Brazil and the Charges of Genocide Against its Indigenous Population

Seth Garfield

International Security Studies at Yale University

January 1995

In responding to initial reports of the massacre of Yanomami Indians by goldminers in August, 1993, Brazilian Attorney General Arisitides Junqueira charged "the multiplicity of homicides of a determined ethnicity is, without doubt, genocide." Revolted, he vowed to undertake a rigorous investigation to prosecute those responsible. Others concurred in Junqueira's assessment but doubted the Brazilian government's capability or very commitment to protect the rights of its indigenous peoples. Representatives of twenty-five American human rights and environmental groups addressed a letter to Brazilan President Itamar Franco expressing dismay over the massacre and calling for justice for the Yanomami. The president of the Brazilian chapter of Amnesty International, Carlos Alberto Idoeta, condemned the "silent genocide" of Brazil's Indians whose "criminals count on the tolerance if not the complicity of the State." Protests were held in Rio de Janeiro, Geneva, London, New York, Washington and Paris. ₁

To be sure, the Brazilian government's public relations' image had taken a beating that month: the Yanomami episode came on the heels of the murder of eight street children by police officials in front of the main cathedral in Rio de Janeiro which had likewise caused an international uproar. Sensitivity to worldwide opinion concerning Indian policy galvanized the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations, Itamarati, to brief embassies around the world regarding facts surrounding the Yanomami massacre and its investigation in order to deflect criticism. Although pleased by the lack of "sensationalism or excesses in foreign coverage," Itamarati acknowledged that "repercussions to facts like this always exist." ₂

One such "repercussion" in the minds of many Brazilian military officials, in particular, concerned the characterization of the massacre as a "genocide" by Attorney General Junqueira and other critics. Indeed, one might speculate that the usage of such strong terminology by Junqueira, a government official, stemmed from a power struggle over Yanomami affairs between the judiciary, legally entrusted with jurisdiction over Brazilian Indians, and the military seeking to maintain leverage over the fate of indigenous peoples in border or "national security" areas. Apart from its graveness, the denunciation displeased military officials because genocide, in their mind, could only refer to policies perpetrated against a "people" or "nation," while national legislation defined Indians as "populations" comprising part of the overall Brazilian citizenry whose lands are territory of the federal government. ₃

Indeed, such denunciations coupling with and fueling on-going discussions regarding Indian self-determination -- endorsed by an initial draft of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 1993 -- fed the military's long-standing fear about threats to Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon region. ₄ In this spirit, seeking to brush aside criticism and scrutiny, military officials decried genocide charges as "precipitous and inopportune." ₅

A subsequent investigation undertaken by the Federal Police concluded that the massacre, although perpetrated by Brazilian goldminers, had in fact occurred across the border on Venezuelan territory and that the dead numbered eighteen, not seventy-three as initially alleged by the government's Indian bureau, FUNAI. The Brazilian government could now proceed merrily along in administering its indigenous policy -- notwithstanding sore losers in Roraima, where the Yanomami reservation is located, who grieved that the incident cost the state $2.3 million in loans from the World Bank, canceled as a result of international flack over reports of the massacre. ₆

In fact, however, far from incidental, genocide charges have dogged the Brazilian government for over two decades and it is unlikely they will disappear in the future either. This paper places the origins of the denunciation in a crisis in the Brazilian state which occurred decades earlier, and traces the trajectory of the accusation, the sources of its longevity, and the government's role in both contributing to and combating it. It seeks to demonstrate that the outrage of certain government officials at the accusations has stemmed not only from opposition to indigenous self-determination but from challenges to myths about indigenous policy. Such practices have derived, in no small part, from timeworn notions about Indians which, behind menaces and snarls, have been shared by Brazilian state elites and critics alike.

Decades earlier, during United Nations discussions regarding the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Brazilian government little suspected that one day it would stand accused of the same atrocities. Drafted in 1951 and subsequently approved by 83 member nations, including Brazil, the Convention defined genocide as acts perpetrated with the intention of destroying, partially or totally, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group through measures such as killing members of the group; inflicting grave damages on the physical or mental integrity of the group; intentionally submitting the group to conditions of existence leading to their partial or total physical destruction; and measures designed to impede births among the group or to forcibly transfer children from one group to another. ₇ Patting itself on the back and wagging its finger at others, the Brazilian government noted in Brazil, fortunately, the problem of genocide doesn't exist, because a nation of Christian formation, never had, in the sphere of its leaders or its populations, moments of such grave perturbation that might cause the crime of genocide. Furthermore, as state officials exulted, Brazil "through its example in its conduct in relations to the human person for the protection of all humanity" was participating in worldwide efforts "destined to avoid and to suppress the horrifying crime." ₈ Consoling themselves, Brazilian elites reasoned that if the modernization of the United States was elusive, so too was its legacy of lynchings and de jure racial segregation; if Nazi Germany's economic progress escaped the nation, so too did its racist ideology and atrocities.

In showcasing its racial relations to the world, the Brazilian government further disseminated the ideal of a multiethnic utopia or racial democracy purportedly underpinning the nation-state. The theory posited that a mixture of Portuguese conviviality and salaciousness, Indian hospitality, and black sensuality and servility, heated to perfection in the tropical sun, guaranteed the success in Brazil of a new experience in racial harmony. ₉ Most influentially propounded by Gilberto Freyre, an intellectual whose writings dated back to the 1930s, the myth of racial democracy's weight and perdurability in Brazil rivals that of the "self-made man" in United States national lore. ₁₀ Government ideologues during the nationalistic regime of Getulio Vargas (1930-45) particularly elaborated on these ideas in an effort to forge myths of national origin and exceptionalism. ₁₁ Boasts of interracial harmony in a world riven by racial and ethnic hatreds quickly captivated international attention. In 1950, UNESCO decided to undertake a study of Brazilian racial relations which further reinforced elites' beliefs in the sanctity of racial democracy -- even if the results of the U.N. and subsequent studies ultimately highlighted the pervasiveness of discrimination against non-whites. ₁₂

The role of the Indian was fundamental, in the mindset of Brazilian elites, in constructing racial democracy and social harmony. Hadn't the Portuguese sought assistance and guidance from the Indians in settling this strange land? Where else could the origins of Brazilianness be found but in Òthe womb of the indigenous woman, the first breeding stock of our nationality, initiating in this way one of the richest experiences in racial miscegenation which the world knows.Ó ₁₃ Didn't the origins of the "cordial man" -- upheld as "a specific trait of Brazilian culture" -- derive from the sum of the "'natural goodness' of the Indian added to that of the black, and the 'sentimental idealism' of the Portuguese? ₁₄ Indians had brought "to the formation of our people" the qualities of "resistance, bravery, generosity, and modesty. . .what we consider precious, as much in the past as it still is in the present." ₁₅ Small wonder a number of Brazilians proudly claim descent, according to a popular saying, from an Indian grandmother "caught by the lasso" of her seducer. Perhaps it is no surprise that given their belief in the uniqueness of the nation's racial relations, Brazilians would also believe their government's indigenous policy to be extraordinary as well. Since its establishment in 1910, the Servico de Protecao aos Indios (Indian Protection Service -SPI) had boasted of its valiant efforts to redeem the Indians --oppressed by missionary, loathed by frontier settler, and undervalued by fellow Brazilian -- and to insure their integration into the national polity. Under the influence of its founder, Candido Rondon, and his fellow positivists, the SPI preached that through moral suasion, technical instruction, and civic education, the Indians would gradually be transformed into generic Brazilian citizens. Legally defined by the Civil Code of 1916 as "relatively incompetent," Brazilian Indians were entrusted in 1928 to the wardship of the SPI which viewed them as children to be remolded by the agency's paternalistic policies. While urging patience and respect for the culture of the Indian -- enshrined as the primeval Brazilian citizen -- the SPI never wavered in its faith that Indians would and should ultimately abandon their traditional culture for the boons of "civilization." ₁₆

