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CONFLICTS

 


... General | Conflicts | Intercultural Education | Environment | Yanomami Health

 


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URIHI denounces large scale goldminers' invasion

Health staff working in the Yanomami Health District (DSY) for the Brazilian NGO URIHI, say they are concerned for the safety of the indians because garimpeiros (goldminers) have re-entered the area and are handing out rifles and ammunition to them.

Dr Claudio Esteves de Oliveira, one of URIHI's directors, who has just returned from the area, says there are over 800 prospectors in the Yanomami reserve.

"If you fly over the region you can easily spot the places where there are miners," he explained. The spread of firearms amongst the indians is causing insecurity inside the reserve, and could even lead to a situation of desegregation.

Dr Oliveira said that there have already been conflicts between indians when rifles were used. "Several murders involving guns have already happened in the region, although they have not been reported," he revealed.

Dr Oliveira said that when indians have a gun in their hands they become dangerous, because if they quarrel with someone they do not hesitate to shoot.

"They stop fighting in the traditional way, body to body, and just shoot, putting an end to the quarrel in a definitive way, which doesn't correspond to their traditional culture," he said. URIHI is now preparing a full report on the subject, which should be ready within a month.

 

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FUNAI PLANS OPERATION TO EXPEL GOLDMINERS FROM YANOMAMI LAND

Following recent press reports that five people four Yanomami and one goldminer have died in conflicts, as a result of the growing garimpeiro invasion of the indigenous area, FUNAI has decided to survey the situation and draw up a plan to expel all the intruders. FUNAI president Glenio da Costa was informed about the deaths in a letter, signed by Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa and another 78 indians.

The letter was written during a meeting held at Koni u, 20 km from the Surucucus post. The indians asked for an urgent operation by federal police to expel the goldminers and stop more entering. They estimate that there are already about 2000 garimpeiros in the Yanomami area. FUNAI, according to press reports, puts the number of goldminers at 500 to 1000.

In protest at the violence, the Roraima branch of NISI, an umbrella organisation of six NGOs working on health projects in indigenous areas, has filed a lawsuit through the public prosecutors' office against the invasion of Yanomami territory.

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CCPY AND FUNAI MEET TO DISCUSS THE VIOLENCE

On 25th April CCPY met the president of FUNAI to discuss the invasion of the Yanomami area by garimpeiros and request their expulsion. Unless urgent steps are taken, there is a huge risk of another tragedy like the 1993 Haximu massacre when 16 indians were killed. FUNAI official Dinarte Nobre Madeiro has been put in charge of the expulsion operation.

Last week he overflew the Yanomami area. The operation needs to be approved by the Ministry of Justice and will depend on special funds being made available by the government.

for the third time...

This will be the third operation to expel goldminers from Yanomami land in recent years. The first, called Selva Livre, launched in 1990, expelled aprox. 20,000 garimpeiros from the area and exploded some of their clandestine airstrips. In the second, which lasted from November 1997 to January 1998, 750 goldminers were removed by the federal police, in an operation which also involved FUNAI, the Army, the Air force, IBAMA, the Foreign Ministry and the Attorney-General's office.

It cost US$6 million, and even so about 200 garimpeiros remained in the area. The garimpeiros are now concentrated in the Surucucus region. Although there is a base of the government's Amazon surveillance project, SIVAM, at Surucucus, goldminers have been returning to the area since the end of 1999. In Parafuri, north of Surucucus, for example, the goldminers camp is located only an hour's walk from the FUNAI post and is supplied by a single engine plane which uses the "Majestade" airstrip, according to reports from organisations that work in the area.

This airstrip was not closed down during the last operation and, according to the same reports, is still in regular use. "The expulsion operation will help to solve the problem of the miners' invasions, but what the Yanomami area really needs is a Permanent Watch Plan, like the one we have suggested to Funai, who have promised to draw it up," declared Fernando Bittencourt, CCPY's general secretary. It is hoped that funds for the expulsion operation will be made available quickly to enable it to start as soon as possible, with the transfer to the region of personnel from the various federal agencies who will cooperate to carry it out.

The Yanomami would like to see all the garimpeiros permanently removed and prevented from reinvading their lands once the operation is over, as they have always done in the past.

