Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  Some 5,000 kilometres and what feels like several centuries away in Brasília, a bearded man with furrowed brow paces a government office in heavy hiking boots and khaki shirt. Sidney Possuelo is charged with protecting Brazil’s indigenous people as the head of Funai. He is angry. He feels powerless and worried that Brazil’s new President, Itamar Franco, will succumb to pleas to open up the reserve for mining. ‘I’m a malandro [scoundrel], not a politician,’ he says as he fires off a letter to the army chief complaining about the arrest of a French nurse in the Yanomami reserve.

  At Possuelo’s offices the lift is out of order, the phones are often cut off, and few lights are on. The government cash crisis has left Funai with no funds to monitor the 272 existing reserves, or to demarcate the 238 outstanding. Last year, Possuelo received less than 10 per cent of his budget. So far this year, he has received nothing. None of Funai’s nine planes is working. The Collor decree, overriding military protests to create the Yanomami reserve, should have been a victory but, without the money to enforce it, Possuelo now suspects it was a mere marketing stunt.

  ‘It’s not enough to create a reserve when, inside, you have riches and, outside, marginalised people,’ he says. He accuses his opponents of distorting the argument. ‘What we’re talking about is not maintaining the Yanomami as they are, like some museum piece for the benefit of anthropologists, but of giving them the option of staying as they are or joining the world around with time to adjust.’

  Over the road in the capital’s flying saucer-shaped Congress building, Senator João Fagundes is having none of this. ‘We never felt we needed to keep the Vikings preserved in cages. It’s no good saying that the Yanomami’s ways are lovely, let’s keep them. What was good 200 years ago is not now.’

  He favours the solution of the previous government, which demarcated 19 islands each of 2.4 million square kilometres for the Yanomami but gave garimpeiros or mining companies access to all the rest. ‘The Yanomami land takes up 40 per cent of Roraima. That’s ten square kilometres per person – no nation on earth has that amount of land,’ says Fagundes.

  Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, the tribe’s Portuguese-speaking representative, also visited Brasília that day to present a bow and arrow to President Franco. ‘I will tell Great White Chief that Omame [a Yanomami god] put minerals beneath the earth because it is cold. When these are taken out, they spread hot air and venom, which causes many illnesses. We have tried to tell the whites but they don’t listen.’

  To Possuelo’s surprise, Franco did listen and agreed to a £1.4 million operation to remove the garimpeiros. But in the Funai office in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, Wilk Celio, the coordinator of the removal programme, is sceptical. ‘It’s useless – the garimpeiros will keep going back. There are 100 garimpeiro planes operating in this area while we don’t have a single one. The only answer is constant monitoring and that means funds. Last year, we didn’t get a cent.’ His colleague, Manuel Reginaldo Tavares, gestures at a wall map of the state showing the location of its 24,970 Indians of eight different tribes, and laughs. ‘Our resources are not even enough to run a crèche of 100 children, let alone 25,000 Indians.’

  Tensions are high over the issue in Boa Vista. Roraima state depends on federal handouts but would be rich if allowed access to its minerals. The population has tripled to 230,000 in ten years because of the influx of garimpeiros, and not just from Brazil. A Londoner has just arrived from Mile End and a Scot, John Boyle, runs the Bay Bar and nightclub after eight years as a garimpeiro.

  Prices in bars and restaurants are in grams of gold, and everyone seems to have a stake in the struggle between garimpeiros and Yanomami. The headlines in the local papers are about murders. People mutter of mafia-like activities and aid workers tell of pet dogs slaughtered in their gardens. Celio gets constant threats and lives between his office and hotel. ‘I’m a prisoner,’ he says, and talks of going on holiday and not coming back.

  An enormous concrete statue of a garimpeiro dominates the town’s main square. It stands in front of the state assembly, where all twenty-four members are against demarcation for the Yanomami. Next to this is the palace of the Governor whose spokesman, Francisco Netto, says: ‘The federal government can keep on spending more and more but will never succeed in taking out the garimpeiros. The only answer is to create mining reserves and allow in companies so that we can collect taxes.’