The SPI upheld its practices towards the Indians as pioneering and humanitarian, in contradistinction to the misdeeds of other American republics, missionary groups, and foreign meddlers. Unlike the 1887 Dawes Act of the United States which had sought to promote individualistic landholding patterns through allotment, Brazilian legislation, the SPI often repeated, safeguarded the integrity of indigenous lands as essential for an Indian community's socioeconomic and cultural well-being. Within Brazil, the SPI contrasted its enlightened policies with those of its arch-enemies: missionaries. Exhorting respect for the "fetishists'" world view, the SPI decried the transmogrification of the Indians' proud and valiant character by missionaries deprecating native beliefs. When the SPI believed others -- such as the predominantly Italian clergy in the Salesian Order -- of being imbued with "racial prejudices against Indians and against Brazil," or incapable of "giving to the Indians feelings of Brazilian nationality," or in any other way encroaching upon its territory and detracting from its symbolic capital of nationalizing Indians, the agency fired salvos. ₁₇

For example, in the 1930s, SPI officials had complained of foreign expeditions to the Indians which "propagate about our nations and its inhabitants, above all the savages, legends and graceless fantasies which are more than not accepted because they come from foreigners with the label of experts." ₁₈ Sensationalist articles, published by foreigners visiting "under the guise of having scientific and humanitarian purposes," in many cases maligned "both the Brazilians and the aborigines," hardly mentioning that the "Brazilian government did all in its power to help the expedition." ₁₉ In part valid, such criticism also reflected, however, a lingering sense of shame and resentment that until Rondon's forays in the backlands around the turn of the century,

we, the Brazilians, were the ones who had the least authority to speak about the Indians of Mato-Grosso, of whom we had litte or almost no knowledge about; the only ethnographic studies from which we had notions about these jungle-dwellers were written by foreigners, among whom were Drs. Karl von der Steinen, Paul Ehrenreich, and Max Schmidt. ₂₀

Asserting now its primacy and know-how over indigenous affairs in its publications and pronouncements, the SPI touted its exceptionalism.

There were many who concurred, further flattering the SPI's inflated ego. An article published by the Pan-American Union in 1937 deemed Brazil's efforts to protect its indigenous population "outstanding" in relation to other American republics, praising the "chief asset of the Service (SPI) that neither racial, religious, nor social prejudice has any place in the philosophy that it embraces." ₂₁ If based on a purely administrative or legalistic comparison with other Latin American nations, such praise was not unbecoming. Venezuelan legislation, dating back to 1915, placed complete control over indigenous lands and welfare in the hands of missionaries; the Colombian government did not create a special bureau to administer indigenous affairs until 1960. ₂₂ A beacon to other nations, Brazilian legislation respecting the Indians' right to preserve their cultures had impressed the League of Nations and "greatly inspired" Convention 107 of the International Labor Organization of 1957 which "approved recommendations to orient the indigenous policy of all nations with indigenous populations." ₂₃

Foreign admiration of Brazilian indigenous policy swelled government officials with pride, solicitous of praise for the nation's (invented) democratic traditions. In fact, intellectuals in the 1930s sought to credit the emergence of European liberal ideals to Brazilian Indians who had provided political philosophers with an alternative model to challenge the naturalness of their hierarchical societies. ₂₄ Teeming with elaborate legislation, juridical safeguards and constitutional guarantees, Brazilian legal history was marred by their systematic violation and disregard. Nevertheless, Brazilian elites sought to affirm their enlightenment and to rub shoulders with other "civilized" nations -- embodied in the popular Brazilian expression "para ingles ver" or "for the English to see." Interestingly, the very adage originated, according to a widely held theory, in double-talk about Brazilian racial relations, namely the efforts of nineteenth-century slavers to deceive British authorities who had banned the international slave trade by disguising boats continuing to bring African captives to Brazil. ₂₅ The SPI, beneath its elaborate ideological raiment, was no exception to the rule, sucked into the abyss dividing the letter of the law from its enforcement in Brazil.

Notwithstanding the agency's ethnocentric presumptions --that all Indians should and would be integrated into the rural Brazilian capitalist system as defined by state planners and imposed by their policies -- even its most well-intentioned paternalistic pledges remained, in most cases, dead letters. So long as the financially strapped bureau lacked the political clout and juridical power in local state affairs to safeguard Indian rights, its promises were empty. Thus, for example, although the 1946 Constitution gave Indians the right to inalienable possession of their lands, the process insuring their recognition and reservation depended upon the concession of the actual territory by local state governments to the SPI for demarcation. Since local state politicians in frontier regions were often powerful oligarchs and/or land speculators or linked to them through familial or clientelistic networks, the SPI's moral pleas for safeguarding indigenous lands often fell on deaf ears and its grandiose claims to a humanitarian policy towards the Indians loomed less as fact than fantasy.

Furthermore, when SPI officials were motivated by venality rather than benevolence, the paternalism inherent in the wardship system easily lent itself to all forms of abuse. In 1963, the Brazilian Congress carried out a special parliamentary inquest into the SPI's activities, uncovering widespread financial improprieties and abuse of indigenous patrimony. The investigation, however, received scant attention either from politicians -- barred from voting until 1966, Indians did not form part of their electorate -- or from the press. The agency's malefactors continued to prosper with impunity.

Ridding the nation of corruption and subversion was an oft-repeated justification and goal of the military when it seized power in 1964. Symbolizing all that was rotten in the state administration, the SPI would be placed by the military in the stocks for public flogging. In 1967, Attorney General Jader Figueiredo was commissioned by the Minister of the Interior, General Albuquerque Lima, to investigate corruption in the SPI. That same year, a mysterious fire at the Ministry of Agriculture in Brasilia destroyed the archive of the SPI with its correspondence, financial records and confidential reports and countless internal investigations. ₂₆ Nevertheless, after months of inquiries, interviews, and visits to Indian posts, Figueiredo held a press conference in March 1968 to publicize the findings of his twenty-volume, 5,115-page report.

