by Gerard Colby
“We are not dealing out punishment here at Crenaque,” Pinheiro said. “The Indian, by his behavior, determines the length of time he remains in the camp.… I understand how sad and hard it is for the Indian to be separated from his family.… but it is necessary to get erroneous ideas out of his head.” Such as resisting “integration.”
All this repression was supposed to have ended with the end of the SPI in 1968. “The Indian Protection Service investigation will wind up in the United Nations,” Rio’s Jornal do Brasil had speculated at the time of Albuquerque Lima’s revelations. “The crime is genocide and violation of the rights of man. It is better that crimes like this be exposed so that our shame may be seen in daylight.”73
But the regime had other ideas. FUNAI and Crenaque were two of them. A trans-Amazon highway system was another, along with expanded exports of Amazonian beef and minerals to pay for an “economic miracle” with foreign earnings.
Denial of genocide was still another.
The regime tried various ways to deny that genocide had occurred. One of its more artful attempts was General Bandeira de Mello’s use of the nomination of Claudio Villas Boas, Brazil’s famed Indian protector, for the Nobel Peace Prize as a means of vindicating Brazil’s Indian policies, even though the nomination had been organized not by FUNAI, but by Robin Hanbury-Tenison of London’s Survival International. The general’s opportunism was shameless: “The fact that Claudio has been nominated by men of such repute in the scientific world represents a positive reply to those who for ulterior motives try to denigrate the Indian policy of the Brazilian government.”74 A year later, the leader of these men of scientific repute, after visiting the Mato Grosso tribes for London’s Primitive People’s Fund, would condemn the hunger and disease he found resulting from cattle ranchers’ invasion of the Indian hunting grounds.
The regime’s most important means for international propaganda was an old one, the Inter-American Indian Institute. The way had been cleared by government representatives to the Sixth Inter-American Indian Conference in 1968. The conference was held, ironically, at Pátzcuaro, Mexico, where the rights of Indians throughout the Americas had first been proclaimed in 1940 in the days of Lázaro Cárdenas and John Collier. The Second Pátzcuaro conference, which reaffirmed the goal of absorbing the Indian into the national economies, had asked the OAS to evaluate the efforts of the Inter-American Indian Institute toward accomplishing this goal since the first Pátzcuaro conference and confirmed the principle of equality among member governments by accepting the invitation of Brazil to hold the next Inter-American Conference in Brasília.
Nelson Rockefeller, as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, had looked warily at the Inter-American Indian Institute in its early years during World War II. He had released funds for American participation in the institute’s programs only after protests by BIA Commissioner John Collier, and only after he was sure the inter-American programs of Collier’s U.S. branch, the National Indian Institute, would facilitate, not get in the way of, his wartime mission of getting rubber out of the Amazon. He incorporated Collier’s top agent in Latin America, Ernest Maes, into the Rockefeller fold. And he left a record bereft of knowledge or concern when Collier’s and Colonel Cândido Rondon’s fear that Indians would again suffer exploitation from the revived rubber boom was borne out when Brazilian troops had to intervene against at least one rubber company for enslaving Indians and cutting off their ears for failing to meet daily quotas; chased across the Peruvian border, the company simply opened shop there.75 Now, twenty-eight years later, as the Amazon was being tapped for riches far greater than rubber, Maes was finishing his career in Nelson’s AIA, and Nelson’s Ecuadorian friend since the war, Galo Plaza, was in charge of the OAS, keeping a close eye on the Inter-American Indian Institute.
In August 1968, to emphasize the importance the OAS placed on the institute’s influence on Indian integration policies, Galo Plaza visited the institute’s headquarters in Mexico City. Pledging financial support, he called for urgent work in Guatemala (where the CIA-backed military regime was fighting a guerrilla insurgency it feared would spread to the Indian hills in the west) and cited the institute’s efforts in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia “to defend certain basic principles.”76 Brazil’s besieged Indians, however, were ignored.
