In 1993, Herbert “Betinho” de Souza opened the nation’s eyes to the misery around them, when he launched Citizen Action Against Poverty and For Life. What was different from earlier campaigns was that Betinho, a world-renowned sociologist, called on every Brazilian to help the poor. He galvanized 3,000,000 people from all walks of life to go out and assist their neighbors. Millions more dug into their pockets to give money or supplies spurred by a media barrage that laid the truth before them: 32,000,000 Brazilians suffer from chronic hunger, some of the poor consuming no more than 500 calories a day.
Betinho was no stranger to suffering. A hemophiliac who tested positive to the HIV virus in 1985, he lost two brothers to the disease. — Betinho was the first Brazilian to publicly declare that he had AIDS and campaigned to educate people about the epidemic, until his own death in 1999. — Forced to flee the country during the dictatorship, he spent ten years in exile and returned to Brazil in 1979. He launched a grassroots campaign for “adjective-less” democracy involving every citizen in building a new society, not with words but actions.
“Betinho gave a face to millions of Brazilians who were pariahs in their own land. No one expects poverty to end tomorrow. The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer than ever, but they are no longer faceless. When the weakest and littlest one gives up life for lack of food, we cannot say we didn’t know,” says Dona Mariette.
In Ipêlandia, Dona Mariette and Marcos learned that the girls were outside the Goodyear factory earlier in the morning. They found a street kid who knew Teresa Dominguez and volunteered to show them where she took the men who paid her for sex. He led them to a vacant lot a block from the tire factory, with an abandoned bus sitting just off the road. As they drove up, two men climbed out of the bus, joking with each other as they headed back to work after their lunch break.
Marcos’ sister, Rosalia, was resting on an old mattress in the filth-strewn bordello. The thirteen-year-old was obviously pregnant. At first, she was aggressive toward Dona Mariette, adding her voice to Teresa’s demands that they be left alone. Then her bravado faltered and she let Marcos take her hand and lead her outside. Teresa refused help and left them, swinging her hips derisively as she sauntered back to the streets.
Somewhere in Tiberica in four months’ time, Rosalia’s child will be born in the favelas. It will give its first cry in an unjust country. Brazilians like Mariette da Silva Prado hear that cry.
Bruno Ramos Salgado
Tajira sat cross-legged in the canoe, bow and arrow ready, as the craft drifted downstream with the engine shut off. He was in the bow, his almond-shaped eyes narrowing as he swept the water. A ripple of green falling to earth in the forest caught his eye. Like the great hunter he was, the boy didn’t let the movement distract him.
The Old Devil was taking a siesta in the back of the canoe. To his enemies, Bruno Ramos Salgado was a terror of the Serra dos Paresís in southern Rondonia, where he made his home the past twenty-five years. Plunderers penetrating the wilds to cut down mahogany or dig for gold avoided the green hell and the Old Devil’s fire. There was a story of three loggers caught by Salgado and immolated on a pyre built from timber they were hauling away. It was false, but the alleged perpetrator encouraged and embellished the tale to warn off trespassers.
To those who loved him, the eighty-year-old was a living hero who risked his life to save the forest people of Rondonia. Salgado worked for thirty years with the SPI, the Indian Protection Service, and the National Foundation for the Indigenous (FUNAI), which replaced the SPI in 1967. He belonged to a group of agents dedicated to the credo of Colonel Cândido Rondon, the SPI’s founder: “Die if necessary, but never kill.” In 1975, Salgado resigned when no action was taken against an SPI man accused of accepting payoffs from a cattle rancher: The rancher’s henchmen poisoned two families of Pacaas Novas with arsenic. Between 1950 and 1968, the Pacaas Novas declined from 4,500 to 400 people, their extinction accelerated by the building of the Cuiabá-Porto Velho road that brought a multitude of colonizers to the Far West.
Bruno was fifty-five when he left FUNAI and went to live at Kaimari in the Serra dos Paresís. His father, Izaias Salgado, had maintained a telegraph station at this spot on the Apidiá River. Bruno was born here, the son of Izaias and Iara, a Paresí woman; he spent his childhood at the station and ferry point. The place never grew beyond a small village, becoming more isolated when the road from Cuiabá passed sixty miles to the north.