Evidence had been found not only of massive corruption, embezzlement, land-grabbing and labor exploitation but cases of massacres, enslavement, rape, prostitution, torture, poisoning, and biological warfare against Indians as well, stemming from the dereliction and, at times, outright collusion of SPI officials. ₂₇ Attorney General Figueiredo decried that "the SPI had degenerated to persecuting the Indians to the point of extermination" with the lack of assistance, nevertheless, being the most efficient means of committing murder. Hunger, plague, and maltreatment are afflicting strong and valiant peoples. The present conditions of the Pacaas Novas are miserable, while the proud Xavantes are a shadow of what they were before their pacification. ₂₈

The Brazilian press, receiving the stamp of approval from government censors, further disseminated such grave accusations in charging:

It is pure and old-fashioned human greed leading to genocide in return for cruzeiros. Not even the first occupants of the land, more than four centuries ago were as torpid as this. To explain their crimes, in the name of God and the King. These sanguinary bureaucrats of the Indian Protection Service (SPI) destroy human life without any risk to themselves and in the name of nothing. Or only in name of their bank accounts. ₂₉

Another newspaper decried that "what the administrative corruption and criminal repercussions of incompetent authorities executed in Brazil for years in the Indian sector has a name: genocide." ₃₀ Determined to repudiate past injustices, the military took measures to signal its atonement. Of the 700 employees of the SPI, 134 were charged with crimes; thirty-three would be removed and seventeen suspended. ₃₁ Ultimately, the military dismantled the SPI and created the National Foundation of the Indian (FUNAI) in December 1967.

With its cast of dastardly villains, the Figueiredo Report presented a perfect morality play to gain national sympathy for dismantling the SPI and, by extension, other government bureaus pre-dating the coup. Perhaps this explains the military's decision to come forward with such strident criticism and embarrassing disclosures, implicating SPI officials in the outright extermination of Brazil's Indians. Purging bureaucrats and creating a new bureau was much easier for housecleaning than reformulating longstanding myths, which would continue to inform government policy, of Indians as infantilized, backward peoples redeemable solely through economic integration and interracial union. Indeed, blind faith in the sacredness of racial democracy and in its moral crusade against the SPI emboldened the military government to divulge crimes committed against the Indians. As the Ministry of Interior coaxed the Foreign Ministry in 1968, a repudiation of the atrocities documented in the Figueiredo Report "could only strengthen, in the exterior, the Brazilian image, with respect to racial democracy" and highlight that the "Revolution of 1964 (was) incompatible, in its inspiration, with the process of degradation of the human person." ₃₂

Unfortunately for the military, however, "the greatest administrative scandal of Brazil" -- in Figueiredo's words --captured worldwide attention as well. Soon buried in an avalanche of international criticism, an embarrassed and offended Brazilian government would spend years fending off and tending to meddlesome foreign critics and human rights organizations regarding genocidal policies towards the Brazilian Indian. The demon which the government itself conjured up in the first place to discredit political foes now threatened to debunk some of Brazil's most sacred myths. A year after the report's publication, the wearisome Foreign Minister, Mario Gibson, railed that genocide accusations were "unjust and false when it is known that this nation never had conflicts in relation to religious, ethnic, or racial groups." ₃₃ But such pomp, which once enchanted observers, no longer held sway. The military's strategy had backfired.

Haunted by charges of genocide, the Brazilian government, it appeared, would have no rest from international censure. At the Sixth Inter-American Indigenous Congress in 1968 in Mexico --whose government decades earlier had lovingly donated a statue of the Aztec hero Cuauhtemoc to Brazil in a symbolic celebration of continental pan-Indianism -- the president of FUNAI, Jose de Queiros Campos, was besieged by genocide accusations leveled by the Mexican press. In a press conference, he vehemently denied the charges, going so far as to invite the Inter-American Indigenous Institute to send a representative to accompany the activities of the newly founded FUNAI. ₃₄ In Iran, where the United Nations Conference on Human Rights convened (commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights), the dreaded possibility loomed that Brazil would be denounced for genocide, against which it had been a proud signatory decades earlier. Consequently, the Brazilian delegate at Teheran, Ciro de Freitas Vale, received strict instructions from the Foreign Service to refute sternly any official accusation which might surface. None ever did. ₃₅

The denunciations and rumors, nevertheless, continued to perturb the government and to strain foreign relations. Circulars sent to Brazilian diplomatic missions by Itamarati highlighted the measures taken by the government to safeguard Indian rights in an effort to assist bedraggled diplomats respond to glowering accusations; the Brazilian delegation at the United Nations was enjoined to combat any resolution which might arise accusing the government of genocide against its indigenous population. ₃₆ Refusing to subside, the issue resurged in the American and European press in scathing exposes on Brazilian Indian policy, most notably the article by Norman Lewis published in the London Sunday Times in February, 1969 entitled "Genocide - From Fire and Sword to Arsenic and Bullets, Civilization Has Sent Six Million Indians to Extinction," which was republished in several countries. ₃₇

As the Figueiredo report boomeranged and served as fuel for the fire of government critics, the military went on the offensive. The military declared it to be unacceptable for foreigners to dictate to Brazilians how to treat "their" primordial citizens or to question the nation's racial democracy. Lambasting the sensationalism of the foreign (mainly European) and domestic press, the government launched a vitriolic attack against "certain anthropologists, or pseudo-anthropologists, thirsty for renown, provoking worldwide or national organizations to judge without proof and, above all, without the audience of the accused." The charge of the "accused" ₃₈ did not lack a kernel of truth: sensationalism has helped earn many a career from journalist to social scientist to military official. Nevertheless, the intrigue and scandal had originated, ironically, with the military itself and continued to reside firmly in the realm of politics.

When the Figueiredo Report first emerged, politicians from the Movimento Democratico Brasileiro (MDB) -- the sole legal opposition party in Brazil at the time -- pounced on it, threatening to denounce the atrocities at the United Nations and to call for an international wardship system for the Indians, one of the military's most dreaded nightmares. ₃₉ For the regime's opponents, constrained by an authoritarian system, the controversy offered a perfect opportunity to enlist foreign assistance and solidarity, not to mention a means to discredit the military. At the international level, Western critics and observers steeped in liberalist doctrine were unlikely to believe that a regime guilty of widespread human rights violations (particularly after 1968) suddenly safeguarded long-neglected Indian rights just because the military, in its moralizing discourse, insisted as such.

Finally, the Indians themselves, suddenly caught in the eye of a political hurricane, took advantage of the affair, exploiting the shame and vulnerability of the government to press their demands. It is perhaps no coincidence that in April 1968, one month after the Figueiredo Report surfaced, two Xavante Indians, Sueter and Preper, denounced to the Minister of the Interior that white invaders were relocating, by airplane, a large group of Xavante from a nearby village. ₄₀ The denunciation of the forced removal of Xavante from their traditional lands purchased by the Suia-Missu ranch -- which in reality had occurred several years earlier -- was undoubtedly updated and issued to extract promises from a government beleaguered by international outrage.

The weight of such protests would become increasingly evident to the Indians. "To remove the indigenous problem from the headlines of Brazilian and foreign newspapers," Minister of the Interior Albuquerque Lima met with the Xavante, Bororo, Caraja, and various Xingu communities in 1969, vowing to reserve or recuperate their lands ₄₁ z Promises would not suffice. Between 1970 and 1972, fact-finding missions from humanitarian groups such as the International Red Cross, the Primitive People's Fund, and the Aborigines' Protection Society, met with Brazilian government officials and visited indigenous areas to investigate allegations and monitor the state of the Indians. ₄₂ Venting his anger, the minister complained "there hasn't been one time when I go to give a press conference outside of Brazil where the first question asked isn't about the massacre of Indians. That revolts me." ₄₃

h Concerned by "the enemies of Brazil, propagators of lies, such as those relative to the practice of genocide" and seeking to "establish a faithful image of FUNAI in the country and in the exterior, eliminating distortions purposefully disseminated by subversive elements," FUNAI established in the early 1970s a public relations department to monitor press coverage about the Indians and indigenous policy. ₄₄ Subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior, FUNAI followed its directives, stating unequivocally "assistance to the Indian, which should be as complete as possible, does not seek and can not obstruct national development nor the axes of penetration for Amazonian integration." ₄₄

When badgered by critics, FUNAI President General Oscar Jeronimo Bandeira de Mello, a former military intelligence officer, might express such ideas less delicately:

the Indian is not a guinea pig, nor the property of half a dozen opportunists. You cannot stop the development of Brazil. . . The Indian is not a museum piece and his acculturation must be gradual in the form of permitting his total integration in the community. ₄₆

Championing integration as a means to preclude "the formation of ethnic cysts," the general's bluster reflected old concerns expressed by the SPI as well as the present discomfort in the military with racial identification mirrored in its decision to omit the category of race from its 1970 national census. ₄₇ Clearly, such an antagonistic stance towards the Indians only further enraged "propagators of lies, such as those relative to the practices of genocide."

