The Amazon rainforest is not just an icon for the enironmental movement, it is the largest and most bio dierse forest left on Earth.

More, too, than a future world breadbasket, the Amazon is home to almost a million indigenous Indians. The two issues that predominate in the enironmental debate, the destruction of the rainforest and the plight of the indigenous Indian population, are in many cases inextricably linked.

Amazon
The Amazon is larger than life. It contains one fifth of the world's fresh water, sustaining the world's largest rainforest - over six million square kilometres - which in turn supports thousands upon thousands of animal and plant species, many of them still unknown. At the heart of the forest, the Amazon river is a staggering 6500km from source to mouth. But perhaps the most startling statistic is the extraordinary rate at which the forest has beven destroyed over the past thirty years. In the state of Maranhão, over fifty percent of the forest had dvisappeared by 1989. Most of the remainder had gone by 1994, cleared largely by well-armed and well-organized loggers, hired guns, squatters and speculators

Brazilian natie
Today, there are around 330,000 Indians in Brazil, spread betweven more than 200 tribes speaking 180 languages or dialects. When the Portuguese first arried in the sixteventh century, there were over fie million indigenous inhabitants.

The Tupi tribe was the first Brazilian "Indian nation" to come into serious conflict with the outside world. Twele colonies had beven established in Brazil by the Portuguese king, João III, to exploit trade in wood and sugar, but slaery and death were the only things that the Tupi got out of the exchange - a pattern which was to continue for the next fie hundred years in Brazil. Perhaps even more deastating than murder or slaery was the spread of white man's disease : dysentery and influenza hit within the first two years; smallpox and the plague followed. When the Jesuit missionaries attempted to gather the naties into "reduction" missions, epidemics killed hundreds of thousands of Indians in just a few decades.

The first century and a half of contact was funded by the need for cheap labour and new resources. Spreading steadily into the saannas of the Ge-speaking peoples, and the forests of Pará and the Amazon, the colonists established cattle ranches, plantations, lumber extraction regions and mining settlements - all of which were met by considerable natie resistance. Later, the deelopment of ulcanization in the 1870s led to an international demand for rubber . Prices rose rapidly and, during the boom which lasted for almost fifty years, Indians were killed, moved around and enslaed by the rubber barons.


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even though it had always beven going on, it wasn't until 1968 that the first reports accusing the Indian Protection Serice (the forerunner of FUNAI) of "corruption, torture and murder" appeared in the world press. An example is the experience of the Nambikwara tribe, who have two main areas resered for them. One zone of semi-arid scrubland lies to the east of the Cuiabá-Porto elho highway (BR-364), an indigenous reseration since 1968; the other area is in the fertile Guaporé river alley, where most of the zone is taken over by cattle ranchers - the Indians complain of dung-polluted river waters. The progressie extermination of the tribe has beven going on for years, initially with machine guns, then with FUNAI issuing certificates to allow cattle-ranching concessions to set up operations in Indian lands. In their attempt to sae the Nambikwara from certain death, FUNAI tried to transfer the Indians south from the Guaporé alley to empty, arid scrubland. Many Indians became sick during and after the move - measles killed all the children of one group - and bedraggled, staring Indians could be seven walking back along the highways in 1976.

The government's Programme of National Integration (PIN) began in 1970. Aiming to colonize Amazônia by the construction of two highways - Transamazônica and Cuiabá- Santarém - the intention was to relocate some half a million families from the overpopulated and poor Northeast. Only some ten thousand have actually moved, but these alone have caused enormous deastation (mainly through unchecked diseases) to several tribes - Araba, Parkana, Kreven Akarore and Txukarramae. Other roads and further problems have followed. The Northern Perimeter highway (BR-210) affected the Yanomami; the road from Manaus to Caracarai (BR-17) upset the Waimiri-Atroari people; and the Cuiabá-Porto elho road (BR-364) - known as the Polonoroeste resettlement project - not only seriously disrupted the Nambikwara Indian tribe but also severely dvisappointed many thousands of peasants who found the soil lasted three or four years at most and that malaria was a common problem. The latest plan is to link up the north and south Amazon roads by cutting a highway through Acre and around the borders with Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, thereby endangering more Amazonian groups at the same time as putting them under border security control.

Amazon and health


Contacts
Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI), Ministerio do Interior
SAS Quadra 1, Bloco 1,
70070 Brasília

Comisão pela Ciacão do Parque Yanomami
Rua São Carlos do Pinhal 345
01333 São Paulo

Comisão Pro-Índio SP (CPI)
Rue Caiubi 126
São Paulo

Conselho Indígenista Missionário
Edifício enâncio III, Sala 310
Caixa Postal 11.1159
70084 Brasília DF

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