William Cameron Townsend’s missionaries, meanwhile, were not ignored. In 1969, among its last round of grants, New York’s Woodward Foundation, founded and run by the brother of Rockefeller aide Harper Woodward, gave the Wycliffe Bible Translators $25,000.77
In 1971, when the World Council of Churches’ Program to Combat Racism sponsored a conference on Indian conditions, anthropologists from throughout Latin America responded. These anthropologists were ready to risk their careers to speak out for Indians—against colleagues, against missionaries, against companies, even against governments and the Inter-American Indian Institute.
And what they said would stun the world.
*The Amapá Development Institute, for example, was set up with funding by Antunes’s ICOMI to carry out recommendations prepared by AIA’s Walter Crawford based on an AIA field survey conducted under the auspices of the Antunes Foundation
* Edwards’s papers were supported against Allende’s criticisms by money and by orchestrated cables of protest about freedom of the press from foreign newspapers and the Inter-American Press Association (run for years by J. C. King’s old friend, Joshua Powers. Edwards was president of IAPA in the early 1970s) and by CIA “agent”-journalists from ten countries who were sent into Chile.
*The trans-Amazon highway system includes a number of interconnected roads, the longest of which is the central highway running east to west, the Trans-Amazon Highway.
42
IN THE AGE OF GENOCIDE
THE TURNING POINT: BARBADOS
Of all places for anthropologists to convene on the horrors of the Amazon, Barbados in January 1971 may have offered the most historical irony. Once a British colony of sugar plantations known for the crack of the slave master’s whip and a visit by fellow planter George Washington, Barbados was now a tourist mecca. The plantations and rum distilleries were still there, but much of the human labor of the past had been replaced by machines. Blacks were still there, too, descendants of slaves, constituting 70 percent of the electorate. But despite an almost 100 percent literacy rate among the island’s 850,000 people, Barbados was still ruled by a minority of white and Creole property holders who kept the island clean and prosperous looking for resident movie stars and wealthy expatriates. Blacks still lived in poverty, working for low wages in the service sector, supplying the needs of the island’s eighty hotels and guest houses.
A modern jet airport brought a steady flow of white tourists. And who would not be charmed by the fashionable boutiques, sophisticated entertainment, convenient check-cashing facilities offered by branch offices of the Barclay, Royal, and Chase banks, and, of course, the island’s quaint flowered beauty? To those uninitiated in the continuing economic legacies of colonialism, Barbados was the model tropical paradise of the corporate age: The streets were safe, the shops were plentiful, and the servants were courteous and refreshingly literate and spoke with a delightful Caribbean lilt to the King’s English. For most Americans, this kind of setting was the only Latin America they ever would see.
Even for some of the anthropologists, Barbados’s limbo dancers, steel bands, and cricket and polo matches seemed light-years from the mounting horror just a thousand miles radius to the south. Yet here the University of the West Indies also housed the Center for Multi-Racial Studies that financially enabled the World Council of Churches (WCC) to bring together anthropologists and ethnologists who were willing to report on what was really happening to the Indians of South America.
Faced with riots and revolutions worldwide, the WCC had set up the Program to Combat Racism to gather information that would alert member churches and secular agencies to the task of “helping to prevent the growth of tension
s arising from racism.” For its first region for study, the program chose South America. Some of the participants were titans in anthropology; others were young scholars just becoming known for their work. But all had been driven by their fieldwork into fearless advocacy for the rights of the people they studied. They rejected the norm of most of their colleagues and dared to publish their findings on the “collective crimes” committed against the South American Indians, despite “the risk of incurring discrimination and repression at the hands of government or missionary institutions.”
The reports were excruciatingly detailed and morally devastating. They described the condition of Indians in the interior regions of South America, where the least had been written and where the indigenous groups’ “very existence” was “seriously threatened.” Specifically, the anthropologists focused on three areas for their reports: the Chaco grasslands of Argentina and Paraguay, the vast plains, or Llanos, of Colombia, and the jungles of the Amazon.