Bruno never married, and when he returned to Kaimari in 1975, he was alone in the world. He settled down to lead a simple life among the twenty families in the village. From time to time, interlopers who threatened the peace of the forest interrupted his retirement. The Old Devil would awake to put the fear of God into them.
He wasn’t responsible for the slaying of three loggers in the Serra dos Paresís in March 1990, but tracked and confronted them before they were murdered. He despised the timber cutters for destroying the rainforest: Where they took a single mahogany tree, they toppled or uprooted twenty-eight other trees. To get the mahogany out, the loggers used bulldozers to tear passages through the jungle; the logging roads opened the way for ranchers and colonists to take possession of the land.
He’d gone to warn the loggers that they’d be expelled if they invaded the forest at Kaimari. — Three nights after his visit, a rival band of loggers attacked and killed the men.
Bruno was first on the scene, early the next morning. The raiders had destroyed the camp and removed everything of value. Bruno sent two villagers with him to fetch the police at Pimenta Bueno, the nearest town on the Cuiabá road. He started back to Kaimari, walking through the forest.
A mile beyond the camp, a cry stopped him in his tracks. He found a small child hiding in the trees, terrified and weeping.
Bruno had seen the four-year-old the previous day. His father was one of the slain loggers: Edson Monteiro, a Pataxó from the state of Bahia, whose Indian name was Apurinã. Bruno asked him why he brought the child on such hazardous work. The boy’s mother had died at Porto Velho where they lived, and there’d been no one to care for him.
It was ten years since Bruno found Tajira in the forest and took him to Kaimari. He sent letters to friends at FUNAI asking their help in tracing the boy’s relatives. After eighteen months without success, he gave up and accepted that the child was staying with him.
Tajira spotted a good-sized catfish in the shallows. He gripped the bow and arrow, keeping perfect balance as he straightened his body. He took a deep breath and held it, bracing himself as he drew back the bowstring. His eye followed the catfish, judging the right moment. The bowstring hummed, the arrow flew straight and true, cutting the water and striking home.
“Aiiee!” Tajira cried in triumph.
The Old Devil opened one eye. “You woke me!”
“Sorry, senhor Bruno,” Tajira said. He pointed excitedly at his catch. “A big one!”
“Bah!” Bruno growled. Then the deep lines on his face broke into a smile. “Bravo, my little Indio.”
Tajira beamed with pride.
Late one morning in April 2000, a month after Tajira caught the catfish, Bruno was sitting on a chair outside his house. He was waiting for the boy to come home from a mission school, four miles up the Apidiá River.
Kaimari village stood on the riverbank, its thirty wattle and daub dwellings facing three sides of a small plaza that fronted the water. Two houses doubled up as a shop and a boteco. Broken boat engines littered one property, the place of senhor Evaristo, an itinerant mechanic who landed here many years ago. Most of Kaimari’s residents tended fields outside the village or fished and hunted for their needs.
Five families, thirty souls in all, were Paresí Indians; other villagers like Bruno Salgado were part Paresí. In the past, Bruno used his FUNAI connections, attempting to have Kaimari and the lands around the village demarcated as a Paresí area. FUNAI has successfully registered half the territory claimed by Brazil’s 350,000 Indians, from 21
0 indigenous peoples: The Indian lands represent 11 percent of the national territory, about 360,000 square miles, most in the Amazon region where half the Indians live. The Paresís failed to satisfy the Ministry of Justice that Kaimari was their traditional domain, Bruno’s father having founded the village.
The Paresís never doubted that their ancestors visited this forest. The name Izaias Salgado chose in the 1920s honored a legendary seventeenth century elder and shaman of the Paresí, Kaimari, chief of eighteen villages two days’ journey to the south. Paresí hunters who ventured to these woods had come face to face with the Great Spirit: the anaconda. Very occasionally, a Paresí would still find one of the great serpents, which by legend helped men steal the secrets of women. The sacred houses and the huge trumpets that represented the snakes no longer exist. But the modern hunters still flee from the anaconda, like the worms men were when warrior women ruled the earth.
