumaque Park in Pará.
New Indian reserves were also recognized for single tribes. The Beiços-de-Pau were to be protected with a 3,000-square-mile reservation, and a FUNAI team was readied to enter the area to pacify them.
As for the besieged Cintas Largas, Francisco Meirelles, pacifier of the Xavánte tribe, and his son Apoena were dispatched to the new Aripuanã Park to convince the bark-belted Indians that all was now safe; they could trust their new FUNAI friends and settle near a new FUNAI post. For nine months, the Indians would resist the initial “flirtation” stage of Meirelles’s pacification campaign, ignoring his gifts of trinkets and tools. Finally, they also succumbed to love.
It was harder to trap their killers. In March 1968, Attorney General Figueiredo ordered charges pressed against members of the 1963 expedition against the Cintas Largas. “Since August 1966, the papers relating to this case have been shuffled about in an endless game of farcical excuses and pretexts,” Figueiredo stated, “to the grave detriment of the prestige of justice.”64 Tough words like these were unusual. The newest prosecutor, the eighth in the call of duty on this case, filed formal charges. The owners of the Arruda and Junqueira firm, Sebastiano Arruda and Antonio Junqueira, were not charged “as their assent to the massacre of the Indians has never been established.” But the sadistic leader of the expedition—de Brito—who was now dead and the three others who had drowned in fishing accidents or died by other means were indicted, along with two survivors. A trial would not take place, however, until another four years had passed amid growing international protests.
REMOVING THE LAST RESTRAINT
Albuquerque Lima and his nationalist allies pressed on with their campaign to reclaim Amazonian land from foreign companies. In April 1968, Brazil was startled by the news that much of the land at the mouth of the Amazon River was owned by foreigners.
Albuquerque Lima had backed a congressional investigation of foreign ownership of Amazon land, triggered by a 1967 report to Congress sent by the Brazilian Institute of Agrarian Reform. The report listed eighty of Brazil’s largest foreign landowners, now in charge of the country’s richest mineral deposits. Albuquerque Lima also favored President Costa e Silva’s decree that would restrict further purchases of Amazonia by foreign interests. At about the same time, the voice of Lacerda’s nationalist wing, Jornal do Brasil, called for Petrobrás to increase its exploration efforts to make Brazil self-sufficient in crude oil. Petrobrás officials clearly saw the Amazon connection and testily responded that some groups wanted to waste millions of dollars drilling “dry holes in the Amazon Region.”65
The issue of American Bible translators collaborating with the SPI was also raised: “In reality, those in command of these Indian Protection posts are North American missionaries—they are all in the posts—and they disfigure the original Indian culture and enforce the acceptance of Protestantism.”66
Ironically, the nationalists, with all their fervor against North American penetration of the Amazon and Lacerda’s claims that the military regime had become a tool of the CIA, missed the fact that SIL’s 1965 survey of Indian tribes for SPI’s agency overseer, the National Council for the Protection of the Indian, had been published by a division of an American research institute with known CIA ties, and that the book’s translator and editor, Janice Hopper, was the recent widow of the head of Project Camelot, Rex Hopper, whose help she acknowledged in her preface.
Operations and Policy Research, Inc., was identified as early as February 19, 1967, by the New York Times as a recipient of CIA funds. This oversight was all the more remarkable, since the survey’s publication coincided with both the publicity about the CIA’s connections and the Brazilian uproar over American corporate penetration of Brazil, including the Amazon. No questions were raised about the fact that nine of the Indian tribes reported to have been subjected to genocidal practices or outright attacks while under SPI’s custody were “occupied” by SIL:
Indian Tribes Subjected to Genocidal Attacks67
Year “Occupied” by SIL
Xavánte
1958
Karajá
1958
Kadiwéu
1958
Parukotó-Charúma (including Hixkaryána)
1958
Borôro
1959
Guaraní
1959
Maxakalí
1959
Canela
1968
Ticúna
1959
Nor were any questions raised then or afterward about SIL’s use of the words hostile and warlike to describe Indians who were attempting to defend their traditional land from invasions, including three tribes then being subjected to genocidal attacks: the Cintas Largas, the Beiços-de-Pau, and the Xikrín. Even the sheer number of tribes—twenty-four—who were placed in mapped areas that SIL had designated as “potentially hostile”68 might have raised some eyebrows.*
Tribes Placed Inside “Potentially Hostile” Areas
Júma
Cintas Largas (this “warlike” tribe was placed just below the “potentially hostile” area of the upper Aripuanã, where most of them could actually be found)
Parukotó-Charúma (SIL had begun work with one group, the Hixkaryána)
Apalaí (Aparaí)
Kayabí
Aiwatári
Guaharíbo
Kámpa (Campa in Peru)
Maya (Mayoruna in Peru)
Mandawáka
Beiços-de-Pau
Ipewí
Itagopúk
Mudjetíre
Apurinã
Bôca Negra
Suruí
Gavião
Txikão
Dioré
Xikrín
Kréen-Akaróre
Arara
Pakidái
In fact, of the 140 tribes listed in the survey, only 2, the Canela of the Tocantins River Valley and the Júma of the Mucuim River, were specifically acknowledged as having their survival endangered by current violent attacks, and then only by “local Brazilians,” not as the result of the development policy set in Brasília. In other negative reports, tribes instead were depicted as “losing the will to live” or “disintegrating” as a result of “contact” with Brazilians. And even in the Canela case, the SPI was pictured as offering “the only possible protection against further attacks.”69 Into this “confused” contemporary situation, SIL entered in 1966, the
same year the survey was published, to hurry the translation of the Bible into the Canela tongue before it disappeared with the Indians.