 

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SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES AMONGST YANOMAMI

Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa has revealed the existence of an outbreak of gonorrhea amongst indians in the Surucucus region, affecting about 70 men and women. URIHI director Claudio Esteves de Oliveira has confirmed the existence of 20 cases since last December. He says they do not know for sure who transmitted the disease to the Yanomami:

"We know they have contact with goldminers, with URIHI employees and also with the Army".

URIHI is providing treatment for the indians who have contracted the diseases, and has sent a formal complaint to FUNASA, the official health agency, about the activities of the garimpeiros or goldminers, who have invaded the Yanomami area. One group is accused of chasing indian women when they came across them in the forest.

"There are about 2000 garimpeiros in the area. The biggest problem is that they are there illegally, so the authorities have no control over them".

FUNAI has now promised to remove the goldminers within three weeks. Dr Oliveira said the Army have been taking steps to prevent the involvement of soldiers with indian women. Soldiers are not allowed out of barracks alone, but only in pairs and with authorization. Army HQ in Roraima have also denied any responsibility for the outbreak of cases of gonorrhea amongst the indians.

Soldiers are submitted to regular medical checkups and every three or four months are allowed recreational visits to town. For the army, there are other non-indians in the Yanomami reserve, including a group of men installing an advanced post of the Amazon surveillance project, SIVAM, who could have transmitted the disease. According to the Army spokesman, quoted in the newspaper Folha de Boa Vista on 23/10/00, previous cases of sexual abuse have been punished with expulsion, and if any new cases were to be confirmed, they would be punished with severity. Davi Kopenawa, quoted in the same newspaper article, said some indian women are going out at night and returning to the village in the morning. Four are married women, but he said their husbands do not complain because they bring back food, including flour, rice, meat, biscuits and dried meat. "Now we are worried about Aids," said Kopenawa.

According to the Yanomami leader three indians have become pregnant through relations with white men. "The head of the FUNAI post in Surucucus has a child with an indian woman. In Homoxi there is an indian who had a child with a garimpeiro. The soldier who had a child with an indian has left."

For Dr Oliveira one of the problems of gonorrhea, which when discovered can be cured with a single dose of the right drug, is that while in men it appears within four days, in women it can remain incubated for a long time, even a lifetime, without manifesting itself. The bacteria is hidden in the cervix and each new sexual relationship can transmit it.

 

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LETTER SENT BY FORMER JUSTICE MINISTER JARBAS PASSARINHO TO THE BRAZILIAN NEWSPAPER, O ESTADO DE S.PAULO, WAS PUBLISHED ON 27/03/2001.

PASSARINHO, A RETIRED ARMY OFFICER, WAS COMMENTING ON THE RECENT CRITICISMS OF THE DEMARCATION OF THE YANOMAMI AREA BY BRAZIL'S DEFENCE MINISTER, GERALDO QUINTAO.

"I read in the Estado, (O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper) that in Roraima, on 2lst March, the Defence Minister, Geraldo Quintao, said that the demarcation of the Yanomami indigenous area was "an error", a "terrible example", and that "Collor's decision was taken either through incompetence or from the president's need to appear in a good light abroad, because inside Brazil his popularity was falling". As the Minister of Justice who introduced Edict No. 580 on 15th November 1991, I consider it my duty to defend myself and the government of the time against these accusations of incompetence and of giving a terrible example to my country. Let us begin with the legal question. As a lawyer the minister knows very well that under the Constitution the Public Prosecution service is charged with defending essential social interests. In October 1989, in the exercise of these attributions, Eugenio Aragao and Debora Pereira, Prosecutors of the Republic, asked the judge of the 7th Federal Court in Brasilia to issue an injunction to protect the area of 9 million hectares established during the government of Joao Figueiredo and reduced to 2.5 million hectares by his honourable successor. The judge accepted the request, the government failed to make a case against it and the judge issued the injunction banning entry to the area and ordering the immediate removal of the goldminers from it.