Around noon, Bruno saw Tajira’s canoe approach the landing. Four children from the village went to school three mornings a week, taking lessons from the wife of a Baptist missionary. Bill and Nancy Proffitt came from Fort Worth, Texas and wanted to plant their church at Kaimari, but the Old Devil worked against them. It wasn’t a question of religion, for he hadn’t been inside a church in twenty years. Like other strangers who penetrated the forest, the Proffitts’ incursion brought colonization closer. The family and their three boys had spent a year at Manaus, learning the Portuguese language and preparing for their crusade in the jungle, part of a stream of evangelicals coming from North America to convert the Brazilians to Protestantism.
The Proffitts settled at the site of an abandoned Jesuit mission, where they lived the past eighteen months, their struggle against the inferno of pests as mighty as the battle for the hearts and souls of the people of Kaimari and two other villages in the forest. The pastor and his wife found great reward in nine children who came to the one-room school. Their own boys sat on the same benches. The young Proffitts though already filled with grace often fell victim to the demons of the forest.
“They’re becoming as wild as their playmates,” Bill Proffitt wrote in Green Pastures, the missionary family’s Internet newsletter. He posted photos of his little savages and their friends, including Tajira half-naked in a ragged pair of khaki pants, playing soccer with the boys from Texas.
Bruno visited the mission a few times, including the previous July 4, when the Proffitts invited him to celebrate their Independence Day, a brave affair with hot dogs and apple pie baked by the missionary’s wife. Evaristo the Mechanic became indignant, seeing the Stars and Stripes fluttering next to the Brazilian flag. “The Americans want to steal Brazil,” Evaristo protested.
“Not these Americans,” Bruno said. “They’re looking for the Garden of Eden. I hope they won’t be disappointed like so many who came to make their conquest of Brazil.”
Tajira beached the canoe and bounded across the plaza, shouting a greeting as he ran. The past years could have been an ordeal for an Old Devil, with his world turned upside down by a rambunctious youngster, but it was not so. Instead, he knew only joy, and sometimes a tinge of regret that he not had a son of his own.
Now he felt sadness, too, for he’d made a decision that must lead to their separation.
“What did senhora Nancy teach you today?” he asked.
Tajira said the senhora told the class about Americans who went to the moon. He didn’t believe the story until the teacher showed them a book with pictures of the astronauts.
“It’s true,” Bruno said. “The Americans are everywhere. Right here in our jungle, senhor Proffitt and his tribe. In this sertão so far from their home, they might as well be on the moon.”
“Daniel says when he is big, he is going to live on Mars.” — Daniel is the Proffitt’s ten-year-old son. — “I told him I’m happy to stay in Brazil with senhor Bruno.”
“When I am gone, who will be there for you?”
“Senhor Bruno is going away?”
“I’m eighty years, Tajira. I have not much time left.”
“Senhor Bruno is not sick. You are very old, but strong like . . . an Old Devil!”
Tajira heard people call senhor Bruno this, especially when they wanted him to fix their troubles.
Bruno laughed. “So! While this old devil has strength left, I want us to leave Kaimari and take the bus from Pimenta Bueno. It will be a long, hard journey.”
“Where are we going?” Tajira asked.
“To find your father’s people.”
Bruno Salgado still cut a formidable figure, over six feet tall with a wild mane of gray hair and piercing dark eyes. His trousers were shabby, his shirt collar frayed and discolored. He had no jacket but wore an ancient Shetland jersey given to him by a Glasgow professor studying the Nambikwara people at his last FUNAI post in Mato Grosso. The jersey was a ruin, elbow patches paper thin, cuffs trailing threads of green wool, but still cherished after thirty years of wear and tear in the jungle.
Bruno and Tajira left Kaimari in a canoe with two villagers, who took them up the Apidiá to a landing below the Porto Velho-Cuiabá road. They hitched a ride with a truck to Pimenta Bueno, where they caught the Cuiabá bus at midnight.
Bruno fell asleep almost immediately they roared off into the dark. Tajira remained awake, his face pressed against the window, staring at the swath of light next to the bus. The forest rose darkly beside the road, here and there a small clearing with a one-or-two roomed house standing in darkness. Then suddenly, the trees were gone and the land lay open, mile after mile cleared for cattle ranching. Along one stretch across the Mato Grosso border, the bus drove through banks of smoke from smoldering fires, tree stumps aglow from the inferno.
