By Michael Swan and Yone Simidzu, special to Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada
Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada has had a decades-long engagement with Brazil. Our support has helped our partners stand with, empower and accompany many Indigenous communities, especially in the Amazon region, who struggle to assert their rights to land, livelihoods and a healthy environment.
To help Canadians better understand the intricacies and complexities of the challenges that Indigenous communities face, the award-winning journalist couple Michael Swan and Yone Simidzu went on a mission to Brazil earlier this year. During his long stint as associate editor of The Catholic Register, Swan wrote extensively about our work. Simidzu, who is originally from Brazil, works as a Portuguese translator in Toronto.
The powerful testimonies and photos that Swan and Simidzu gathered in Brazil have appeared in the America magazine and been exhibited and presented across Ontario. The first instalment of their Notes from Brazil was published here on August 9, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, followed by the second, a week later. The last part will be published next Friday.
Over a thin slice of more than 10,000 years of Yanomami history, most of what we know tells us of a rising tide of death and violence over the last half-century in Brazil. The genocidal decimation of Yanomami children during the four years of Jair Bolsonaro’s government did not come out of nowhere.
In 1970, the generals running Brazil needed a big project to galvanize some sort of support for their drifting, aimless dictatorship. They landed on opening up the Amazon, laying claim to its natural resources, settling Brazilians from the south and the northeast throughout the vast, often unexplored Amazon territory. They called this scheme the National Integration Program and promised it would bind the vast country together economically, raising Brazil from underdeveloped to developed status by the turn of the century. The generals’ notion of development amounted to a plan to actively colonize what the Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish had merely drawn onto their conflicting, inaccurate 18th century maps.
Highway to “development” and destruction
The process began with a road, the Trans-Amazonian Highway or BR-230. It came to the Yanomami in the form of Highway BR-210, popularly known as Perimetral Norte, an offshoot of the main highway. This highway’s construction brought the Yanomami into regular contact with white people. Contact gave the Yanomami tuberculosis, venereal diseases and alcohol.
BR-210 also brought agriculture into the Amazon. Ranchers encroached on Yanomami territory, slashing and burning the forest to make room for cattle and crops. The ranchers made use of Yanomami labour in conditions that resembled slavery.
“They [the Yanomami] started to visit the farms,” explained veteran lay Franciscan missionary Maria Edna Bertoli. “They come here a lot to work. There is sexual exploitation, labour exploitation, child exploitation, child theft and so on.”
In 1987 a gold rush sent poor, young, uneducated Brazilians up the Perimetral Norte in search of fortune. These wildcat miners, known as garimpeiros, at first needed the Yanomami to show them the rivers, but later treated them as either cheap labour or a problem they had to eliminate.
This led to the Haximu Massacre in 1993. Garimpeiros burned down the village of Haximu and killed all its residents. In 2006, Brazil’s Supreme Court sentenced the garimpeiros to 19 years in prison for genocide in connection with the attack.
Beyond Brazil: the struggle for the Amazon
The Yanomami haven’t been passive. Even before the generals retired and Brazil gained a constitution in 1988, the Yanomami made their case for demarcation. Under the new Brazilian constitution, Indigenous people have a right to live on their land and the government in Brasilia has a duty to investigate, negotiate and draw a fair boundary around Indigenous Territory―a process called demarcation. The Yanomami secured their rights to 9.7 million hectares, an area larger than the size of Portugal. In the run-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil announced this vast area, the Parque Yanomami, for exclusive use of the Yanomami.
Twenty years on from the Haximu Massacre, the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa published The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, warning that the continuing threat to the Amazon forest and to Yanomami people is existential, life-and-death, now-or-never. And it’s not just their problem, but one the Yanomami share with the world. The world needs the Amazon.
Kopenawa’s book and Kopenawa himself were popular in Europe and on university campuses in North America. In 2018, a bare majority of Brazilians reacted by electing Jair Bolsonaro, a poorly educated former junior officer in the Brazilian military. As a candidate in 2018, Bolsonaro praised the military dictatorship and promised a return to its policies―especially the recolonization of Indigenous lands in the Amazon and elsewhere.
Bleak times in Brazil under Bolsonaro
As president, Bolsonaro used his weekly Facebook broadcast to declare: “Indians are undoubtedly changing…. They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us.” It was anything but an isolated comment.
Under Bolsonaro’s watch, COVID ran wild. It killed more than 700,000 Brazilians, the fifth highest COVID death rate in the world, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. And it swept through Yanomami communities, taking down children and the elderly in untold numbers. As late as April 2021, a year into the global pandemic, Bolsonaro was scorning COVID-19 as just “a little flu” and media “hysteria.”