  Elton Rohmelt, the head of the state energy department, has no doubt that day will come. He is one of the main garimpeiro bosses and owns a fleet of four planes and a helicopter. ‘No one knows the Amazon better than me,’ he says. He is so fat that his jowls quiver as he speaks and the buttons strain on the patterned shirts he buys in Savile Row. Rohmelt decided to lie low when Collor took office. ‘I saw he was mad, so I took up the Governor’s invitation to run the state energy department.’

  He is using his position to put in place the infrastructure for his future mining operations. Here a hydroelectric project, there a road to Venezuela and the port. His company, Goldmazon, has more than sixty claims in the Yanomami areas.

  ‘Refusing access to this is a crime for a poor country like us,’ he says. ‘I’m absolutely sure that, within the next few years, mining in Yanomami areas will be allowed – and I’m ready.’

  His great rival, the ebullient Zé Altino, a media-loving representative of the garimpeiros’ union, Usagal, is more careful to play down his personal interest. ‘What’s the point of blowing up airstrips if, six hours later, they are rebuilt?’ he asks. He claims that there are a million garimpeiros in Brazil, of which 400,000 are ‘professional’. He adds: ‘They say garimpeiros are illegal, but there are more garimpeiros in indigenous areas than there are Indians in Brazil. Don’t they have rights, too?’

  Haroldo Eurico dos Santos, the State Planning Secretary, is a former professor who used to advise governments to burn down the Amazon. He is busy drawing up mega-plans for Brazil’s poorest state. Above the noise from roaring, clanking pipes, he shouts: ‘This state is basically unviable. We generate only 16 per cent of our expenditure and our only potential economic base is either demarcated or will be. Ninety-nine per cent of the population is against demarcation. The only ones in favour are the Church, communists and some Indians.’

  The most vitriolic opposition is on Rua do Ouro (Gold Street). There, many of the gold shops are boarded up, the stores full of mining

  utensils deserted, and garimpeiros huddle miserably in the bars, biding their time, comparing how often each has had malaria (one man has had thirty-four bouts). They recall the days when they could make a good living just from the end-of-day sweepings outside the gold shops.

  Most of the gold is smuggled out of the state to avoid taxes, so figures for the amount produced are vague. According to Altino, production reached 12 tonnes in the peak year of 1990, as well as 500,000 kilos of diamonds. Even then, few got rich apart from the bosses, the Rohmelts and Altinos, who run airstrips, planes, bars, brothels, and rent machinery at inflated prices.

  In Rua do Ouro, the blame for the latest crackdown is laid on everyone from the Americans (‘they are scared of Brazil becoming a great power’) to the padres for their defence of Indian rights. So unpopular is Dom Aldo, the Bishop, that a petition was mounted last year to get him out. One man told me: ‘I’d like to have his kidneys on a barbecue fork.’

  After seventeen years in Boa Vista and overseeing a Yanomami mission, the fire seems to have gone out of Dom Aldo. Wearily, he tells me: ‘People say we are working for gold or trying to create another nation, but that’s a lie. Nor are we trying to convert them [the Indians]. They don’t yet have the terminology for catechism, so it’s very hard to explain our Christian concepts.

  ‘People get angry because we tell the Indians their rights. It’s a war between economic interests and human rights in a country where the powerful always win.’

  Among so many voices, the only ones not to be heard are the Yanomami’s. Experience from other tribes suggests t
hat Indians are keen to have the badges of progress such as televisions, speedboats and ghetto-blasters. Some of the more acculturated Amazonian tribes, such as the Kayapo and Xingu, have organised and demand royalties for prospecting in their areas. But along the Rio Branco River from Boa Vista, at Fazenda São Marco, a community of Macuxi Indians live in pitiful conditions. White contact has robbed them of their old ways without equipping them to find a substitute. For the primitive Yanomami, the future looks bleak.

  Most of my Brazilian friends in Rio could not understand my fascination with the Amazon, regarding the region as a Dante-like cauldron of death and disease.