For the military, "the development of Brazil" consisted in the construction of roads, telecommunications networks, colonization projects, hydroelectric enterprises, mining ventures and agribusiness in the Amazon region. In 1970, the government unveiled the Plan for National Integration (PIN) which centered around the construction of a Trans-Amazon highway linking northeastern Brazil to the Peruvian border. In addition, the government began construction on the Santarem-Cuiaba highway, running north to south through central-western Brazil. ₄₈ Demeaning the uniqueness of indigenous cultures and concerns, military officials and technocrats staffing FUNAI systematically sought to tailor Indian policy to the regime's ideological Procrustean bed. As Bandeira de Mello stated, "ethnic minorities such as the Brazilian Indians" were to be "oriented to a well-defined planning process, taking into account their participation in national progress and integration as producers of goods." ₄₉

As swaths of roadway were laid down and developmental projects invaded lands inhabited by Indians -- whether those lacking or with only partial contact with Brazilian society or those for whom the government had already reserved areas --conflicts erupted. By its own admission in 1971, although FUNAI administered 142 indigenous posts throughout Brazil, only eleven Indian territories had been reserved -- so much as on paper -- by the agency. ₅₀ Nevertheless, in 1970, the agency signed a contract with SUDAM, the superintendency for the Amazon region, for the "pacification" of Indian groups along the Trans-Amazon and Santarem-Cuiaba highways. FUNAI estimated that 5,000 Indians dispersed in twenty-nine different tribal groups lived in the area of these thoroughfares; twelve had sporadic contact with Brazilian society while many continued to fight off outsiders, as they had for years. ₅₁

The fate of numerous tribes victimized and threatened by such an aggressive developmental policy fueled the genocide controversy. In 1970, forty Parakanan Indians "pacified" by FUNAI agents seeking to make way for the Trans-Amazon Highway's passage through their traditional area were stricken with influenza and many died soon after. In the early 1970s, the Santarem-Cuiaba highway's invasion of their habitat led the elusive Kreen-Akarore to make contact with Indian agents. The reservation which the government decreed for the Indians did not include their traditional territory and was bordered on one side by the highway. By 1974, a year after "pacification," the Kreen-Akarore population had fallen from 300 to less than 135 and continued to be ravished by epidemics. ₅₂

Similarly, land in the Aripuana Park reserved for the Cinta Largas and Surui Indians in 1971 was later leased, with the approval of FUNAI and the Minister of the Interior, to mineral prospecting and colonization companies. Lambasting the disease, malnutrition, and violence afflicting the Indians, a report published in 1974 by an American human rights group asserted:

Today a new form of genocide is taking place in Brazil, one less dramatic than the bombing of villages or the wholesale slaughter of Indian women and children, but nevertheless, one similar in intent. Simply stated, the present policy of FUNAI is one of "pacifying" Indian tribes, in order to eventually lease away their lives. . . In present day Brazil, more than twenty five years following the U.N. Genocide Convention, the responsible agents for such crimes are two: the military government and the large national and multinational corporations which it represents. ₅₃

That same year, a group of Brazilian anthropologists presented a report at an international conference, criticizing the government's "mandate for the destruction of Indian communities in the name of 'assimilation' and 'integration.'" Basing their allegations on the vaguer aspects of the UN convention on genocide -- intentionally subjecting members of the group to "conditions of existence partially or totally producing their physical destruction" -- the anthropologists branded government policy "decisively genocidal." Consequently, they called on the international community to intervene:

It would be an act of supreme justice if the United Nations would petition the military government of Brazil to account for the situation of its Indians. A minute investigation must be made. Threatened tribes must be visited. Reliable witnesses -- who exist -- must be questioned. The Indian policy of Brazil must again be judged by world opinion. Brazil has promised before Humanity to preserve the remaining Indians who live in her territory. But the preservation of minorities is not a compromise of our nation alone. It is a compromise of all of Humanity. . .The destiny of the Indian peoples of Brazil must be accounted for before the other people and nations of the world. ₅₄

Hoping to close the case on the genocide issue, the Brazilian government had formally rebutted the accusations in a report written by Danton Jobim, President of the Brazilian Press Association and a member of the Ministry of Justice's Council for the Defense of Human Rights. ₅₅ Exculpating the government from charges of genocide which the United Nations defined as acts committed with the intention of destroying all or part of an ethnic, racial, or religious group, Jobim stressed that crimes perpetrated by individuals could not be equated with the overall policy of the Brazilian state. It is interesting to note, however, that even in its official defense against the accusation of genocide, the government's ideological armor was riddled with biases against Indians and misconceptions about Brazilian social relations.

Enshrining the work of FUNAI in reconciling the Indians' needs with those of the "Brazilian community," Jobim's report --consonant with many of the official statements at the time --discursively placed the Indians in opposition to the nation, subordinating their rights as citizens to other Brazilians. Reiterating a basic tenet of the elite's ideal of racial democracy, he argued that economic interest rather than racial animosity solely accounted for violence perpetrated against Indians. As he succinctly expressed, "these crimes are better branded theft than genocide." In insisting "no one hates the Indian because he is an Indian," he off-handedly dismissed racial discrimination towards Indians, exemplifying perhaps its most insidious form: denial. The myriad of negative racial stereotypes of the Indian as lazy, infantile, and shiftless --reflected linguistically in terms such as bugre, referring to an Indian or any brutish person, or programa de indio ("Indian plan") to signify a ridiculous or senseless outing -- suggested otherwise. In parrying genocide charges, Jobim retreated to the other extreme, sweeping issues of racial prejudice and persecution under the carpet.

Government policies and interest group strategies aside, it is interesting to speculate on the factors which allowed for such grave charges to maintain visibility and credibility in the public's eye. Despite the disregard of indigenous concerns manifest in government policy, Brazil could not be characterized as an outlaw state masterminding and perpetrating genocidal acts. Brazilian indigenous policy conformed to the overall guidelines established by the International Labor Organization's Convention 107 in 1957 which endorsed the integration of indigenous peoples into the nation-state and to which twenty-seven other nations were signatories. One of the Brazilian government's most opprobrious actions -- relocating indigenous groups from their traditional territories -- was sanctioned by the Convention in cases where "national security" or "economic development" were at stake, although indigenous peoples were always guaranteed the right to lands of equal values or indemnification. Although in 1989 the ILO's convention was revised -- with more emphasis placed on indigenous self-determination and less on integration -- during its heyday its vision was championed by policymakers who believed it offered indigenous peoples the greatest opportunity to participate and benefit from national development. ₅₆

From a purely demographic analysis, the genocide charge was problematic as well. Indigenous populations reached their nadir in the late 1950s when their number was estimated at 100,000 --one tenth of their total population at the time of the founding of the SPI in 1910 -- with 87 different tribes disappearing over the first half of the century. ₅₇ At the height of the genocide accusations, Indian population levels had begun to stabilize and would show gradual growth throughout the 1970s in a trend which has continued ever since. ₅₈ However authoritarian, the Brazilian government's actions towards the Indians never consisted of an intentional policy of extermination. Like other people of color and other poor rural dwellers in Brazil, Indians suffered because their rights were systematically violated, ignored or unprotected by the military government.

