WORLD IN BRIEF : BRAZIL : Amazon Land Set Aside for Indians

President Fernando Collor de Mello took a major step toward satisfying environmentalists’ demands by formalizing the reservation of the Amazon’s Yanomami Indians. Collor’s decree grants permanent rights over 36,358 square miles of dense Amazon rain forest in the northern state of Roraima to the primitive tribe whose population has dwindled to 10,000. Decimated by malaria and other diseases brought to their traditional lands by gold prospectors, the Yanomami have been threatened with extinction. Conservationists had pressed Collor to set the reservation boundaries as a litmus test for his commitment to the environment in general.