Brazil

Polonoroeste Update

In February 1985, for the first time, the World Bank halted payments on a loan because of environmental problems and threats to the integrity of indigenous populations. The loan was for what has become perhaps the most notorious multilaterally financed development project ever - the Northwest Region Integrated Development Program (Polonoroeste), a $1.6 billion project to pave 1,500 km of road and resettle migrants in the Brazilian Northwest.

In the past year Cultural Survival has worked with environmentalist organizations, notably the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Wildlife Fund, in urging Congress to pay attention to the harmful social and environmental effects of many loans made by the large multilateral development banks (MDBs). In this connection I testified on September 18, 1985 before the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, chaired by Senator Kasten.

About a year ago the Brazilian Anthropological Association, the Union of Indian Nations (UNI), the Pro-Indian Commission of Sao Paulo, the Missionary Indianist Council and other groups that support the Indian cause produced a document d

Under the national laws and legal systems of the countries in which Indians live, it has been extremely difficult for them to find protection for their human rights. In light of such inadequacies, Indian nations have made efforts to establish an international personality in the courts and political assemblies of the world. Needless to say, their efforts to reassert their sovereignty in their homelands have met with considerable obstacles and opposition.

The Polonoroeste Case in Brazil

The Polonoroeste project consists of highway resurfacing, the building of feeder roads, the construction of storage facilities, the titling of land, and other "development" measures in western Brazil. The World Bank contributed $412 million to the project. Serious doubts about the wisdom of this expensive project were voiced before loan arrangements were signed.

One concern about the project was its effects on the indigenous peoples of the area.

The people who depend on marine resources have been overlooked and the exploitative versatility of commercial interests has been underestimated.

The Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), with their massive development projects, affect the lives of indigenous peoples and the environment every day. But it has been hard to find ways for indigenous peoples, indigenists, and those concerned with the environment to affect their decisions.

Indians from five Amazonian countries presented their cases at UN meetings in July/August.

For two years CS Quarterly has identified global themes important for an understanding of the current situation of tribal groups and ethnic minorities and has brought the urgent situations confronting specific groups to the attention of

Shavante women of central Brazil, 1958-1982

"Perhaps many of its will have to write our Indian history with blood, but one day we will make the V of victory to the government an to FUNAI. We will be victorious." - Marcal Tupa-Y (Guarani leaders assassinated on 25/11/83)

Brazilian Indians have taken advantage of the process of abertura ("opening," the process of political democratization initiated by President Joao Figueiredo in 1979) to make significant political gains.

On June 2, 1983, Indians in the Xingu National Park, long heralded as the model reserve of Brazil's Indian agency, FUNAI, confiscated a private airplane. It had landed illegally on an airstrip, to which access is controlled by FUNAI. The Indians released the owner within 24 hours, but held the plane until early August, demanding improved health care, competent management, and the resolution of longstanding land claims. The incident eventually involved not only FUNAI officials but one of the Park's founders, Claudio Villas Boas.

FOR more than thirty years, the Amuesha Indian community of Miraflores (Oxapampa, Peru) has provided young girls as servants to neighboring haciendas and the homes of the region's lumber barons. During the past ten years, as the demand for servants in the urban areas has grown, more and more Amuesha girls have been taken to Lima to work in middle class homes.

Mario Juruna, the only Indian Representative in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, convened a meeting of various pro-Indian organizations in Brasilia at the end of November to consider the seriously deteriorating situation of Indians throughout the country. The meeting was called in response to the killing of an Indian leader, Macal Guarani, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul on November 25.

From the earliest contacts between Portuguese explorers and the coastal Tupi populations in the 1500s, Catholic missionaries have provided a buffer between Brazil's Amerindian tribes and European-based nation-states.

By the end of this decade most of rural Latin America will be incorporated into major national and international telecommunication networks. In this sudden, quantum leap to space-age telecommunications, indigenous communities living in rural, "frontier" areas, whose experience with television and even radio has been minimal or nil, will become "linked" to satellite technology. The modernization of communications is widely acclaimed by Latin American governments as necessary for national economic development and socio-political integration.

Cinema has emerged as the most alluring and expensive communications medium of the century. No other art form has been disseminated so effectively, or has appeared to transcend so many national and cultural boundaries. Unlike other art forms, films are created solely for mass distribution. Every member of every audience can witness "the real thing."

Television technology and exhibition entrepreneurs have introduced cinema to both rural and urban audiences in many developing countries. However, most cinema distributed internationally is produced in the United States and Europe.