If genocide accusations stuck with the public they had, nevertheless, obviously struck a responsive chord. The explanation perhaps lies in outsiders' perceptions of Brazilian Indians and their understanding of indigenous cultures. Europeans, after all, hatched the myth of the noble savage at the time of the Conquest and subsequently exported it back to Brazil. Devoid of class distinctions and social hierarchies at the time of contact, Brazilian Indians enthralled European audiences with their absence of clothing and their tropical surroundings --interpreted as signs of their egalitarianism, sexual freedom and communion with nature. Small wonder they inspired great thinkers like Montaigne and Rousseau in formulating ideals of a utopian society even if European biases blinded them to the complexities of indigenous communal and family relations. ₅₈

Such constructions, clearly embodying whites' fears and fantasies more than indigenous realities, have marked discourse about the Indians throughout the Americas. ₆₀ Heirs to a political identity forged by and for others, Indians have both profited and suffered from it accordingly: on the one hand venerated for their purported traditionalism, on the other infantilized as peoples lacking adaptability and political savvy. Centuries later such images have continued to flourish in popular and academic literature, film, and journalism. Within this mindset, Indians continued -- or ought -- to inhabit a fairy-tale realm outside the socioeconomic context of rural Brazilian relations (which might place their plight in comparative perspective); were unequivocal victims of "modernization" which -- despite its ambiguities and unevenness -- they were deformed by and opposed to because of their very essence as Indians; and represented the last vestige of morality in a nefariously capitalistic and technological world. For example, in her 1961 account of her experiences shooting a film among the "primitive, completely naked tribes of Brazilian Indians in the great forests of Matto Grosso," the actress Andrea Bayard proclaimed it

a sin to take this child of God and nature out of his own private Eden. To suddenly snatch him from his realm of pure, simple, beauty, free of complication and frustration and cast him into a world of money, avaricious ambitions, and prudish conventions. A world where he would be obliged to suffer all the civilized and social evils, the majority of which he would never be able to fully understand. ₆₁

Likewise, the British novelist, Kenneth Matthews, recounted his impressions of the Indians at the Xingu Park which he visited in the 1950s:

This was where I could look at the Stone Age Man and he could look at me; and of the two, I dare say I gaped the wider. . . watching these people, I could hardly help wondering how Adam and Eve had really come by the idea of the fig-leaf; it was so plain that nakedness in itself played no part in erotic stimulation. ₆₂

Notwithstanding that the "Stone Age Man" had never been repeatedly visited by government officials and visitors arriving by airplane, taking photographs, distributing supplies and medicine, and preaching ideas about the Indians and their relationship to the nation-state, Matthews concluded "what lay before me was the world as it had been two hundred generations ago, untrodden except by the primal beasts and a race of men whom time had passed over." ₆₃ Such a depiction of Brazilian Indians revealed that perhaps the most timeless aspect of the culture of indigenous groups has been others' perception of them.

For many sympathizers, imbued with ideas about the pristine essence of Indians and their fixity within the natural landscape, the speedy integration into Brazilian society championed by the military was tantamount to genocide. As Norman Lewis, who authored the scathing expose on the government's purportedly genocidal policies stated, "the Indian is as much a part of the forest as the tapir and the jaguar" who could not be removed "without calamitous results." ₆₄ Or as Anthony Smith, a British engineer invited by the Brazilian government to accompany a road-building venture in the Amazon region in the late 1960s, said of the Xavante: "they are neither Indians nor Brazilians -- begging from the twentieth century and retreating to the past." Mere "remnants of their shattered culture," he lamented that "the young don't remember the day when warriors were first pacified." Seeing no hope for the Indian, Smith concluded, "the sooner he becomes Brazilian, the better." ₆₅

Such views pronouncing ethnic communities moribund had deep roots in academic circles as well. In his analysis of "folk" societies, the anthropologist Robert Redfield had cast his shadow for decades over social scientists' understandings of Indians and other rural peoples. "In this world-wide Western offensive against the rear-guard of the primitive societies, extermination or eviction or subjugation has been the rule and conversion the exception," Redfield argued, lamenting the loss of "traditional moral solidarity" and "inner-directedness" of "isolated folk societies" engulfed by "civilization." Based on the area where he carried out his field work, Redfield concluded, "the Latin American Indian begins as a member of a morally independent folk society whose people look across at invader and conqueror; he becomes a peasant, looking up -- and down -- towards a ruling class." ₆₆

Privileging tradition over transition as constitutive of cultural authenticity, Redfield's analysis tracing the effects of cultural change along a "folk-urban continuum" was perhaps best epitomized in his statement, "civilization is deracination." In Brazil, such views were echoed by the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro who defined Indians according to their degree of acculturation which he, too, viewed as progressing along in an unilinear process. As Ribeiro stated, Òhaving survived, and their acculturation progressing, it is to be expected that they will be integrated into national society or even becoming dissolved in it, so long as there are advantages of living the life of our rural populations.Ó ₆₇

Whether decried by romantics or hailed by modernization theorists, the disappearance of the "traditional" (equated with the authentic) Indian was heralded, as increased social interaction diminished, adulterated, even erased ethnic distinctions. Only more recently, from the 1970s onward, would social scientists begin to reformulate notions about ethnicity as a form of social organization founded on interaction, resulting in rather than determined by culture-bearing units. ₆₈ In a similar vein, scholars would begin to re-examine the notion of tradition as the product of selective memory or an "invention," with discourse about the past authenticating present concerns. ₆₉

Notwithstanding its accusatory tones and impassioned stances, the debate between the government and its detractors --which at its extreme revolved around the issue of genocide --orbited within a faulty binary. Pitting Indians and isolationism on one side and progress and integration on the other, the debate defined each in tendentious terms. In his 1973 speech commemorating the "Day of the Indian," FUNAI President Bandeira de Mello articulated the alleged antinomy addressed by government policies:

Indian communities have their own culture, which is withdrawn in time, as the result of various factors, including isolation. And since our culture has all the advantages that modern technology offers us, we should not forget that they above all need our support. Civilization proceeds with large steps transforming them possibly into marginalized beings, if they are not duly assisted, oriented and prepared by the Governmental Organ entrusted with their protection, which is the FUNAI. We know that nothing can detain the march of progress. But we all know also that, armed with same progress, we will be able to rescue our Indians from the irreversible impact of two different cultures that meet. ₇₀

Likewise, when Minister of the Interior Costa Cavalcanti hailed the government's "taking measures capable of guarding our jungle brothers, calling them, through scientific processes, to the camp of civilization," he oversimplified the nature of interethnic relations. ₇₁ What a better foil for "progress," summarily defined by Brazilian state developmentalist ideology, than another construction -- the image of the tradition-bound Indian, lacking historical agency, immanently opposed to integration but ultimately salvageable through civic education and technological uplift? And what a better assault on such policies than a complete inversion of this model by government critics?

