Amazon tribe wonders why missionaries who help them are being expelled (fwd)

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Amazon tribe wonders why missionaries who help them are being expelled

Deep in the jungle, Indians wearing loincloths and beaded necklaces
gather in a hut to hear their leader question why the American
missionaries who help them are being told to leave the country.

The missionaries have been here for years, offering Bible lessons,
helping cure the sick and painstakingly learning the Indians’ language.

Now, President Hugo Chávez says their U.S.-based evangelical group has
links to the CIA, and he ordered all missionaries working with the New
Tribes Mission to leave Vene-zuela.

“They’ve always helped us, they’ve lived among us,” said tribal leader
Timoteo Tute, 42. “How can they send them away?”

Four American families assigned to live in Cano Iguana say they hope to
stay, but are preparing for the worst in case they are evicted. During
18 years among the Joti Indians, missionary Susan Rodman said she and
her husband, Dave, have raised three children, learned to deal with the
isolation and battled bouts of malaria.

“Now I just can’t imagine the thought of not being here,” said the
56-year-old Rodman, originally from North Carolina. “I’ve come to know
(the Joti) and love them.” But for others in Venezuela, these foreign
evangelists stir deep suspicions.

The New Tribes Mission, based in Sanford, Fla., has settlements in
remote, mineral-rich tracts of Venezuelan rain forests located far from
the surveillance of authorities.

Chávez – who has repeatedly claimed the United States is plotting to
invade his oil-rich country – two weeks ago ordered New Tribes
missionaries to leave, accusing them of exploiting indigenous
communities and having links to the CIA through “imperialist
infiltration.”

No official order has reached the group yet, but one missionary family
at Cano Iguana has already begun pulling out.

A daughter’s visa is expiring, and they see little chance of getting it
renewed.

In addition, more than 200 foreign Mormon missionaries transferred out
of the country a week ago, with the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints citing visa troubles for some of them.

The New Tribes Mission, which has 160 missionaries and other staff here,
has long faced accusations of wrongdoing in Venezuela.

Anthropologists, military officials and others have accused the group of
watching indigenous people die of malnutrition while living in luxurious
camps, forcing communities to give up ancestral traditions and creating
a sophisticated enclave of airstrips and settlements to exploit gold,
quartz and even uranium deposits.

“This is not a problem that has developed in the Chávez government,”
said Alberto Muller, a retired general and ex-governor of the region
who left office in 1985. “Since my time as governor, (the missionaries)
have really alarmed me.”

Since first establishing a presence in Venezuela in 1946, the group has
repeatedly been investigated, though each time the controversy fizzled
out.

Vice President José Vicente Rangel started calling New Tribes a security
threat as early as 1981. Tomás Antonio Marino Blanco, a navy captain,
recently revived claims first made in 1978 that New Tribes missionaries
have helped U.S. defense contractors from Westinghouse conduct mineral
prospecting.

The group denies the accusations and is seeking to meet directly with
Chávez to discuss the issue. It also says it is willing to open its
camps to government observers to quell suspicions.

Many indigenous leaders in Amazonas state defend the group, and on
Friday hundreds marched through the southern town of Puerto Ayacucho to
protest Chávez’ decision. Some said they support government efforts,
including the granting of collective property titles to Indian groups,
but do not see the sense in kicking out missionaries who help the
tribes.

Missionaries live in a cluster of rustic homes among the Indians’
thatched huts in Cano Iguana, a village about 350 miles south of
Caracas on the fringes of the Amazon basin.

Speaking through an interpreter, Tute, the tribal leader, said the Joti
people have come to know the white missionaries as neighbors.

He said the villagers, who still speak only Joti, have not been
pressured to abandon their beliefs and customs. They still hunt with
blow guns and cook cassava over stone hearths in the ground.

But some changes have come: The missionaries have invented a way of
writing the Joti language, and many Joti have learned it.

The missionaries say they stretch their donated funds to cover ex-penses
of flying in food and supplies and airlifting tribe members for medical
attention in emergencies via a short, grassy airstrip.

“There was never anybody who helped us like this before,” Tute said. “It
pains me to think of losing them.” AP