  But I was finding the Amazon was full of stories, not all grim. I spent an unlikely few days with a Japanese community deep in the jungle who had opened a karaoke club. Delighted to find someone English, they made me sing all the Elvis songs in the catalogue then the Beatles until I felt like Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust forced to endlessly read Dickens to a mad recluse in the Amazon. I accompanied the Amazon’s first Avon ladies selling lipsticks and blushers from canoes up and down the river. There, I saw my first botos – the Amazon’s famous pink dolphins which are said to turn into men at night and seduce young girls, a handy excuse for inconvenient pregnancies.

  I even went to an opera in the jungle – The Magic Flute. The accompaniment was provided by an orchestra of sweating Bulgarians who looked somewhat alarmed to find themselves in this sweltering place that rotted their violins. The newly renovated candy-pink opera house with its yellow and blue dome was all that remained to mark the rubber boom that had once made Manaus one of the richest towns on earth, a place where men fed buckets of champagne to their horses and sent their shirts to be laundered in Paris and Lisbon. It may have been in the middle of a malarial swamp but it was the first town in Brazil to have electric streetlights, a telephone system and trams.

  It seemed like something out of a novel. After I left Brazil, I would go back again and again.

  Love Intervenes

  From Boston to Khartoum 1993–1994

  We said goodbye at Central Park boathouse. In my bag was the plastic snow globe that had been his first present to me, and in my mind, his words in romantic broken English: ‘We fit together like the last pieces in a jigsaw.’ I was heading off to my dream job and should have been happy. At Kennedy airport I cried so much that a man asked me if I was scared of flying.

  On my application for the Nieman fellowship I had written how I planned to spend my year at Harvard studying environmental policy-making. Secretly, I had thought that at last I would write my novel. I had not expected to fall in love.

  I’d noticed Paulo immediately the first day. All twenty-four of us fellows (twelve Americans and twelve from the rest of the world) gathered in the Nieman Foundation’s white clapboard house and each gave a small introduction. Paulo came from Portugal and was wearing a suede waistcoat over a white shirt that perfectly set off his olive complexion, dark eyes and black hair. I thought he was dashing and arrogant in roughly equal measure.

  Most impressive was Kofi Coomson, the editor of the Ghanaian Chronicle, who was resplendent in gold-threaded Ashanti robes and informed us that he was going to be the next president of Ghana. Then there were Jaroslav Weis, a Czech intellectual with a scruffy beard and baggy jumpers who wrote science-fiction books in between political columns, and Ratih Hardjono, an Indonesian of swan-like beauty who battled daily against a dictatorial regime that allowed none of the freedom of the press which the rest of us took for granted.

  The Harvard course directory was as thick as a telephone book and the first subject that caught my eye was ‘Introduction to Opera 101’. Mondays at 9 a.m. seemed a little brutal yet it was the perfect way to start the week, listening to Professor Lewis Lockwood talk about the leitmotifs in Don Giovanni and Der Rosenkavalier then play the blissful music which was the reason we were all there. Sometimes he even brought in singers from the Boston Symphony Hall.

  Paulo, the dashing Portuguese Nieman, had had the same idea. It would have been rude not to sit next to him, particularly as I spoke Portuguese from my years in Brazil. As we walked across Harvard Yard after class, he made me laugh. Soon, I found I was looking out for him at the twice-weekly opera mornings, disappointed if he did not turn up.

  Our mutual passion for Der Rosenkavalier quickly developed into something more. Paulo had been to Boston before and our first date was over lobster in the Union Oyster House, America’s oldest restaurant, followed by fiery shots of grappa in Caffe Vittoria in the Italian quarter. We laughed at the ‘foliage hotline’, a local free-phone service that told you the best days to see the autumn colours in all their glory, and rented a car for the day to drive into the New England countryside and look at leaves.

  Soon we were seeing each other almost daily. On fine days we went cycling along the Charles River to buy hot melt-in-the-mouth cinnamon buns. Sunday mornings were spent in Harvard Square with a large paper cup of coffee and sticky Danish from Au Bon Pain, wading through the thick wad of the New York Times or watching old men play speed chess as minutes ticked by on old-fashioned clocks.

