Dramatic as it was, the Indian invasion surprised no one. Park rangers had been sparring with the Pataxo for 40 years. In 1961, when the national park was created, some 220 Indians lived in relative harmony with this pristine tropical wilderness. Today more than 3,000 Pataxo are wedged into three crowded villages, and they have made short work of the forest. Traditional slash-and-burn agriculture and cutting trees to make handicrafts for tourists are only partly to blame. Courted by clandestine lumbermen, Indians have also sold off their most prized timber. Now a third of the forests of Monte Pascoal are gone. In her brief tenure at the park, Florencio has seen all sorts of plunder. But nothing like that of the Pataxo. “Today the Indians are our biggest problem,” Florencio told NEWSWEEK.
Indigenous peoples began to appropriate some of the same rhetoric. “Indians are the voice of the land,” said Marcos Terena, an articulate Brazilian Indian leader, at the Earth Summit held in Brazil in 1992. “We believe the earth speaks through us.” Those ideas still have resonance today. “Indians know how to take care of the wilderness,” says Zezito Ferreira, a Pataxo leader and now self-appointed park ranger at Monte Pascoal. “We can do a better job at the park than the government.” Defenders of indigenous peoples acknowledge the damage to the park but claim that Indians have mostly been pawns in the hands of others. “Blaming Indians for destroying the forests is like blaming minors recruited by slum drug traffickers,” says Mario Montovani, head of SOS Mata Atlantica, a green group sympathetic to the Pataxo. “They have been victims for 500 years.”
Victims have rights; the question is, do they have responsibilities, too? In Brazil indigenous groups increasingly want to reclaim traditional lands–on their own terms. “Indians aren’t necessarily interested in preservation,” says Joo Pacheco, an anthropologist at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro. “They want development.” That’s placed Indians at odds with their erstwhile allies. Conservationists argue that Indian advocates are turning a blind eye to plunder. Supporters of Indians accuse the greens of wanting a “wilderness without people,” says Montovani of SOS Mata Atlantica. And the clash between the two agendas has played havoc with government policy. Brazil’s beleaguered federal Indian agency, FUNAI, is constantly at war with the environmental authority, IBAMA, leaving the police and the courts dizzy in the cross-fire.
In the last half millennium, native Brazilians have fared no better. Five million strong at the time of “discovery,” by the mid-20th century Indians were a disease-ridden, crowded and vanishing people. But thanks to improved health care and official aid, their numbers are growing again. And another sort of revival has boomed. In the 1960s anthropologists had identified 12 separate indigenous groups in Brazil’s northeast. Today there are 29 groups. Why? Because the Constitution of 1988 assured indigenous peoples claims to their ancestral lands. Suddenly there was a reason to be Indian again, and with the aid of smart lawyers and militant advocates, Indians and “neo-Indians” began to petition for redress. “Today it’s much better to be an Indian than just a poor peasant,” says anthropologist Pacheco.
But that’s not necessarily the best thing for the environment. The Pataxo, a nomadic people, have spent centuries fleeing enemy tribes and encroaching white settlers. In 1980 they celebrated a land settlement that granted them 8,200 hectares of Monte Pascoal park. Yet when fires swept the park in 1989, the Pataxo tried to stop the firefighters. Later, park rangers found out why: the Pataxo were protecting secret stashes of logs they had sold to outlaw lumbermen. “If the damage is not curbed, one more valuable nature preserve is going to be leveled,” says Gustavo Martinelli, a botanist who has spent years researching the bromeliads of the Atlantic Forest. “The Pataxo could be digging their own graves.”
In the mahogany rush, the Brazilian government can’t win. Often the Indians end up cheated by the loggers. Yet when the authorities crack down on the offenders, the Indians–with a little under-the-table cash–often rally to the bandits’ aid. In 1998 a band of armed Kayapo threatened a team of forest police who were conducting a bust of illegal lumber companies in Resende, a key stop on the black-market mahogany trade. It took hours of tense negotiation and a police convoy to rescue the forest inspectors. “One day there is going to be bloodshed,” predicts Eduardo Martins, a former IBAMA director.
The real tragedy is that nobody has more to lose than the Indians. A handful of their leaders have become famously rich pillaging the forest–buying airplanes, motorboats, pickup trucks and video cameras. But the majority still live in destitution, drowning in debts to the town pharmacy and grocery store. And now the mahogany is growing scarce. “Indians are depleting their natural resources, yet they remain as poor and desperate as ever,” says Sergio Brant, a researcher at the conservation unit of IBAMA.
The sensible use of natural resources would help the impoverished villages. Yet the rules governing Indian lands are a tangle of contradictions. Under the old forestry code, Indian reservations were off-limits to commercial ventures. But the 1988 Constitution lifted that ban, subject to congressional approval and payment of royalties to the Indians. Enabling legislation was never passed, leaving impoverished Indians and the cowboy capitalists of the backlands to slash and burn at will. To make matters worse, FUNAI, the government agency in charge of Indian affairs, is chronically underfunded and uninspired and has seen 25 directors come and go in 34 years.
Tired of handouts and failed official initiatives, some Indian communities have tried to improvise their own solutions. Manoel Santana, 77, is a Pataxo medicine man and a sort of freelance tree planter. For two decades now he has been singlehandedly sowing Boca da Mata, a mostly deforested reservation, with hundreds of seedlings of Brazil wood, massaranduba and oticica, monumental trees with musical names that once flourished there. But it is lonely work. “No one is interested in planting around here,” Santana laments. “They think I’m crazy.”
Though it is a relatively small patch of Brazil, the trouble at Monte Pascoal is emblematic; the place is a reference for every schoolchild. On April 22 Brazil will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the coming of the Europeans, and by rights Monte Pascoal ought to be the centerpiece. Instead, it could turn into a major embarrassment. IBAMA has won a judicial order to restore the park to government hands, but police are keeping their distance. Evicting native Brazilians on the eve of such a momentous national celebration could make for disastrous headlines. “If they try to expel us from here, blood will run,” vows the Pataxo’s Ferreira.
There has been vague talk of a deal to allow the Indians and the government to manage the park together. But the Brazilians aren’t holding their breath, least of all Carmen Florencio. Unwelcome at the park, she works from her home in Itamaraju, a scruffy cattle town five miles south of Monte Pascoal. And she’s put in for a transfer. “I think it’s time to be going,” Florencio says.
The Pataxo are staying put. Their sentries mill around the entry to their park like proud new proprietors, collecting the $1.80 entry fee from visitors. When the odd tourist comes along, they don thatch skirts and headdresses and perform the tore, a millennial dance-and-prayer ritual. Ferreira, a big-shouldered man in a T shirt and rubber sandals, breaks from the ring of dancers to explain the tradition to visitors. “This is a dance for our ancestors,” he says. “We are asking them for strength and guidance.” Let’s hope the ancestors are listening.