Funai asked for the court order to be carried out. I had become Minister three days before. I ordered the area to be placed out of bounds, while I studied the question. A month later, the same prosecutors asked the court to declare that the area belonged to the Yanomami. When I verified the inexistence of legislation governing the demarcation of indigenous lands, I got President Collor to issue Decree No. 22 on 4th February 1991. I consulted the Ministry's legal advisers and the National Secretariat for Citizenship Rights. Funai set up a technical committee to come up with a report on the question, which they did on 22nd July 1991, recommending the demarcation of the area of 9 million hectares as a continuous area. Decree No. 22 recommended that certain official departments should be heard, and this had not yet been done. So I then asked the governors of Roraima and Amazonas and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Infrastructure and the Secretaries of the Environment and Strategic Affairs for their opinions. The military ministers decided that the chief of staff of the president's military cabinet should provide the report. The governors were against it. Itamaraty (Foreign Ministry), whose minister was a judge, was in favour. The Secretariat for the Environment agreed with them. The Secretariat for Stratregic Affairs considered that there was a danger to national sovereignty. The military cabinet, speaking for the High Command of the Armed Forces and the Navy, Army and Air Force Ministries, recommended that the case should be sent to the Defence Council. However, my legal adviser, and the Ministry's executive secretary considered there was no threat to national sovereignty and security, a view supported by eminent jurists. As the Yanomami territory is located in the frontier area, the state's rights over the area were guaranteed twice over.

The government's duty was to exercise its sovereignty over the indians and guarantee the integrity of the territory with the help of theArmed Forces. To have consulted the Defence Council, as the Military Cabinet proposed, was unnecessary, because under the Constitution's Article 91, lst paragraph, addition III its attributions were defined as "To propose the criteria and conditions for the use of areas indispensable to the security of national territory and to give opinions on their effective use." This case was not about the use or utilization of the land, but its demarcation. The right to possession had to be analysed in the light of Article 231 of the Constitution: "Lands traditionally and permanently occupied." Geneticists, linguists and anthropologists attest to the permanent and millenary presence of the Yanomami in the area, although the first historiographic references date from the 18th century. All that needed to be done was to define the area compatible with " productive activity, physical and cultural reproduction according to their uses, customs and traditions."

Anthropologists of prestige, authors of books, and who have studied the Yanomami in loco for years on end, defend continuous demarcation. To isolate the villages would be to make interaction between them unviable. One of the last existing primitive populations - never a nation! The spaces that seem empty on the maps are "paths that link the various villages, nerves and veins of the social space, areas of perambulation, essential for funeral and matrimonial ceremonies and for sociocultural reproduction, for hunting and travelling camps, for old vegetable gardens". The separation into "islands" would prevent the"intertribal relations" necessary to their uses and customs. Those who do not believe in cultural anthropology think they can follow the criteria of colonization with so many hectares per person. As Minister of Justice I have to fulfill in an exemplary way the Constitution I helped to write. After thirteen often exhausting months of study I approved the theory of a continuous area. In a dispatch I insisted on the need to hear the Defence Council as to the posterior utilization of the land. And in Edict No. 580 the action and activity of the federal authorities in the area, a government possession, was assured. Was it an error and terrible example? With the participation of incompetent scientists, jurists and technical advisers? How can one then explain the fact that the Supreme Federal Court has ruled against every attempt to get the continuous demarcation declared unconstitutional ? And the fact that the Senate has not approved any project contrary to it? The irresponsibility of Roraima politicians when they say we did not observe "any criteria in a demarcation made just looking at the map" does not surprise me. The politicians know that the indians do not have the vote while the goldminers do If there were to be any threat to the Amazon, it would not come from the Yanomami nation but from the devastation of the rainforest.

I do not underestimate the role of certain NGOs. But I think of Field Marshal Castelo Branco when he lacerated the "strategy of fear". In June 1999 during a public audience in the Chamber of Deputies, General Schroeder Lessa, then military commander of the Amazon region, told the deputies that the demarcation did not inhibit any Army action. Of course, because the land belongs to the state, it is state property (Article 20 of the Constitution) and not to the indians, who are simply occupiers. As to President Collor, if truth be told at no moment did he ever make even a suggestion with respect to demarcation. He ratified Edict No. 580 on 15/11/1991, at a sectorial meeting of the Ministry, in the presence of all the military ministers, without any disagreement being expressed. Even so, there are those who accuse him of carrying out the orders of the American president of the time, George Bush...."

 

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...General | Conflicts | Intercultural Education | Environment | Yanomami Health .