  Best of all were visits to the Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore* on Boston’s Newbury Street. Housed in a brownstone building, there was a fat cat in the window and the desk was manned by a crotchety old man who had started out selling books from a barrow. The books were second hand and crammed into lots of tightly packed shelves in no particular order. In that room I discovered the short stories of Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor, John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, and rediscovered Tennessee Williams and Jack Kerouac.

  Perhaps Paulo and I had watched too many movies but the shop took on another role. Sometimes, tucked between the pages of certain books like Hemingway’s letters, Neruda’s poems or Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I would find a note. Cinnamon buns at 5? one might read or Meet me at Swan boats lunch-timetomorrow.

  Then the cold came. To start with, we were like small children full of excitement at waking to a world cloaked in white and with all the sounds muffled. Wrapped up in woolly hats and puffy parkas we had bought at bargain prices in Filene’s Basement, we ran into Harvard Yard where the statue of John Harvard had become a white hump on which a student had stuck a carrot nose and tied a scarf. Someone found a tray and we took turns tobogganing down the steps of the Widener Library.

  But the snow did not stop. That winter Boston had twenty-six snowstorms. The Boston Globe ran a daily chart comparing the amount of snow to the height of Larry Bird, a legendary basketball player from the Boston Celtics who stood six feet nine inches. Soon the snow had topped Bird – we’d had over ninety inches, making it Boston’s snowiest winter since records began some hundred years earlier. The snow was no longer white and crispy but hard and dirty, piled up in walls along the pavements and stained an unpleasant yellow.

  And the cold hurt. It did not matter how many clothes you wore – there was always a bit of earlobe or nose for the chill wind to cut into. Weathermen warned that exposed skin could freeze within thirty minutes.

  I began to dream of going somewhere warm. I had never forgotten sitting in the FT office in February 1990 watching the TV showing Nelson Mandela emerge from jail after twenty-seven years, no one knowing how he would look since that one grainy black and white photograph everyone had used for years. I had desperately wished I was there reporting on it. So when the new editor of the Sunday Times phoned and asked me if I’d like to be his Africa correspondent based in Johannesburg, I did not have to think twice.

  On 15 August 1994, a day after flying back from America, I walked into Fortress Wapping, the News International headquarters, to collect my laptop and press card. It was an inauspicious start. I was surprised to find Britain’s biggest quality newspaper housed in what seemed like a Portakabin and everyone glued to their desks. Richard Ellis, the managing editor, had a chart on his wall listing all the reporters, with red dots awarded for each front-page story. The wo
rd was that if you did not rack up five in a year, you were out. That evening on the Northern Line back to my parents’ house, I was mugged for the first time and had my new laptop stolen by two men with knives.

  Within a few days I was on a flight to Khartoum. Carlos the Jackal, then the world’s most wanted terrorist, had just been spirited out of Sudan by the French secret service and I was supposed to find out how. Suddenly I had the life which I had longed for, jumping on planes to places I had never been. I was working for the same paper as the correspondents I most admired, Jon Swain and Marie Colvin. But it was Thursday night and I would arrive in Khartoum with only one day to get my story. And half of Fleet Street seemed to be on the same plane.

  Stumbling through the airport in the early hours, we were met by Tariq from the Sudanese Information Ministry. He told us he was there to ‘facilitate’; in fact he was our minder and determined to ensure we did not get any information or evade a single piece of red tape. Consequently we journalists were by far the last to emerge from Customs.

  In most capitals there is one hotel favoured by journalists. In Khartoum this was the Hilton, perched on the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile. It was the wrong side of 4 a.m. by the time check-in was completed, but I felt wide awake as I looked out from my room over the swollen waters from which dark treetops poked. ‘The Nile!’ If I followed it downriver I would come to the heart of Africa and Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria where Burton and Speke had searched for its source. Along the bank stood an elegant white building. This was the former Governor’s Palace where General Gordon was under siege for ten months. I imagined him prowling the flat roof desperately scanning the river for signs of a relief expedition from London against the Mahdi, whose guns were amassing across the river. It did not come and in January 1885 he was gunned down and his head paraded round the city on a spike.