by Norman Lewis
A young American engineer, Walter Hardenburg, carried accidentally in a fit of wanderlust over the company’s frontier, was immediately seized and imprisoned for a few days during which time he was given a chance to see the kind of thing that went on. Several thousand Huitoto Indians had been enslaved and at the post where Hardenburg was held, El Encanto (Enchantment), he saw the rubber tappers bringing back their collection of latex at the end of the day. Their bodies were covered with great raised weals from the overseers’ tapir-hide whips, and Hardenburg noticed that the Indians who had managed to collect their quota of rubber danced with joy, whereas those who had failed to do so seemed terror-stricken, although he was not present to witness their punishment. Later he learned that repeated deficiencies in collection could mean a sentence of a hundred lashes, from which it took six months to recover.
An element of competition was present when it came to killing Indians. On one occasion one hundred and fifty hopelessly inefficient workers were rounded up and slashed to pieces by macheteiros employing a grisly local expertise, which included the corte do bananeiro, a backward and forward swing of the blade which removed two heads at one blow, and the corte maior, which sliced a body into two or more parts before it could fall to the ground. High feast days, too, were celebrated by sporting events when a few of the more active – and therefore more valuable – tappers might be sacrificed to make an occasion. They were blindfolded and encouraged to do their best to escape while the overseers and their guests potted at them with their rifles.
Barbadian British subjects were recruited by the Peruvian Amazon Company as wild Indian-hunters, being sent on numerous expeditions into areas where the company proposed to establish new rubber trails. These were paid on a basis of piecework, and were obliged to collect the heads of their victims, and return with them as proof of their claims to payment. Stud farms existed in the area where selected Indian girls would breed the slave-labour of the future, when the wild Indian had been wiped out. Some rubber companies have been suspected, too, of not stopping short of cannibalism, and there were strong rumours of camps in which ailing and unsatisfactory workers were used to supply the tappers’ meat.
The world-wide scandal of the Peruvian Amazon Company, exposed by Sir Roger Casement, coincided with the collapse of the rubber boom caused by the competition of the new Malayan plantations, and a crisis of conscience was sharpened by the threat of economic disaster. The instant bankruptcy of Manaus was attended by spectacular happenings. Sources of cash suddenly dried up, and the surplus population of cardsharpers, adventurers and whores pouring into the river steamers in the rush to escape to the coast paid for their passages with such possessions as diamond cuff-links and solitaire rings. Merchant princes with their fortunes tied up in unsaleable rubber committed suicide. The celebrated electric street cars – first of their kind in Latin America – came suddenly to a halt as the power was cut off, and were set on fire by their enraged passengers. A few racehorses found themselves between the shafts of converted bullock carts. The opera house closed, never to open again.
When Brazilians had got used to the idea that their rubber income was substantially at an end, they began to examine the matter of its cost in human lives in the light of the fact, now generally known, that the Peruvian Amazon Company alone had murdered nearly thirty thousand Indians. Brazil was now Indian-conscious again and its legislators reminded each other of the principles so nobly enunciated by José Bonifacio in 1823, and embodied in the constitution: ‘We must never forget,’ Bonifacio said, ‘that we are usurpers, in this land, but also that we are Christians.’
It was a mood responsible for the determination that nothing of this kind should ever happen again, and an Indian Protection Service – unique and extraordinary in its altruism in America – was founded in 1910 under the leadership of Marshall Rondon, himself an Indian, and therefore, it was supposed, exceptionally qualified to be able to interpret the Indian’s needs.
Rondon’s solution was to integrate the Indian into the mainstream of Brazilian life – to educate him, to change his faith, to break his habit of nomadism, to change the colour of his skin by inter-marriage, to draw him away from the forests and into the cities, to turn him into a wage-earner and a voter. He spent the last years of his life trying to do this, but just before his death came a great change of heart. He no longer believed that integration was to be desired. It had all been, he said now, a tragic mistake.