Faith in "scientific processes" -- defined by the state as the lure of capitalism in transforming Indians into market-oriented rural producers -- overshadowed indigenous understandings of and reactions to their increased participation "in the camp of civilization." Government detractors -- at their shrillest, crying genocide -- based many of their criticisms on the same flawed premises underpinning the military's definition and model of integration. Both sides mystified Indians, the role of the state, and its developmentalist ideology, obscuring the myriad of ways indigenous groups have negotiated, contested, precipitated, in short, defined their accommodation with Brazilian society.

With their lands deforested and invaded by agribusiness, mining, and governmental projects, indigenous groups increasingly understood that the primary recourse to defend their constitutional land rights was to place pressure on their greatest potential friend or foe: the state. This form of "integration," increasingly embraced and perfected by the Indians, would allow them to retain a modicum of autonomy in deciding the fate of their lands and their communities' welfare. Indeed, the Indians' ongoing struggle from the 1970s until the present, enjoining the government to safeguard their lands and expel invaders, has been a testament to their "progress." The same roads granting outsiders access to their lands paved the way for Indians to leave their habitat, without "calamitous results," to attend pan-Indian meetings, canvass outside support, and descend upon Brasilia to press for the demarcation of their lands. "Traditional" Indian bellicosity has been complemented with non-traditional Brazilian activities such as bureaucratic pressuring, political lobbying, and alliances with national and international advocacy and human rights groups.

In the meantime, genocide accusations will recurringly torment Brazilian military and state elites, so long as the same issues and conditions which gave rise and lend credibility to them persist. A recent study showed that only 156 indigenous areas have been homologated and 95 demarcated in Brazil -- only slightly more than half of the total of 497 -- despite the fact that the Indian Statute of 1973 and the Constitution of 1988 both called for all areas to be demarcated within five years of their respective promulgation. ₇₂ Even areas legally demarcated --like the Yanomami reserve -- remain invaded by miners, ranchers, and peasants spawning tension and violence. Impunity for those committing crimes against Indians continues to reign, with those responsible for the Yanomami massacre yet to be brought to justice. In sum, so long as a chasm separates law from practice and discourse from reality in Brazilian indigenous policy, accusations of genocide will be leveled by those wishing to alarm others of such a disparity. Just as those failing to understand the social context of Brazilian indigenous policy will parrot such charges, those loath to explore the contradictions and shortcomings in state planning will categorically dismiss them.

Note 1: Jornal do Brasil, August 20 and 21, 1993. In London, a protest at the Brazilian embassy organized by the indigenous rights advocacy group, Survival International, blamed the government for the massacre by failing to remove the goldminers from the Indians' reservation as promised; in a letter delivered to the Brazilian ambassador, British human rights groups accused his government of "being incapable of defending the rights of its weakest citizens." Back.

Note 2: Jornal do Brasil, August 21, 1993. Back.

Note 3: Jornal do Brasil, August 28, 1993 Back.

Note 4: Folha de Sao Paulo, August 27, 1993. The UN Declaration contained several polemical guarantees in the mind of Brazilian officials. In addition to upholding indigenous peoples' rights to control, own and use their territory -- defined in Brazilian legislation as property of the federal government -- the Declaration asserted their right to "self-determination." Drafted by a Geneva-based United Nations subcommission on minority rights, the declaration would then have to proceed to the U.N. Human Rights Commission for further discussion and ultimately to the Assembly General for ratification. Back.

Note 5: Jornal do Brasil, August 28, 1993. The military official quoted stated that the Attorney General's declarations had been based on tenuous proof: "the depositions of two Indians, a burnt down hut, a skeleton, some used cartridges, and some bullet-ridden pots." In order to defuse genocide charges, the military officials' strategy sought to downplay the massacre of the Indians. Back.

Note 6: Jornal do Brasil, August 31, 1993. Back.

Note 7: Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Os Direitos do Indio - Ensaios e Documentos (Sao Paulo, 1987), 2-23. Back.

Note 8: Isidoro Zanotti, "Genocidio" in Revista do Servico Publico (DASP), Ano XII, Volume II, No. 3, (June, 1949). Back.

Note 9 For further discussion of the myth of racial democracy in Brazil see Thomas Skidmore, "Race and Class in Brazil: Historical Perspectives"in Pierre-Michel Fontaine, ed., Race, Class and Power in Brazil, (Los Angeles, 1985), 12-3, as well as Emilia Viotti da Costa, "The Myth of Racial Democracy: A Legacy of the Empire" in The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories, (Chicago, 1985.) Back.

Note 10: Freyre's most seminal work establishing his theory on the harmoniously multiethnic origins of Brazilian society, Casa Grande e Senzala, was originally published in Brazil in the 1930s. It has been translated and most recently published in the United States as The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, Berkeley, 1986 Back.

Note 11: Cassiano Ricardo, a government ideologue of the Vargas regime's Department of Press and Propaganda, played a particularly prominent role in romanticizing the multiethnic nature of the bandeiras, or explorer bands, which sallied forth into the Brazilian interior in search of gold and Indian slaves and which, in Ricardo's analysis, formed the cell of Brazilian nationalism and political organization. See Cassiano Ricardo, Marcha para Oeste: A Influencia de "Bandeira" na Formacao Social e Politica do Brasil, 1970. Back.

Note 12: Skidmore, 13. Back.

Note 13: Sipysaua- O Indio Brasileiro,(Rio de Janeiro, 1970.) Although not explicitly published by FUNAI, the publication reiterated, at the height of the genocide accusations, the government bureau's viewpoints and praised its actions in contacting Brazilian Indians and assisting in the process of their acculturation, presenting ample official data and statistics to back its claims. Back.

Note 14: Cassiano Ricardo, O Indianismo de Goncalves Dias, (Sao Paulo, 1964), 185. On the theory of the naturalness of the "cordial man" in Brazil see Dante Moreira Leite, O Carater Nacional Brasileiro, (Sao Paulo, 1969). Back.

Note 15: Candido Mariano Silva Rondon, Rumo ao Oeste, (Rio de Janeiro, 1940). Back.

Note 16: For a an anlysis of the founding and earlier years of the SPI see Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, "O Governo dos Indios sob a Gestao do SPI, in Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ed., Historia dos Indios no Brasil( Sao Paulo, 1992), 155-72. Back.

Note 17: Brasil, Servico de Protecao aos Indios, Relatorio, 1939. Back.

Note 18: SPI, "Relatorio das Atividades da 6a IR em Matto Grosso, Remetendo Minuta par o Relatorio da Diretoria, 1928", Museu do Indio-Setor de Documentacao. Back.

