Amazon Tribes Trust Guardian Angel

Ranchers despise him. Wildcat gold prospectors avoid him. Loggers and their gunmen have sworn to kill him.

But the Indians name their children after him.

There’s no greater honor for Reilli Franciscato, a backwoodsman who defends the Amazon’s indigenous people from settlers who would like nothing more than to claim Indian lands as their own.

The stocky frontiersman gets distress calls from places not on any map or chart. When word arrives that a tribe is in trouble, Franciscato speeds off on the Purus River in a motorboat, with a canteen, shotgun and a pot of cold rice and chicken.

The Indians may need help building a communal hut, an extra man on a hunt, or antibiotics to stop a virus from decimating a village.

“Reilli is one with the Indians,” said Issac Albuquerque, the other backwoodsman at the Labrea post. “They trust Reilli.”

Growing up in the southern farming state of Parana, Franciscato remembers being “taught like most Brazilians to think that Indians were pigs--lazy, dirty people who didn’t deserve the land they had.”

His family left the southern state of Parana in 1975 to chase a dream of a better life on the western frontier. They stopped in Alta Floresta, a rough-hewn town of gunfighters and cattlemen in Mato Grosso state, and bought farmland.

Unlike other settlers, Franciscato empathized with the Indians because “they understand the land and their place in it. And we were stealing it from them.”

After college, Franciscato took a job with the Indian Bureau in Porto Velho, capital of Rondonia. His first assignment: Expel miners and loggers from the lands of the Urueu-Wau-Wau tribe.

He organized the Indians, confiscated buzz saws, power hoses and suction pumps, and denounced payoffs to bureau officials who looked the other way when miners and loggers entered the 7,000-square-mile reservation.

One night, Franciscato went with an Indian chief to the Jamari area of the reservation to check reports of loggers illegally cutting cherry wood and mahogany. A logger extended his hand, and the chief slapped his face.

Out of the shadows snapped shotguns. “We were told to turn around real slow and walk away. We did, sweating our shirts,” Franciscato said. After they had split up at the edge of the reservation, he saw the logger, 100 paces behind, pistol in hand.

Franciscato kept walking, never turning around. “If I had turned or ran or stopped, somehow I think he’d have shot me dead. But I just kept walking at my own pace, right into town. Longest walk of my life.”

Today, the 34-year-old backwoodsman oversees the safety of 4,000 Indians spread across a jungle area the size of Idaho. When his budget runs out, usually by June, “Reilli buys medicine for the Indians out of his own pocket,” Albuquerque said.

On a $250 weekly salary, Franciscato lives in a paint-peeled houseboat on loan from the agency. He sleeps in a hammock and washes his clothes and bathes in the river. He has no television, no ice box. He reads yellowing books by a kerosene lamp.

“If money makes you happy,” he asks, “why don’t the Indians ever leave the forest?”