Police raid Amazon to protect uncontacted Indians (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Police raid Amazon to protect uncontacted Indians

02 Dec 2005 19:23:15 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Raymond Colitt
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N02349469.htm

BRASILIA, Brazil, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Brazilian police have arrested a
gang of illegal land speculators accused of killing and displacing one
of the Amazon's few remaining isolated Indian tribes, officials said on
Friday.
Federal police detained 29 people and expelled squatters who illegally
occupied, logged and sold land inhabited by an unidentified Indian
group near the River Aripuana on the border between the northwestern
states of Mato Grosso and Amazonas.

"There are no more intruders in the region," Marcos Antonio Farias,
Federal Police chief in the Mato Grosso capital Cuiaba, told Reuters.
Those arrested belonged to an association of landowners seeking to
develop the area known as Rio Pardo into farmland. The territory has
been earmarked but not officially declared an Indian reservation by the
government.

"This is an isolated Indian community with no contact to the outside
world so we may never have definitive proof but there are strong
indications that these criminals were seeking to exterminate them and
take their land," Mario Lucio Avelar, Mato Grosso public prosecutor,
told Reuters.
During an expedition this year, the government's National Indian
Foundation (Funai) officials found the squatters armed with guns and
bombs, a Funai spokesman said. They also found instruments and
makeshift shacks of the Indians.

Almost nothing is known about the Indian community - neither the
language they speak nor the tribe they belong to.

Nobody has ever communicated with it but last month's Funai expedition
sighted a few members.

A cameraman, documenting the expedition, filmed the attempted contact
with one Indian accompanied by two women, who was cutting a tree trunk
in search of honey.

After hesitating, the Indian put down his weapon but fled when the Funai
guide held out his hand to greet him.

Avelar said officials in the state's land registrar had participated in
the land appropriation scheme by issuing false land titles in the area.
Anthropologists have identified 30 groups of Indians that have made no
lasting contact with the outside world. The government's policy is not
to establish relations with such communities unless they are deemed to
be in danger of extermination.

Brazil's native Indians account for only 0.2 percent of the 180 million
population. At least on paper, they hold 12 percent of the country's
territory, an area larger than Germany and France together.

Yet in practice the Indian territories often do not provide the
necessary protection or well-being for their survival. In some cases
land speculators and wildcat miners invade the territories. In other
cases, corrupt Indian leaders sell the rights to use their natural
resources.
In April the government officially asked forgiveness from Brazil's
Indians for centuries of suffering.