The conclusion of all those who have lived among and studied the Indian beyond the reach of civilisation is that he is the perfect human product of his environment – from which it should follow that he cannot be removed without calamitous results. Ensconced in the forest in which his ancestors have lived for thousands of years, he is as much a component of it as the tapir and the jaguar: self-sufficient, the artificer of all his requirements, at terms with his surroundings, deeply conscious of his place in the living patterns of the visible and invisible universe.
It is admitted now that the average Indian Protection Service official recruited to deal with this complicated but satisfactory human being was all too often venal, ignorant and witless, and it was natural that he should call to his aid the missionaries who were in Brazil by the thousand, and were backed by resources that he himself lacked. But the missionary record was not an imposing one, and even those incomparable colonisers of the faith, the Jesuits, had little to show but failure.
In the early days they had put their luckless converts into long white robes, segregated the sexes, and set them to ‘godly labours’, lightened by the chanting of psalms in Latin, mind-developing exercises in mnemonics, and speculative discussions on such topics as the number of angels able to perch on the point of a pin. It was offered as a foretaste of the delights of the Christian heaven, complete with its absence of marrying or giving in marriage, and many of the converts died of melancholy. After a while demoralisation spread to the fathers themselves and some of them went off the rails to the extent of dabbling in the slave trade. When these settlements were finally overrun by the bloodthirsty pioneers and frontiersmen from São Paolo, death can hardly have been more than a happy release for the listless and bewildered Indian flock.
When the Indian Protection Service was formed the missionaries of the various Catholic orders were rapidly being outnumbered by nonconformists, mostly from the United States. These were a very different order of man, no longer armed only with hellfire and damnation, but with up-to-date techniques of salesmanship in their approach to the problems of conversion. By 1968 the Jornal de Brasil could state:
In reality, those in command of these Indian Protection posts are North American missionaries – they are in all the posts – and they disfigure the original Indian culture and enforce the acceptance of Protestantism.
Whereas the Catholics for all their disastrous mistakes, had on the whole led simple, often austere lives, the nonconformists seemed to see themselves as the representatives of a more ebullient and materialistic brand of the faith. They made a point of installing themselves, wherever they went, in large, well-built stone houses, inevitably equipped with an electric generator and every modern labour-saving device. Some of them even had their own planes. If there were roads they had a car or two, and when they travelled by river they preferred a launch with an outboard engine to the native canoe habitually used by the Catholic fathers.
As soon as Indians were attracted to the neighbourhood a mission store might be opened, and the first short step towards the ultimate goal of conversion be taken by the explanation of the value and uses of money, and how with it the Indian could obtain all those goods which it was hoped would become necessary to him. The missionaries are absolutely candid and even self-congratulatory about their methods. To hold the Indian, wants must be created and then continually expanded – wants that in such remote parts only the missionary can supply. A greed for unessential trifles must be inculcated and fostered.
The Portuguese verb employed to describe this process i
s conquistar and it is applied without differentiation to subjection by force or guile. What normally happens is that presents – usually of food – are left where the uncivilised Indians can find them. Great patience is called for. It may be years before the tribesmen are won over by repeated overtures, but when it happens the end is in sight. All that remains is to encourage them to move their village into the mission area, and let things take their natural course.
In nine cases out of ten the local landowner has been waiting for the Indians to make such a move – he may have been alerted by the missionary himself – and as soon as it happens he is ready to occupy the tribal land. The Indians are now trapped. They cannot go back, but at the time it seems unimportant, because for a little longer the missionary continues to feed them, although now the matter of conversion will be broached. This usually presents slight difficulty and natural Indian politeness – and in this case gratitude – accomplishes the rest. Whether the Indian understands what it is all about is another matter. He will be asked to go through what he may regard with great sympathy as a rainmaking ceremony, as water is splashed about, and formulae repeated in an unknown language. Beyond that it is likely to be a case of let well alone. Any missionary will tell you that an Indian has no capacity for abstract thought. How can he comprehend the mystery and universality of God when the nearest to a deity his own traditions have to offer may be a common tribal ancestor seen as a jaguar or an alligator?