Professor Miguel Alberto Bartolomé of Mexico told of the torture of Indians by police in El Gran Chaco, a huge grassy plain that straddles northern Argentina and much of western Paraguay. The region, used mostly by cattle ranchers, began to attract oil companies in the late 1960s. By 1969, the Trans-Chaco Highway was being built for the same purposes as its trans-Amazonian counterpart in Brazil: to connect extractive industries to their world markets. Settlements began to spring up along the road, just as settlements had accompanied railroads a century earlier in North and South America, with similar results for indigenous peoples. At the conference in Barbados, the name Chaco drew charges of degradation, despoliation, and, ultimately, genocide.
Bartolomé spoke of hospitals refusing to admit Indians; of efforts to drive out Indians who were seeking work in towns; of the growth of ghetto shantytowns on the outskirts of towns and cities; and of hunger, malnutrition, and disease.
Professor Miguel Chase Sardi told of worse conditions in the Paraguayan part of the Gran Chaco. Ayoreo (Moro) and Tomarxa Indians were forced to choose between surrender and peonage or fighting the advance of the frontier of General Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship, which boasted census figures showing that 52 percent of the country’s arable land belonged to 145 owners. There were Indian raids on settlements along the Trans-Chaco Highway (financed with U.S. money under sponsorship of the Inter-American Development Bank).1 Here was a history of dispossession of Indian lands by the Mennonite Colonies and coercive methods of promoting birth control with dangerous IUD coils among Chulupí Indians by Mennonite missionaries from Pennsylvania. Indian cooperatives were defrauded of aid sent by the West German government for the development of the Chaco.2 Paraguayan and German cattlemen organized slave hunts and massacres of Indian people, particularly the Aché Indians of the Yvytyrusú hills in eastern Paraguay. In the 1960s, the military used the Aché to hunt down and destroy rebels in the area who were fighting the dictatorship. Racism toward the Aché was self-evident not only in deeds, but in words: Paraguayans referred to the Indians as “Guayakí,” Guaraní for “rabid rats.”
The news from Colombia was equally grim. A series of attacks on Colombia’s Guajibo, Arauca, and Sibundoy Indians in 1969 had prompted clerics and anthropologists to appeal to the Vatican and the WCC. Some 7,000 Guajibos were said to be hiding from army hunts in the forests of the Planas region of northern Meta, a department west of Bogotá in the vast grasslands the Colombians call the Llanos. Sixty percent of the Guajibos were suffering from tuberculosis; 100 percent were malnourished.3 When Colombian anthropologist Victor Daniel Bonilla described the systematic oppression and killing of Colombia’s Indians, he called it “colonialist genocide.”4
As elsewhere, the Guajibo story began as a conflict between ranchers and Indians over land. The Llanos grasslands always had been a source of conflict, but in recent years, as world beef prices rose with demand, cattle interests, including American ranchers, had been moving onto Indian lands. In December 1967, this conflict led to the massacre of a band of Cuiva Indians who lived along the Colombia-Venezuela border.5 The killers were arrested, but “Indian hunts” continued.
The hunts centered on three Guajibo Indian reserves—San Rafael de Planas, Ibibi, and Abariba—just south of the huge American oil concessions recently obtained from the Colombian government.6 These Indian reserves had been the creation of Rafael Jaramillo Ulloa, a government malaria inspector. Ranchers had staked claims for as much as 98,000 acres, in blatant violation of the 7,413-acre limit in the Llanos set by Colombian law.7 Working his network of contacts in the government, Jaramillo persuaded INCORA, the government colonization agency, to provide loans to start a farm cooperative, an electricity-generating plant, a health clinic, and reserves totaling 34,594 acres, which was not much for 7,000 Indians. To protect the Indians’ land, Jaramillo got himself appointed police inspector. But as the rice cooperative began to succeed and more Indians became involved, the ranchers and farmers found themselves deprived of their source of cheap labor and cheap food. They accused Jaramillo of being a communist and began setting fire to villages.
In February 1970, in the face of escalating attacks on Jaramillo and his community and the death of an American rancher, he and 200 Guajibos withdrew into the forests for protection, determined to start another self-sustaining community. Colombian authorities sent in the army. Indians were arrested, many were tortured, and some were killed, including Guajibo leaders. The army claimed to be looking for Jaramillo and his followers, who were accused of being responsible for the American’s death and of joining communist guerrillas in the vogue of Father Camilo Torres Restrepo, a Catholic priest and advocate of peasants’ rights who died five years earlier fighting as a guerrilla in the ELN, the National Liberation Army.