They made frequent stops on the way to Cuiabá. Every three or four hours, the motorista rolled up to a “restaurant,” often no more than an ugly concrete block that represented the dream of a new life on the frontier. Every month since the road opened, thousands of dirt-poor farmers came to clear the forest, cutting down trees one by one, selling the valuable wood and torching the rest. They planted a crop of manioc, then some beans, rice, and squash; within a few seasons, the poor quality soil was exhausted.
Some pioneers moved on to new land, where they repeated the debilitating cycle. Some sought work in towns like Pimenta Bueno, crowding into favelas as squalid as shantytowns they fled in São Paulo and other cities. Some gave up the fight against the forest and retreated to their roadside habitations, where they hung a hand-painted sign, “Restaurant Formosa,” and began to make their fortune.
The ride to Cuiabá lasted twenty-two hours. Bruno climbed stiffly off the bus, his big shoulders sagging. Tajira was also tired, as much from excitement as weariness. Bruno wanted to get a room across the street from the terminal and rest before tackling the next leg of the journey, 600 miles to Brasília. He stopped to inquire about the Brasília bus: There were two cancellations on an express leaving within the hour. Somehow, the Old Devil mustered the energy to get back on the road.
They reached Brasília the next afternoon, arriving at the Rodoviária toward sunset. The futuristic capital built in 1,000 days in the late 1950s has 2,000,000 inhabitants in its super quadrants and satellite cities. The Candangos are fiercely proud of the white marble palácios and towers rising on the savannah. At no time is the vision of Utopia more striking than at sunset when the cerrado sky lights the Plaza of the Three Powers and turns the Lago do Paranoá into molten gold.
Bruno called an old friend, Corinne Nery Mangoni, who worked for FUNAI. Corinne picked them up at the bus station and took them to her house on the shore of Paranoá, where she lived with her husband, Jorge, a secretary in the foreign ministry. She was a young anthropologist at FUNAI in 1975, when Salgado left the agency, but kept in contact with him over the years. She helped him when he originally tried to find Tajira’s relatives.
They stayed with the Mangonis for three days. The rigors of busing across half the country exhausted Bruno. He spent ho
urs sprawled in a chair at the poolside, while Tajira swam and played in the water. For a boy from the forest of Kaimari, visiting Brasília was like being on the moon or Mars even; everything was a wonder to him.
Corinne Mangoni drove Tajira around Brasília, stopping in at her office, where functionários of FUNAI met the boy and wished him luck in finding his Pataxó family.
When Corinne was showing Tajira the city, she pointed out a monument in Compromisso Square, which the people of Brasília erected in 1997 to pay homage to Galdino, a hero of the Pataxós. Tajira stood respectfully in front of the sculpture symbolizing Justice and Freedom.
Corinne spared the boy details of how Galdino Jesus dos Santos, a Pataxó Indian had come to be honored. On April 20, 1997, the forty-four-year-old Galdino was in Brasília, where he arrived as a member of a delegation pressing a land claim. Early that Sunday morning, locked out of the building where he was staying, he slept on a bench in Compromisso Square. Five youths aged sixteen to nineteen, from well-to-do families poured gasoline over Galdino and set him alight. “It was a joke. We thought he was a beggar,” they said when arrested and confronted with the atrocity. Only hours before, Galdino took part in observances for the “Day of the Indian.”
A week after leaving Kaimari, Bruno and Tajira resumed their journey, taking a bus traveling from Brasília to the south of Bahia. Their destination was Santa Cruz Cabrália, on the coast fifteen miles north of Porto Seguro, where a group of Pataxó Indians lived. — On April 23, 1500, the Portuguese captain, Pedro Álvares Cabral dropped anchor off the islet of Coroa Vermelha in Santa Cruz Cabrália and claimed the land for Portugal. Five hundred years later, Brazil planned to celebrate the event in the shadow of a Cross that marked the spot where the first mass was held at Coroa Vermelha. From every corner of the country, too, surviving Indians traveled to Bahia to remember their ancestors who paid a mortal price for their “discovery.”
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