Note 19: V.M. Petrullo, Primitive Peoples of Matto Grosso Brazil, The Museum Journal, Volume XXIII, Number 2, (Philadelphia, 1932), 101-03. Petrullo, an American anthropologist, carried out field work a year earlier and, based on his comments, had been sensitized by SPI officials to their concerns about outsiders meddling with Brazil's Indians. Xenophobia alone, however, did not characterize Brazilan officials, who were flattered by researchers from the University of California and Columbia studying the Indians. In constant search of European and American confirmation of the nations' cultural worth, Brazilian officials exulted about "the importance that the most civilized nations habitually attribute to this research of scientific character to the point of not limiting their studies to their own nationality, but organizing and financing expeditions to foreign nations to collect all ethnological, ethnographical, and anthropological documentation." Brasil, Ministerio de Agricultura, Conselho Nacional de Protecao aos Indios, Relatorio Apresentado pelo General Candido Mariano de Silva Rondon Correspondente ao Ano de 1944. Back.

Note 20: Amilcar A. Botelho de Magalhaes, Pelos Sertoes do Brasil, (Sao Paulo, 1941). Botelho de Magalhaes was the secretary of the Conselho Nacional de Protecao aos Indios, a government council drafting and overseeing indigenous policy. In 1933, government supervision over the activities of foreigners in indigenous areas fell under the newly created Council for the Overseeing of Artistic and Scientific Expeditions. Until today, foreigners entering indigenous areas must receive special clearance from the Brazilian government. Back.

Note 21: Vincenzo Petrullo, "Brazilian Protection for the Indian," in Bulletin of the Pan-American Union, April 1937. Petrullo waxed estatic about the idealism as well as the "Christian principle and attitudes" of the SPI and its devoted functionaries. Emphatic that for the Indians the "personnel of the Service, the 'General' (Rondon) is a symbol of justice and fraternity among mankind," Petrullo avowed that he had not "exaggerated in making the statement that to the personnel of the Service this program is the catechism of a religion in which they believe and that General Rondon is its inspiring hero." Back.

Note 22: Cunha, Os Direitos do Indio, 146-48; 156-69. Back.

Note 23: Supysaua, Rio de Janeiro, 1970. The influence of Brazilian legislation on the ILO's 1957 Convention was also highlighted by Darcy Ribeiro in A Politica Indigenista Brasileira,(Rio de Janeiro, 1962). The phenomenon has a strong corollary today in Brazilian officials' portrayal of the nation, particularly in the aftermath of the Eco-92 conference in Rio, as standing at the vanguard of the worldwide environmentalist movement. Banking on outsiders' fascination with its exotic tropical flora and fauna -- and the florid national legislation designed to protect them -- such an image, in fact, obscures widespread non-compliance and unenforceability. Back.

Note 24: Affonso Arinos de Mello Franco, O Indio Brasileiro e a Revolucao Francesa, (Rio de Janeiro, 1937). The author wisely distinguishes between Brazilian indigenous communal and family structures and Europeans' misinformed and utopian perceptions of them, the latter influencing essays on the benevolence of man in the state of nature and other egalitarian ideals which have served as hallmarks of liberal thought. Back.

Note 25: In his book, Peter Fry explores the origins of the adage which he interprets more widely as a form of counterhegemonic behavior by subordinate groups masking resistance to domination behind the facade of confority. See Fry, Para Ingles Ver - Identidade e Politica na Cultura Brasileira, (Rio de Janeiro, 1982). Fry's analysis, however, does not explore the tremendous appeal of European liberal ideals to Brazilian elites in historically shaping (or distorting) their own self-image and the socioeconomic and political realities which vitiated such lofty principles. For further discussion see Roberto Schwarz' essay "Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late-Nineteenth Century Brazil" in his book, Misplaced Ideas - Essays on Brazilian Culture, (London, 1992), 19-32. Back.

Note 26: Correio da Manha, September 17, 1967. The fire at the SPI archives was not only a serious blow to the course of justice in Brazil but to scholars seeking to document indigenous policy as well. In the fire's aftermath, FUNAI attempted to reconstitute the Indian agency's archive by gathering and microfilming duplicates of the correspondence located in regional offices. The results of this Herculean task form the bulk of the historical archive of the SPI located at the Museu do Indio in Rio de Janeiro.The FUNAI archive in Brasilia also contains scattered documents from the SPI as well. Back.

Note 27: Shelton Davis, Victims of the Miracle, (Cambridge, 1977), 10-13. Back.

Note 28: "Inquerito Administrativo Referente a Apuracao de Iregularidades no Extinto SPI" Processo 4483-68, Volume XX (Figueiredo Report). FUNAI-SEDOC. Back.

Note 29: Jornal do Brasil, April 24, 1968. Back.

Note 30: Correio da Manha, September 17, 1967. Back.

Note 31: Davis, 11, and Jornal do Brasil, September 13, 1969. Back.

Note 32: Jornal do Brasil, April 10, 1968. Back.

Note 33: Jornal do Brasil, November 13, 1969 Back.

Note 34: O Globo, May 2, 1968. Back.

Note 35: The UN conference was held during the months of April and May, 1968. Jornal do Brasil, September 13, 1969. Back.

Note 36: Jornal do Brasil, September 13, 1969 Back.

Note 37: The FUNAI archive in Brasilia contains newspaper clippings from Switzerland, West Germany, France, England, and the United States, (such as "The Vanishing Indian" in Time, May 3, 1968) highlighting the government's sensitivity to foreign criticism. In West Germany, for example, magazine articles regarding maltreatment of the Indians led politicians to request that Bonn express its concern to the Brazilian government. In addition to press coverage, letters flooded government bureaus such as those sent by over 100 French anthropologists to Brazilian President Costa e Silva lamenting crimes against the Indians which "were and continue to be the responsibilty of all of humanity." Back.

Note 38: Jornal do Brasil, November 13, 1969. Back.

Note 39: Jornal do Brasil, April 20, 1968. Back.

Note 40: Ultima Hora, April 18, 1968. The Xavantes were accompanied on their visit to the Minister of the Interior by their "pacifier," Francisco Meireles. Back.

Note 41: O Globo, July 30, 1968 Back.

Note 42: In 1970, out of the concern of numerous national societies and humanitarian organizations with charges of genocide and upon the request of the Brazilian government with clearing them, a delegation from the International Red Cross visited twenty different Indian tribes during a three-month fact-finding missions to thirty villages as well as government ministries in Brazil. The mission was welcomed by the Minister of the Interior Costa Cavalcanti and FUNAI President Queiroz Campos who had embarked upon a full-scale public relations campaign to vindicate the government's indigenous policy. In general, the committee concluded that FUNAI's resources were "inadequate" to deal with the vast problem of integrating the Indian. Comite International de la Croix Rouge, Report of the International Red Cross Committee Medical Mission to the Brazilian Amazon Region, (Geneva, 1970). Other foreign delegations would soon follow. In 1971, the Primitive People's Fund published a Report of a Visit to the Indians of Brazil and in the subsequent year, the London-based Aborigines' Protection Society visited Brazil and published Tribes of the Amazon Basin in Brazil, 1972. Armed with a new set of allies, the Indians sought to prod the government to safeguard their rights. Back.

Note 43: Quoted in Pedro Casaldaliga, Uma Igreja da Amazonia em Conflito com o Latifundiario e a Marginalizacao Social, Mato Grosso, 1971, 100. Back.

