Brazil Acts to Save Tribe Without a Name

Federal police are evicting settlers and loggers from an Amazon area that experts believe is home to one of the world’s most isolated Indian tribes, the Brazilian government said Wednesday.

Police have arrested 27 people accused of illegal land appropriation and possible genocide in an operation involving 120 officers, about 1,400 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro in Mato Grosso state.

“We perceived that this group of Indians was being systematically persecuted. We found settlements that had been hastily abandoned, with the Indians leaving their belongings behind,” said Armando Soares Filho of the Federal Indian Bureau’s Department of Isolated Indians.

Government anthropologists first detected traces of the tribe in 1998. In 2001, the bureau issued a decree banning outsiders from about 410,000 acres of rain forest to allow anthropologists to contact the tribe and demarcate a reservation.

The tribe doesn’t have a name, although it has been referred to as the Rio Pardo tribe, after a nearby river. Little is known about the group except that it has perhaps 15 members who live by hunting animals and gathering native fruits and vegetables.

The bureau discovered that outsiders were trying to chase the Indians away and destroy signs of their presence to keep the area from being declared a reservation, Soares said.

He said officials also found evidence linking the effort to local politicians, ranchers and loggers. Based on that, public prosecutors issued more than 70 arrest warrants and are investigating whether any Indians were killed.

“We found a group of men in the area with global positioning systems, chain saws, ammunition and two bombs,” Soares said. “They were clearly trying to chase the Indians out or exterminate them.”