One area where SIL did come under scrutiny was its aviation program. More than enough Brazilians were trained pilots. “There is also lurking in the background the question of national security and foreign pilots,”70 Jim Wilson, the publicity officer of SIL’s Brazil branch, wrote Cam Townsend in April 1968.
This was a potentially explosive issue for SIL. Americans not related to SIL had recently been arrested for allegedly smuggling mineral samples out of the Brazilian Amazon, and the press was full of protests by Brazilian nationalists about Americans flying ore samples out of Indian areas, including the lands of the Cintas Largas, for American companies.
Cam moved quickly. While attending another Inter-American Indian Conference in Mexico, he met the new head of FUNAI. Next, he visited the Brazilian ambassador to lobby for a draft contract between SIL and FUNAI.
Cam spent two weeks in Rio and Brasília, building SIL’s image through a carefully planned series of public relations events, including a formal reception at the Indian Museum in Rio that Darcy Ribeiro had founded. Cam’s goal remained unchanged: to reach the people who were in power.
Success came on September 1, when Cam rode the crest of this public relations wave into the office of Brazil’s president. General Costa e Silva was not adverse to Cam’s proposals for a ministerial-level contract and sent him to his interior minister. The president’s backing outweighed any reluctance on the part of Albuquerque Lima’s staff. When Cam left the ministry, he had Albuquerque Lima’s agreement in principle to provide gasoline, as in Peru, to let JAARS fly and to provide SIL with a contract with the assent of FUNAI’s president. Cam departed Brazil for Peru, confident that “our pilots will doubtless get to fly again.”71 They did, but only after Albuquerque Lima was gone from office.
At first, it appeared that the minister was trying to back out of the accord. The ministry balked at signing an agreement with a U.S.-based organization over which there could be little legal control. For a government that was licensing an organization to operate airplanes over a vast stretch of isolated territory, the poor prospects of exercising even informal control over SIL’s activities were unsettling; using a contract to exercise legal power over its local functionaries was the only recourse. Albuquerque Lima insisted that the agreement could be signed only with the Brazil branch of SIL, not with Cam as general director of the U.S.-based parent organization. It was another example of the struggle against foreign influence that soon led to the minister’s fall from power.
Albuquerque Lima was making many enemies. While his army units built roads, railways, and bridges and established thirteen colonies to encourage development in the Amazon,72 he also seemed bent upon protecting Amazonian Indians. He set aside a 3,000-square-mile reservation in October 1968 for Mato Grosso’s Beiços-de-Pau.
At the same time, the Villas Boas brothers, founders of the Xingu Indian Park, were authorized to try to contact the Kréen-Akaróre, the mysterious group made famous as the “tribe that hides from man,” by author and expedition member Adrian Crowell. The tribe’s fierce defense of their lands just northwest of the park had, with its “no prisoners” policy toward white intruders, understandably been effective. The tribe’s territory was at the heart of an old gold mining district. The undeveloped rectangle, 350 miles by 200 miles of jungle valleys and cliffs between the Xingu and Tapajós rivers, had been left blank on SIL’s 1964 map of tribes, as if inadvertently prophesying the tribe’s destiny.
Watching the way bulldozers so easily toppled the shallow-rooted trees of the rain forest, Claudio and Orlando Villas Boas could foresee that terrible end as well. They asked only that they be funded to outfit an expedition of peaceful contact with the Indians before Operation Amazon’s road crews sparked a holocaust from Brazil’s military firepower. Already in July 1967, an incident had occurred when a band of about 100 Kréen-Akaróre decided to visit Cachimbo, one of the airstrips built by the Villas Boas brothers in 1951, which was later expanded into an Amazonian air base.