Note 44: Letter from Romildo Carvalho, Director of FUNAI's Juridical Department to the agency's president, Brasilia, May 14, 1970. FUNAI Archive, Brasilia; FUNAI, Relatorio das Atividades da FUNAI Durante o Exercicio de 1970. During Bandeira de Mello's administration FUNAI published various publications seeking to boost the agency's public image, explain its activities, and list statistical information. They included FUNAI em Numeros (1973) and O Que e a FUNAI (1972).In addition on the occasion of the VII Interamerican Indigenous Congress, held in Brasilia in 1972, FUNAI carried out a detailed study of press coverage of Brazilian indigenous policy. See "A Imprensa e o Congresso Indigenista," in FUNAI, Boletim Informativo, Ano I-No 4- II Trimestre, 1972. Back.

Note 45: FUNAI, Relatorio das Atividades da FUNAI Durante o Exercicio de 1970. Back.

Note 46: FUNAI President Oscar Jeronimo Bandeira de Mello, quoted in Shelton Davis and Patrick Menget, "Povos Primitivos e Ideologia Civilizada no Brasil" in Carmen Junqueira and Edgard de A. Carvalho, eds., Antropologia e Indigenismo na America Latina (Sao Paulo, 1981), 49-50. Bandeira de Mello was referring to the BR-O80 highway which transected the northern portion of the Xingu Park. Foreign Relations Minister Mario Gibson hurled a similar invective in a press interview in 1972, noting the Indian is not "a guinea pig for studies of foreign universities of dubious value. . . anthropologists lament to see extinguished here a precious piece to study in a live laboratory." Back.

Note 47: Skidmore, 17. Bandeira de Mello quoted in Davis and Menget, 49. The crusade against ethnic cysts, it must be highlighted, dated back to the "golden years" of Rondon (whose image had been mythologized by both government official and critic alike) but was now stripped of the paternalistic gloss which characterized the discourse of the SPI's earlier years. Back.

Note 48: Davis, 38-41; 62-4. In 1966, the government pledged over $1 billion dollars annually -- to be borrowed largely from international lending institutions and foreign banks -- in a massive program of highway building, rural settlement, mineral exploration, and hydroelectric and port construction in the Legal Amazon. Between 1968 and 1972, the Brazilian National Highway Department (DNER) received a total of $400 million in loans from the Inter-American Development and World banks. In 1972, Davis notes, Brazil surpassed Japan as the largest borrower from the U.S. Export-Import bank and was the major debtor nation to the World Bank. Back.

Note 49: For example, Bandeira de Mello reintroduced the "renda indigena" (indigenous proceeds), a policy creating a special government fund gained from the sale of Indian products and the leasing of Indian lands for financing government-initiated agricultural and industrial projects on Indian reserves. Dating back to the later years of the SPI, "renda indigena" had led to a plethora of irregularities and abuses denounced in the Figueiredo Report. Davis, 56-7. Back.

Note 50: Fundacao Nacional do Indio, FUNAI em Numeros, July 1972. Back.

Note 51: Davis, 65. By 1972, FUNAI operated ten attraction posts seeking to make contact with communities of the Cinta Larga, Surui, Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, Waimiri-Atroari, Ava-Canoeiro, and Karipuna, coordinated by a special division created within the agency. FUNAI, FUNAI em Numeros, July 1972 and Boletim Informativo, Ano II - No. 5, IV Trimester, 1972. Back.

Note 52: Davis, 66-73. Ultimately, they were transferred by plane to the Xingu Park and resettled next to their traditional enemies, the Txukahamae. Back.

Note 53: American Friends of Brazil, "Leasing Away Indian Lives," (Berkeley, 1974), 14-6. Back.

Note 54: "The Politics of Genocide Against the Indians of Brazil," report by a group of Brazilian anthropologists presented at the XLI International Congress of Americanists, Mexico City, September, 1974. Reprinted in Indigena and American Friends of Brazil, Supysaua: A Documentary Report of the Conditions of Indian Peoples in Brazil, (Berkeley, 1974), 41. Back.

Note 55: Danton Jobim, O Problema do Indio e a Acusacao de Genocidio, Ministerio da Justica, Conselho da Defesa dos Direitos da Pessoa Humana, Boletim No. 2, (Brasilia, 1970). Back.

Note 56: Cunha, Os Direitos do Indio, 127-30. Back.

Note 57: Ribeiro, 142-43. Back.

Note 58: Mercio Pereira Gomes, Os Indios e o Brasil, (Petropolis, 1988), 87. The most recent estimate of Brazil's indigenous population by the Brazilian Conselho Indigenista Missionario (CIMI) -- the missionary body officially subordinate to the Catholic Church's National Conference of Brazilian Bishops -- places the number at 300,000 or 0.2 percent of the Brazilian population. Jornal do Brasil, April 19, 1995. Back.

Note 59: See Arinos de Mello Franco, O Indio Brasileiro e a Revolucao Francesa. Back.

Note 60: For an elaborate analysis of essentialist qualities attributed by whites to Indians and their various permutations over the course of history -- ranging from the "wise," "emotive," or "patriotic" to the more recent "ecologically correct" Indian -- see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, (New York, 1978). Back.

Note 61: Andrea Bayard, Brazilian Eden, (London, 1961), 145. Bayard was a Brazilian actress who travelled to Mato Grosso in the 1950s, at the age of 19, to shoot a film involving Indians and jungle scenes. The British press, Robert Hale Limited, which published her account apparently specialized in adventure tales in exotic locations as evidenced by other titles in the series: "Africa for Adventure"; "Samoan Medley"; "Grief, Gaiety, and Aborigines"; "Bundu Doctor." Bayard's book was advertised as documenting "life in the raw and death that came swiftly and suddenly amid the savagery and beauty of a land which is still uncharted. . .the strange customs and habits of a race which never progressed from beyond the club, bow and arrow, for whom the use of metal, or even stone, has yet to be discovered; and who never wear any form of clothing." Back.

Note 62: Kenneth Matthews, Brazilian Interior (London, 1957), 182, 197. Back.

Note 63: IBID., 208. Back.

Note 64: Lewis quoted in INDIGENA and American Friends of Brazil, Supysaua: A Documentary Report on the Conditions of Indian Peoples in Brazil, Berkeley, 1974. The report had no relation to FUNAI's 1970 publication of the same name. Back.

Note 65: Anthony Smith, Mato Grosso: The Last Virgin Land, (New York, 1971), 102, 281. Back.

Note 66: Robert Redfield, "Later Histories of the Folk Societies" in The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Middlesex, 1968), 38-63. Back.

Note 67: Ribeiro, 142. Back.

Note 68: Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference, (Bergen & Oslo, 1969). In his anthology, Barth criticized the view crediting geographical and social isolation for sustaining cultural diversity as simplistic, viewing ethnic distinctions as being built on the foundations of social interaction. He emphasized the role of ethnic ascription (self-defined and attributed by others) and categorization as primarily a social vessel -- at times very relevant to behavior, at others less so -- which derived and depended on the maintenance of a boundary or difference whose features might and often changed. Back.

Note 69: See, for example, William Roseberry, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy (New Brunswick, 1989), 55-75, 223. Back.

Note 70: Bandeira de Mello quoted in FUNAI, Boletim Informativo, Ano II-No. 6, (1973). Back.

Note 71: Costa Cavalcanti quoted in Diario de Brasilia, August 9, 1972. Back.

Note 72: Jornal do Brasil, April 19, 1995. The estimate was provided by the Catholic Church's Conselho Missionario Indigenista (CIMI) which relied on FUNAI sources as well as other information.