Bolsonaro didn’t just dismantle Brazil’s agencies responsible for protecting Indigenous people and land, he created an atmosphere in which the Yanomami and other Indigenous people could be openly dismissed as less than human, beyond the concerns of civilized society. The result: last year, the Conselho Indigenista Missionario (CIMI, see website in Portuguese), the Brazilian bishop’s organization for missionaries who work with Brazil’s Indigenous, issued a report documenting 416 cases of violence against individual Indigenous people, including 180 assassinations, in 2022. This is the cost of standing up for Indigenous land rights in Brazil. The 2022 totals were the crest of a wave that saw a 54 per cent rise in violence over the previous four years.
This violence is paralleled by an increase in land invasions. In 2022, there were 309 new cases of outsiders occupying Indigenous lands, adding to thousands of cases of land theft across Brazil.
From jungle to city: a journey of alienation
But the movement is no longer just one way. The highway that once brought farmers and miners into Yanomami territory has opened the way for the Yanomami to come into the city. In five or six days walking out of the forest and then along the BR-210, the Yanomami can reach Boa Vista.
When they get to Boa Vista, Maria Edna Bertoli is looking out for them, ready to greet them in their own language. Bertoli spent 16 years living with the Yanomami on their territory. Now she is part of the Yanomami Protection Network. She patrols the streets around the farmers’ market and near the hospitals, looking for Yanomami living out on the street.
In most cases, the Yanomami have come to the state capital seeking government benefits they are entitled to under law. But they arrive in dirty, cast-off clothing (in their territory, Yanomami do not wear clothes), having walked 300 kilometres with babies in their arms and grandparents trailing behind. They have no documents, speak only a few words of Portuguese and cannot find their way around the city of half a million.
Bertoli’s goal is to persuade them to go home.
“They have land, right? They don’t need to stay here in the city like beggars,” she told us, a pair of Canadian journalists.
The situation is made worse by alcohol and drugs.
“The problem isn’t the drinking. I say this in any meeting I go to,” Bertoli said. “The problem is the society that does not know how to respect them as human beings. As they are Yanomami, they have to be respected as Yanomami.”
For the Yanomami, overwhelmed and unable to accomplish anything in Boa Vista, the oblivion of alcohol and drugs seem like a solution.
“They have a cultural tendency to solve their problems, their emotions with nature. The forest is their spiritual environment,” Bertoli explained. “When they get here, they don’t know how to turn around. They don’t know… right? So, I think the emotions and such are agonizing. Then they go to pinga, cachaça [a clear whiskey-strength sugarcane liquor containing 40 per cent alcohol by volume].”
As an academic and a missionary priest, Rev. Corrado Dalnonego of the Consolata Missionaries has watched the corrosive process of Yanomami encounters with Western culture. “We are bringing to the Yanomami the worst of our society, and that is crime,” he said.
Fighting criminality, illness and deracination
Fr. Dalnonego was not speaking just metaphorically. Many of the garimpeiros on Yanomami land are connected with criminal gangs based in Sao Paulo and Manaus. When mining comes to Yanomami land, it is financed by drug money.
“We see the physical death of children and the elderly, who are the most vulnerable groups to disease, to the lack of health care,” Dalnonego said. “This is interconnected with the invasion of their territory, with the occupation of their territory, with pollution, contamination, the destruction of resources.”
Back in Yanomami Indigenous Territory, at the village of Catrimany, a new generation of Consolata Missionaries and CIMI members is fighting to keep the Yanomami wedded to their land, and proud of their Yanomami identity.
“We need to help them recover from the suffering that’s been caused psychologically, feeling that they have been rejected,” said Rev. Bob Franks of the Consolatas. “Secondly, their land. They have seen it being destroyed. So, we need to be with them, to reconstruct again, moving with them.”
Franks’s particular concern is with young Yanomami, those most tempted to turn their backs on a tradition that seems to be on the losing end of every cultural exchange. They often seek the shiny world they have glimpsed on their cell phones.
“Through the years, back up till now, there’s been a great contempt of the Yanomami,” said Franks. The young have absorbed that contempt. “They discovered they can walk from the forest and have access to the city,” he added. “When they come into the city, they see how people live outside their world… their kind of thinking, the way we do things. That kind of confuses them, because we have a very different lifestyle from life in the forest.”
Accompaniment in “the fight for life”
CIMI, a Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada partner through most of its 52-year history, has done more than just document the carnage in annual reports. It has stood there with the people.
With very limited financing, Franks brings youth and elders together so the young people can learn the skills of living in their own forest―hunting, fishing, traditional plants for food and medicine. Fluent in the language of Pope Francis, he frames his mission as the work of accompaniment.
“What we need to kind of fix the problem is constant accompanying,” he said. “I speak not as an anthropologist. I speak as a religious, missionary priest―not a sociologist, but a person present in the lives of people. We can be with them, understand, speak their language, feel the ground where they also are…. In the church we have a certain line. That line is life. We fight for life.”
Also read:
