Why do they conceal? – Survival Worldwide

Most of the remoted Indians of western Amazonia, for instance, are the descendants of the few survivors of the rubber growth which swept by 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 newer killings. The Amazonian individuals often called the ‘Cinta Larga’ [‘wide belts’] suffered many vicious and ugly assaults by the hands of Brazilian rubber tappers between the Nineteen Twenties and the Sixties. One well-known incident, the 1963 ‘bloodbath of the eleventh parallel’, occurred within the headwaters of the Aripuanã river the place the agency of Arruda, Junqueira & Co was accumulating rubber.

The top of the corporate, Antonio Mascarenhas Junqueira, deliberate the bloodbath, deeming the Cinta Larga Indians to be in the way in which of his industrial actions. ‘These Indians are parasites, they’re shameful. It’s time to complete them off, it’s time to remove these pests. Let’s liquidate these vagabonds.’

He employed a small aircraft, from which sticks of dynamite had been hurled right into a Cinta Larga village beneath. Later, among 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, ‘We have now 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 12 months. He declared in the course of the trial, ‘It’s good to kill Indians – they’re lazy and treacherous.’