From now on the orders and the prohibitions will flow thick and fast. The innocence of nudity is first to be destroyed, and the Indian who has never worn anything but a beautifully made and decorated penis-sheath to suppress unexpected erections, must now clothe himself from the mission’s store of cast-offs, to the instant detriment of his health. He becomes subject to skin diseases, and since in practice clothes once put on are never taken off again, pneumonia is the frequent outcome of allowing clothing to dry on the body after a rainstorm.
The man who has hitherto lived by practising the skills of the hunter and horticulturist – the Indians are devoted and incomparable gardeners of their kind – now finds himself, broom or shovel in hand as an odd-job man about the mission compound. He shrinks visibly within his miserable, dirty clothing, his face becomes puckered and wizened, his body more disease-ridden, his mind more apathetic. There is a terrible testimony to the process in the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture’s handbook on Indians, in which one is photographed genial and smiling on the first day of his arrival from the jungle, and then the same man who by this time appears to be crazy with grief is shown again, ten years later. ‘His expression makes comment unnecessary,’ the caption says. ‘Ninety per cent of his people have died of influenza and measles. Little did he imagine the fate that awaited them when they sought their first contact with the whites.’
There is a ring about these stories of enticement down the path to extinction, of the cruel fairytale of children trapped by the witch in the house made of ginger bread and barley sugar. But even the slow decay, the living death of the missionaries’ compound was not the worst that could happen. What could be far more terrible would be the decision of the fazendeiro – as so often happened – to recruit the labour of the Indians whose lands he had invaded, and who were left to starve.
Extract from the atrocity commission’s report:
In his evidence Senhor Jordao Aires said that eight years before the (600) Ticuna Indians were brought by Fray Jeremias to his estate. The missionary succeeded in convincing them that the end of the world was about to take place, and Belem was the only place where they would be safe … Senhor Aires confirmed that when the Indians disobeyed his orders his private police chained them hand and foot. Federal Police Delegate Neves said that some of the Indians thus chained were lepers, and had lost their fingers.
Officially it is the Indian Protection Service and 134 of its agents that are on trial, but from all these reports the features of a more sinister personality soon emerge, the fazendeiro – the great landowner – and in his shadow the IPS agent shrinks to a subservient figure, too often corrupted by bribes.
One would have wished to find an English equivalent for this Portuguese word fazendeiro, but there is none. Titles such as landowner or estate owner which call to mind nothing harsher than the mild despotism of the English class system will not do. The fazendeiro by European standards is huge in anachronistic power, often the lord of a tropical fief as large as an English county, protected from central authority’s interference by vast distances, the traditions of submission, and the absolute silence of his vassals. All the lands he holds – much of which may not even have been explored – have been taken by him or by his ancestors from the Indians, or have been bought from others who have obtained them in this way. In most cases his great fortress-like house, the fazenda, has been built by the labour of the Indian slaves, who have been imprisoned when necessary in its dungeons. In the past a fazendeiro could only survive by his domination of a ferocious environment, and although in these days he will probably have had a university education, he may still sleep with a loaded rifle beside his bed. Lonely fazendas are still occasionally attacked by wild Indians (i.e. Indians with a grievance against the whites), by gold prospectors turned bandit, by downright professional bandits themselves, or by their own mutinous slaves. The fazendeiro defends himself by a bodyguard enrolled from the toughest of his workers – many of them, in the backwoods, fugitives from justice.
