Brazil’s Champion of a Forgotten People Draws Line in the Sand

He’s fought off a stroke and at least 287 attacks of malaria, but even at 87, the last of Brazil’s great explorers, who opened up the country’s vast tropical interior in the 1940s and became a protector of its Indian tribes, can’t seem to sit still.

“I’m writing my memoirs,” announces Orlando Villas Boas, brandishing a sheaf of typewritten papers grabbed from a table in the middle of his study. The room is so crammed with artifacts, memorabilia and old black-and-white photos that it looks like Indiana Jones’ attic.

For Brazil’s Indians, Villas Boas’ autobiography will be just that--memories.

When the Portuguese first landed in Brazil in 1500, the huge territory was populated by an estimated 5 million to 7 million Indians. Today, there are only about 300,000, mostly living in the depths of the Amazon rain forest.

And although the government recently set aside nearly 4.5 million acres for 14 new reservations, Brazil’s Indians are facing a new, possibly final threat: a $40-billion federal plan to build roads, canals, dams and other infrastructure of the modern world in the rain forest.

Villas Boas is the last surviving brother of three who joined the Roncador-Xingu expedition that then-President Getulio Vargas ordered during World War II to tame Brazil’s interior. They were to build roads and airfields and consolidate control over the territory, known in Portuguese as the “sertao.”

Along the mighty Xingu river and its tributaries, Orlando, Claudio and Leonardo made contact with more than 100 tribes whose way of life had not changed for centuries.

With support from Marshal Candido Rondon--a pioneer who wired Brazil for the telegraph, took Teddy Roosevelt into the sertao for big-game hunting and headed the country’s first Indian protection agency--the brothers founded Brazil’s first Indian reservation in 1961, the Xingu Indigenous National Park.

“Then, the old idea that the Indian was a beast was common currency,” said Villas Boas. “But what we showed to Brazilian society was that we had made contact with communities that were at peace, full of joy.”

“I lived with them for 40 years and I never saw a mother twist her daughter’s ear or a father give his son a slap,” he added. “It was, and is, a fantastic thing, a revolutionary concept.”

Villas Boas recalled how, to join his brothers on the expedition, he insulted his boss at Standard Oil’s Sao Paulo offices, got fired and pocketed the severance pay.

That bought him a revolver, a bush knife and a ticket to Uberlandia, a town 360 miles northwest of Sao Paulo that then was “the last frontier of civilization.”

To get to Xingu, 690 miles farther northwest, took weeks.

The three trekked along bush paths and paddled 22 days by canoe to Baragoiana--”a dangerous camp of about 5,000 gold diggers and diamond hunters where they killed people every day, just like in the Wild West,” Villas Boas recalled, tweaking his goatee and chuckling.

It took 20 years to get the government to create the Xingu park, but meantime the brothers cleared an airstrip and built a medical station. It was staffed in 1963 by a shy nurse, Marina, now Orlando’s wife, who treated diseases like influenza and measles that were just a nuisance to the colonizers, but fatal to the Indians.

The brothers’ battle to protect the people current President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has called “the first Brazilians in history” was based on four points that Orlando still defends vehemently:

--Keep other Brazilians and tourists out of the reserves.

--Do not impose “white man’s logic.”

--Refrain from meddling in village affairs.

--Keep traditional healers’ medicinal knowledge out of the hands of “biotech pirates” who sell rare flora and fauna to pharmaceutical companies in rich nations.

Today, both Orlando and Marina worry about the fate of the 12,000 Indians living in Xingu and the nearby reserves of Kayopo and Gorotire that together cover an area about the size of Florida.

“We only seem to get bad news,” said Orlando. “We had a policy that gave assistance to the Indians but when we left, it became more like a policy of integration.”

First, Sidney Possuelo, a longtime Villas Boas disciple and friend, was removed as president of the government body for Indian affairs, the National Indian Foundation, known as Funai.

Orlando fell victim to government cost-cutting and was fired by fax in February 2000. His dismissal caused a national outcry and prompted at least two personal phone calls from Cardoso, the second when the explorer suffered a stroke months later.

“Orlando stayed in Xingu. He had no time to go out and create more [reserves],” said Possuelo, who is still at Funai but now heads a staff of just 14 experts responsible for locating undiscovered tribes in the 2 million square miles of forest and making sure they stay isolated.

Possuelo also demarcates native areas, in theory to prevent incursions by other Brazilians seeking their fortunes by logging, mining and farming virgin Amazon lands.

“But our demarcation signs are shot at, pulled out and destroyed--nobody respects them,” he said. “That’s why we need to follow up the demarcation with observation, but in a time of budget cuts it’s difficult to talk of setting up observation posts on every river.”

Villas Boas and Possuelo worry about the federal program called Avanca Brasil (Advance Brazil). Its $40 billion of projects include 6,000 miles of highways, dams, power lines, mines, gas and oil fields and logging concessions.

Plans for Xingu include a canal that will allow local farmers to transport Brazil’s biggest cash-crop, soya, to Amazon ports.

It will also mean dynamiting the river bank, installing locks and greatly increasing river traffic, said Dr. Bill Laurance of the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

In a recent study, Laurance and other international scientists predicted Avanca Brasil would have dramatic effects on the Amazon, home to two-fifths of the world’s rain forest. By 2020, only 5% would remain untouched, they said.

“What is worrying is the landslide of colonization that historically has followed any opening up of the interior,” Laurance said. “Brazil needs development and the Amazon needs development, just not this destructive development.”

Amazonino Mendes, governor of Amazonas state, argues the program will hardly touch the forest’s core and says environmentalists are “ill-informed and lack objectivity.”

Environment Minister Jose Sarney Jr. says that “all the studies say the Amazon must be integrated, definitively, into the national and international markets.”

For Villas Boas, the outcome is already clear: the likely extinction of the Indian.

“The Indian can only survive in his own habitat,” he said. “There is no place for the Indian in the Brazilian society of today.”