Shield for a Stone Age People

Last month, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved $325 million to help write off debts owed the United States by developing countries, on one condition: that the countries make better efforts to protect their rain forests. And last week President Clinton promised to push for Senate ratification of a stalled international treaty to combat deforestation. It’s all part of a renewed drive in Washington on behalf of the world’s rain forests, most of which lie in Brazil, home to half of all the plant and animal species on Earth.

But in addition to protecting Brazilian animals and plants, Washington should extend a helping hand to the Yanomami Indians, the world’s largest surviving Stone Age tribe.

When El Nino-stoked fires nearly destroyed the Yanomami’s villages last week, their shamans saw the “great smoke” as a sign of doomsday. But ancient tradition alone did not inspire the shamans’ dark prophecy; international aid experts say that unless the Yanomami get help soon their future will be as dark as the skies.

The most immediate threat is malaria, which in the last three months has infected 1,226 of the 9,500 Yanomami in Brazil and brought the tribe’s infant mortality rate to 24 times that of the United States. Introduced by settlers who have entered the tribe’s reservation illegally, the disease is expected to spread further as El Nino-related droughts force villagers to rely on a few stagnant pools where malaria-carrying mosquitoes breed.

Brazilian laws grant the Yanomami 22 million acres, a huge swath of land for 9,500 people, which understandably frustrates the more than 60,000 Brazilians who settled near the Yanomami’s reservation in the 1990s and are pressing to expand onto the reservation. Tensions have been heightened by reports that the land is rich in minerals, including gold and diamonds.

Clinton and Congress cannot do much to thwart the lust of gold diggers. But by linking U.S. debt forgiveness to Brazil’s enforcement of its own tribal protection laws, Washington could help spare the Yanomami the persecution that North America’s own native peoples endured in a hunger for land a century earlier.