It has often been hard by ordinary Christian standards for the fazendeiro to be a good man, only too easy for him to degenerate into a Gilles de Raïs, or some murderous and unpredictable Ivan the Terrible of the Amazon forests. It can be Eisenstein’s Thunder Over Mexico complete with the horses galloping over men buried up to their necks – or worse. Some of the stories told about the great houses of Brazil of the last century in their days of respectable slavery and Roman licence bring the imagination to a halt: a male slave accused of some petty crime castrated and burned alive … a pretty young girl’s teeth ordered by her jealous mistress to be drawn, and her breasts amputated, to be on the safe side … another, found pregnant, thrown alive into the kitchen furnace.
An extract from the report by the President of last year’s inquiry commission into atrocities against the Indians corrects the complacent viewpoint that we live in milder days.
In the 7th Inspectorate, Paraná, Indians were tortured by grinding the bones of their feet in the angle of two wooden stakes, driven into the ground. Wives took turns with their husbands in applying this torture.
It is alleged, as well, in this investigation, that there were cases of an Indian’s naked body being smeared with honey before leaving him to be bitten to death by ants.
Why all this pointless cruelty? What is it that causes men and women probably of extreme respectability in their everyday lives to torture for the sake of torturing? Montaigne believed that cruelty is the revenge of the weak man for his weakness; a sort of sickly parody of valour. ‘The killing after a victory is usually done by the rabble and baggage officials.’
It is the beginning of the rainy reason, and from an altitude of 2,000 feet the forest smokes here and there as if under sporadic bombardment, while the sun sucks up the vapour from a local downpour.
The Mato Grosso seen from the air is supposed to offer a scene of monotonous green, but this is not always so. At this moment, for example, a pitch-black swamp lapped by ivory sands presents itself. It is obscured by shifting feathers of cloud, which part again to show a Cheddar Gorge in lugubrious reds. The forest returns, pitted with lakes which appear to contain not water but brilliant chemical solutions; copper sulphate, gentian violet. The air taxi settles wobbling to a scrubbed patch of earth and vultures go by like black rags.
All these small towns in this meagre earth are the same. An unpronounceable Guaraní name for a street of clapboard, tapering off to mud and palm thatch at each end; a general store, a hotel, Laramie-style with men asleep on the verandah; a scarecrow horse, bones ab
out to burst through the hide, tied up in a square yard of shade; hairy pigs; aromatic dust blown up by the hot breeze.
Life is in slow motion and on a small scale. The store sells cigarettes, meticulously bisected if necessary with a razor blade, ladlefuls of mandioca flour, little piles of entrails for soup, purgative pills a half-inch in diameter, and handsomely tooled gun holsters. The customers come in not to buy but to be there, wandering through the paper-chains of dusty dried fish hanging from the ceiling. They are Indians, but so de-racialised by the climate of boredom and their grubby cotton clothing, that they could be Eskimos or Vietnamese. They have the expression of men gazing, narrow-eyed, into crystal balls, and they speak in childish voices of great sweetness. Like Indians everywhere, the smallest intake of alcohol produces an instant deadly change.
The only entertainment the town offers is a cartomancer, operating largely on a barter basis. He tells fortunes in a negative but realistic way, concerned not so much with good luck, but the avoidance of bad. All the children’s eyes are rimmed with torpid, hardly moving flies. The fazenda, some miles away, has absorbed everything; owns the whole town, even the main street itself.
This is a place where cruelty is supposed to have happened, but the surface of things has been patched and renovated and the aroma of atrocity has dispersed. Everything can be explained away now in terms of extreme exaggeration, or the malice of political enemies, and all the witnesses for the defence have been mustered. Finally, the everyday violences of a violent country are quoted to remind one that this is not Europe.
Senhor Fulano lives with his family in three rooms in one of the few brick-built houses. His position is ambiguous. An ex-Indian Protection Service agent, he has been cleared of financial malpractices, and hopes shortly for employment in the new Foundation. He has an Abyssinian face with melancholy, faintly disdainful eyes, a high Nilotic forehead, and a delicate Semite nose. He is proud of the fact that his father was half Negro, half Jewish; a trader who captured in marriage a robust girl from one of the Indian tribes.