BRAZILIAN INDIANS
The history of Brazil's indigenous peoples has been marked by brutality, slavery, violence, diseases, and genocide.
When the first European colonists arrived in 1500, what is now Brazil was inhabited by an estimated 11 million Indians, living in about 2,000 tribes. Within the rst century of contact, 90% were wiped out, mainly through diseases imported by the colonists, such as fiu, measles and smallpox. In the following centuries, thousands more died, enslaved in the rubber and sugar cane plantations.
By the 1950s the population has dropped to such a low that the eminent senator and anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro predicted there would be none left by the year 1980. On average, it is estimated that one tribe became extinct every year over the last century.
In 1967, a federal prosecutor named Jader Figueiredo published a 7,000 page report cataloguing thousands of atrocities and crimes committed against the Indians, ranging from murder to land theft to enslavement.
In one notorious case known as 'The th massacre of the 11 parallel', a rubber baron ordered his men to hurl sticks of dynamite into a Cinta Larga village. Those who survived were murdered when rubber workers entered the village on foot and attacked them with machetes.
The report made int e rna tiona l headlines and led to the disbanding of the government's Indian Protection Service (SPI) which was replaced by FUNAI. This remains the government' s indigenous a ff a ir s department today.
Survival International was founded in 1969 in response to an article by Norman Lewis in the Sunday Times magazine on the genocide of Brazil's Indians.
The size of the indigenous population gradually started to grow once more, although when the Amazon was opened up for development by the military in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, a new wave of hydro-electric dams, cattle ranching, mines and roads meant tens of thousands of Indians lost their lands and lives. Dozens of tribes disappeared forever.
Twenty-two years of military dictatorship ended in 1985, and a new Constitution was drawn up. Indians and their supporters lobbied hard for more rights. Much has been achieved, although Indians do not yet enjoy the collective landownership rights they are entitled to under international law.
Adapted from http://www.survivalinternation... ilian.