Although the peaceful intent of the Indian men was indicated by their approaching without weapons (having left them at one end of the base) and their being accompanied by women and children, their appearance out of the jungle nevertheless inspired such panic at the air base that jet fighters and troops were flown in from Belém, Manaus, and even Bananal. The troops were trained in jungle combat, presumably graduates of the new CIA- and Green Beret-inspired Jungle Warfare Training Center north of Manaus. But the local general, attempting to land, had seen the Indians near the runway, and he dived and swooped over the Indians’ heads. The Kréen-Akaróre fled back into the rain forest.73
Rather than create Indian attacks where none had occurred, the new FUNAI under Albuquerque Lima hoped that none would be provoked. Instead, it authorized peaceful expeditions to the Kréen-Akaróre and other tribes in the north, while moving to create parks and reserves to protect the Indians. To prove his sincerity and to dissipate a worldwide outcry, Albuquerque Lima invited several international human rights organizations to send their own investigators into the tribes. To the horror of the regime, several accepted.
If that were not bad enough for an interior minister’s political career in post-coup Brazil, Albuquerque Lima was probably the most outspoken member of the cabinet who supported efforts in the Brazilian Congress to restore democracy and to curtail the acquisition of Brazilian lands and companies by foreign interests, most of whom were powerful American corporations. By December 1968, this campaign had built up such a momentum that it appeared that the opposition would sweep the scheduled coming congressional elections. Fear spread that another coup was in the making. The death of former president Castelo Branco the previous year had removed the only significant restraint on the generals. When the coup finally came, it was almost an anticlimax. In 1964, it had been the left wing of Brazil’s nationalists that was smashed; this time, it was the right wing, including former Governor Carlos Lacerda, the opponent of Hanna Mining’s planned ore-export terminal in his state of Guanabara, and Albuquerque Lima. Lacerda was placed under arrest; Albuquerque Lima was politically marginalized and soon lost his job.
*Brazil and Venezuela were the linchpins of Nelson’s and J. C. King’s proposed Amazon Development Project—Brazil, because most of the Amazon basin was within its territory, and Venezuela, because its developed oil resources (something Brazil lacked and needed) could fuel the basin’s commercial and industrial development. One of Nelson’s advisers on the basin, in fact, was Dr. Harvey Bassler, a former geologist for Standard Oil of New Jersey. See John McClintock to Nelson Rockefeller, April 1, 1942, Central Files, Box 1, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs files, National Archives (Federal Records Center, Suitland, Maryland).
*Dale Kietzman, SIL’s Brazil branch director, did report a few cases of invasions of Indian lands in the 1950s and the “recent past,” particularly in the Northeast, by “colonists” and “landowners”; with only a few exceptions—notably the taking of lands of the Xokléng of Santa Catarina and the Borôro of Mato Grosso—past invasions were still referred as being part of a vague “integration” process that produced “survivors” or “extinct” tribes.
40
ROCKY HORROR ROAD SHOW
“WALKING” INTO THE NIGHT
High above Manhattan’s Rockefeller Plaza, Rockefeller family agents in Room 5600 watched in stony silence as repression, savagely modern, tightened over Brazil, decreeing by day, hunting by night. Associates of the family’s financial empire had kept them apprised in graphic detail of what was happening. Cornell University’s Presbyterian chaplain, William W. Rogers, the former director of the now-defunct Brazil-Cornell Project in the Brazilian Northeast (a victim of fear of the CIA), brought the kind of news that few American journalists, including those outside Brazil and free of the regime’s censorship, either cared to report or were allowed to.
“One
thousand leaders of the outlawed National Union [of] Students were arrested and jailed in São Paulo over the weekend,” he wrote from Rio in October 1968, two months before Brazil’s second coup of the decade. Students responded with demonstrations in every major city, but they were no match for armed soldiers. Rogers’s report was vivid:
The military police, for the most part, are swift, tough and efficient. They can also be destructive and deadly.… Some students have been shot to death in the last three months. There are times when downtown Rio is like an occupied city. The streets are regularly patrolled by elite, well-disciplined riot squads—and as occasion demands these are reinforced by mounted cavalry, water cannons and tanks.… It is clear that the government regards these students as a threat to the “national security.” In this case, “national security” probably should read “the security of the present government,” since it seems highly unlikely that these students could actually subvert and take over Brazil.…
Talk of a potential right-wing coup is common, and is openly discussed in the congress.… The present government [is not expected] to last beyond December.1
Despite dictatorial rule, the will of the students had not yet been broken. At the nationally televised International Festival of Popular Songs in Rio de Janeiro’s huge sports arena, young Geraldo Vandre sang a powerful protest song called “Caminhando” (“Walking”). He “sang of hunger and protest, of soldiers and guns, of living and dying without reason,” Rogers informed the Rockefeller office. “The crowd, mostly students … cheered and sang every word with Vandre. ‘Caminhando’ was their song and Vandre their hero.”2
Brazil’s picture magazine, O Cruzeiro, called the occasion “Vandre’s Festival.” Rogers noted the military government’s extreme reaction, quoting from Rio’s English-language Brazil Herald:
RIO DE JANEIRO (October 15)—Stores selling records were notified by the political police yesterday that they must not play for the public the song “Caminhando” by Geraldo Vandre.…
