O. Villas Boas, 88; Helped Brazil Indians

Orlando Villas Boas, a Brazilian explorer who gained an international reputation along with his brothers for protecting the rights of Brazilian Indians, died Thursday at a Sao Paulo hospital. He was 88.

Villas Boas had been hospitalized since Nov. 14 with an acute intestinal infection.

He was the last of four brothers who spent their lives defending Brazil’s natives against the harmful incursions of Westerners.

He and brothers Leo- nardo, Claudio and Alvaro were members of the Roncador-Xingu expedition, which was created by the government in 1943 to study unexplored regions of Brazil’s interior and to chart areas for towns, roads, airfields and other advances.

Instead, after meeting the Indians of the Upper Xingu River Basin, the Villas Boas brothers vowed to do all they could to preserve a way of life that had not changed in centuries.

Orlando Villas Boas was born in 1914 on his father’s coffee plantation near Botucatu, 150 miles northwest of Sao Paulo.

He was 29 when he joined the Roncador-Xingu expedition, which lasted from 1943 to 1960. During that time, the Villas Boas brothers helped establish Western civilization’s first contact with several Indian tribes: the Xavantes (1948), the Jurunas (1949), the Kayabis (1951), the Txucarramaes (1953) and the Suyas (1959).

After seeing the harm that roads, airstrips and contact with the white man caused the Indians, the brothers became the tribes’ most outspoken advocates.

Orlando and Claudio eventually moved in with Indians and stayed in the jungle for 32 years. In 1961, they persuaded the government to create its first, and probably most successful, reservation: the Xingu National Park. Today, more than 3,000 Indians live there, in relative isolation from white culture.

During those years, Villas Boas worked to keep other Brazilians and tourists out of the reserve and to refrain from meddling in village affairs. He also sought to keep traditional healers’ medicinal knowledge out of the hands of “biotech pirates” who sell rare flora and fauna to pharmaceutical companies in rich nations.

When they founded the reservation more than 40 years ago, “the old idea that the Indian was a beast was common currency,” Villas Boas told the Associated Press last year. “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. It was, and is, a fantastic thing, a revolutionary concept.”

The Villas Boas brothers had critics among supporters of Indian self-determination, who saw them as overly protective and paternalistic.

But their work in defense of the country’s indigenous population earned them many honors, including the Founders’ Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

Claudio and Orlando, who co-wrote at least 12 books, were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.

In 1967, Orlando founded Brazil’s Indian Affairs Bureau. In later years, he held a largely honorary position there, from which he was unceremoniously fired by fax in January 2000.

His dismissal caused a national outcry. A week later, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso apologized for the firing.

Villas Boas is survived by his wife, Marina, a nurse he met in 1963 at the Xingu Park, where she treated diseases; and their two sons, Orlando Villas Boas Filho, 33, and Noel, 27.