Many tribal people who find themselves in the present day ‘uncontacted’ are actually the survivors (or survivors’ descendants) of previous atrocities. These acts – massacres, illness epidemics, terrifying violence – are seared into their collective reminiscence, and make contact with with the surface world is now to be prevented in any respect prices.
Most of the remoted Indians of western Amazonia, for instance, are the descendants of the few survivors of the rubber growth which swept via the area on the finish of the nineteenth Century, wiping out 90% of the Indian inhabitants in a horrific wave of enslavement and appalling brutality.
Others are survivors of more moderen killings. The Amazonian folks generally known as the ‘Cinta Larga’ [‘wide belts’] suffered many vicious and grotesque assaults by the hands of Brazilian rubber tappers between the Twenties and the Nineteen Sixties. One well-known incident, the 1963 ‘bloodbath of the eleventh parallel’, happened within the headwaters of the Aripuanã river the place the agency of Arruda, Junqueira & Co was amassing rubber.
The pinnacle of the corporate, Antonio Mascarenhas Junqueira, deliberate the bloodbath, deeming the Cinta Larga Indians to be in the best way of his business actions. ‘These Indians are parasites, they’re shameful. It’s time to complete them off, it’s time to eradicate these pests. Let’s liquidate these vagabonds.’
He employed a small airplane, from which sticks of dynamite had been hurled right into a Cinta Larga village under. Later, a number of the killers returned on foot to complete off the survivors – discovering a girl breastfeeding her youngster, they shot the newborn’s head off, after which hung her the other way up and sliced her in half. The decide on the trial of one of many accused stated, ‘Now we have by no means listened to a case the place there was a lot violence, a lot ignominy, egoism and savagery and so little appreciation of human life.’
In 1975 one of many perpetrators, José Duarte de Prado, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, however was pardoned later that yr. He declared throughout the trial, ‘It’s good to kill Indians – they’re lazy and treacherous.’
