SOCIAL CONFLICT : Brazil Moves to Evict Loggers on Indian Land

When the reports dribbled into his office here last week, Benigno Pessoa Marques, an area superintendent for Indian affairs, knew they spelled trouble, possibly murderous trouble.

About 100 loggers and their families had invaded the Arara Indian reservation deep in the Amazon forest 300 miles southwest of this northern city. Such incidents are familiar to Americans mostly from old Western movies, but they occur often in modern-day Brazil.

The way the scenario usually goes, gold or the prospect of riches is believed to exist on one of the many reservations set aside for Brazil’s 320,000 Indians. Prospectors, often just local Brazilians trying to scratch out a life, illegally rush in to grab what they hope will be their share of the wealth.

This time the riches are not shiny metal but a precious wood. The Arara reservation, an area slightly more than twice the size of Los Angeles, is home to one of the world’s last remaining mahogany forests.

The invasion has pitted 120 Araras, members of a particularly aggressive tribe that had no formal relations with Brazilians until 1980, against well-armed, hard-bitten loggers.

A fight, Marques fears, is imminent. “If that happens, it could wipe out this tribe,” he said. “They could disappear.”

Twenty-one tribes have been wiped out in Brazil since 1900, by guns or foreign diseases, Indian affairs officials say.

Marques is particularly mindful of the slaughter two years ago of members of another Amazon Indian tribe. Gold miners illegally operating on the Yanomami Indian reservation killed 20 tribespeople near Brazil’s Amazon border with Venezuela.

To avoid a repeat of the Yanomami massacre, the federal government dispatched a team of Justice Department officials and federal police to remove the loggers from the Arara reservation.

The Araras, whose existence came to light in 1968 when they attacked workers and tractors constructing the Trans-Amazon Highway, fought repeatedly with outsiders, including Indian affairs officials, until a reservation was set aside for the tribe in 1980.

While government officials attempt to remove squatters from the Arara land, they will also be investigating reports that the encroachment is actually the work of city officials in Medicilandia, a frontier town of 25,000 with only one telephone that sits on the edge of the Arara reservation.

*

According to the reports, the loggers are being sponsored by Mayor Joao Batista Barbieri and City Council members with the backing of some of Brazil’s large logging companies.

Barbieri has been supplying trucks to loggers so they can bring mahogany out of the forest and then sell it to the huge national logging concerns, observers told Indian affairs officials.

Diego Pelizares, a Roman Catholic priest who reported the encroachment to officials, says several loggers have told him that they are in effect doing the dirty work for the big firms. One major logging company has set up a wood-processing plant nearby, said Pelizares, who has been ministering in the area for the past five years.

Sydney Possuelo, former head of Brazil’s department of Indian affairs and now director of the division for isolated tribes like the Arara, said such invasions continue despite strong laws against them.

“The problem is that between the law and practice there is a very big distance,” said Possuelo, who made first contact with the Araras for Indian affairs officials. “Everybody knows it is against the law, but they do it. Congress knows it is against the law, but they make exceptions.”

Indian affairs officials and local observers are fearful that their attempt to remove the loggers from the Arara land could worsen the situation.

When the police raided and destroyed much of an illegal gold-mining camp two years ago, the miners retaliated with their attack on the Yanomami Indians.

“Whether they can remove the loggers will depend on how forceful they are going to be,” Pelizares said. “Now that (the loggers) have their families here, they will not be easy to move.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Amazon Invasion

About 100 loggers and their families have invaded the reservation of the Arara Indians, a fierce tribe in northern Brazil. The interlopers are after the wood in one of the world’s last remaining mahogany forests.