Colombia’s Indians and SIL
*An Eastern Tucano tribe in Vaupés; no population data available
Sources: Victor Daniel Bonilla, Map of Colombia and Its Indian Groups, in Walter Dostal, ed., The Situation of the Indian in South America, p. 392; Anales del Congreso, Republica de Colombia, November 14, 1975, p. 1170; Richard Evans Schultes, Where the Gods Reign: Plants and Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (Oracle, Ariz.: Synergetics Press, 1988); Center for Folklore Studies, National University of Colombia.
Colombia Oil (1972)
Sources: El Tiempo (Bogotá), January 30, 1972; Republica de Colombia, Empresa Colombiana de Petroleós, Zonas de Exploracion, in El Tiempo, January 30, 1972, p. 8; Andean Times, December 7, 1973, p.13.
The Colombian army switched to more modern counterinsurgency tactics, launching a civic action program to draw the Indians out of the forests for the purpose of isolating Jaramillo’s armed Indians. Well-publicized protests of Catholic priests and anthropologists had focused attention on the Guajibos, making it impolitic to turn their forests into “free fire” zones. Otherwise, however, the counterinsurgency strategy perfected by Lansdale in the Philippines—drying up the sea of peasants needed by a rural guerrilla movement—was put into effect. The same methods were used—including translators of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), according to one report—as those used by the U.S. forces in Vietnam. Bogotá’s respected daily, El Espectador, reported that “the Summer Institute of Linguistics entered into collaboration with the civic action program of the Planas government … its purpose was to serve as direct mediator with the Indians” to persuade them “in the proper language and dialect” to surrender under the guarantee that “they will not be punished.… The Linguistic Institute also was prepared to offer radio equipment to establish direct communication between the police station in Planas and the Department capital,” Villavicencio.8
SIL’s Lomalinda base was situated between Villavicencio and Planas and had the most powerful telecommunications tower east of the Andes, quite capable of daily reports to the Jungle Aviation and Radio Services (JAARS) base in Waxhaw, North Carolina, never mind Villavicencio. But from this news report sprang charges that SIL was giving the military logistical support, including aerial maps
to help locate Guajibo settlements in the forest, in much the same manner that they were alleged to have done during the attacks on the Campa Indians in Peru in 1965. All charges were denied by SIL officials.
Whatever the truth of these allegations, the anthropologists who gathered at Barbados began to notice that SIL was a common factor in their reports. Whether in Peru or Bolivia, Ecuador or Brazil or Colombia, there was SIL, operating out of huge jungle bases strategically located throughout the Amazon basin. SIL seemed to have easy access to high government officials; it employed a fleet of airplanes and powerful radio transmitters, flew across borders like they did not exist, and knew more about the location and cultures of tribes of the Amazon than local governments did.
To some degree, many of Latin America’s anthropologists had only themselves to blame for being passive bystanders; most of them lived in comfortable academic surroundings. Often from privileged backgrounds, they were simply unwilling to endure the hardships of the jungle the way missionaries were. When it came to motivation, the will of science was not as strong as the Will of God. That was nothing new. But the sudden appearance of foreign capital in the wilderness—development loans for roads, cattle ranches, and colonization schemes billed as “agrarian reform,” bulldozers and jungle crushers paving the way to open pit mines and oil wells—was new in the Amazon.
The simultaneous forced “integration” of Indians—with increasing use of Bible translators by governments to carry out the first stage of contact that often led to degradation, ethnocide, and even extinction—could no longer be ignored. Guiding the anthropologists at Barbados was not only a strong humanitarian concern for Indians, but the nagging fear that what was happening to the Indians of South America’s interior was the first stage in the extinction of national sovereignty itself. Multinational corporations had arrived in the Amazon more often with missionaries than with soldiers, driven by competition and their own struggles with debts to dominate nature’s last refuges. Their domination of resources and their “free-trade” exchange of products threatened to sweep away national barriers and in so doing, to establish a new world order where cultural homogeneity, rather than diversity, would rule.