Genocide in the Mato Grosso

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32803, 31 December 1971, Page 8

Genocide in the Mato Grosso

Massacre on the Amazon. By Lucien Bodard. Tom Stacey. 333 pp. Glossary. Two years ago Lucien Bodard, a distinguished French journalist, wrote an account of the terrible impact of socalled civilised man on the Indian tribes of the Amazon Basin in central Brazil; this is the book’s first English translation and is sub-titled “a report on contemporary genocide.” For centuries men have sacked Brazil in their search for land and mineral wealth, liquidating the Indians as a matter of course, by poisoning, shooting or crude germ warfare-hunting them down like animals so none should live to tell the tale, driving the remaining tribes further back into the green hell of the Mato Grosso—the great jungle. But not all men regard the Brazilian Indian with hate. In the centre of the Mato Grosso on the sacred Xingu River, in a reservation the size of the Netherlands, live two Brazilian brothers, Orlando and Claudio Vilas Boas, humanitarians dedicated to the preservation of the 20 or so tribes in the area, whose lives are based on the act of faith—“that the Indians are men like other men.” Theirs is basically material aid and they will have no truck with Bibles. It was to the Vilas Boas’ group of dingy huts that Lucien Bodard went for an up-to-date picture of the Indians’ situation today, flying over trackless jungle from Rio de Janerio. He stayed with them for several days and also

visited the modem miracle city of Brasilia; his book is based on his findings in these two places. Each of the 20 tribes on the Xingu Reservation are composed of fewer than 50 people, speaking their own language and living naked in primitive isolated villages; some elaborately tattooed, some festooned with feathers, and some with enormous discs of wood distending their lower lips. Visitors are forbidden because of germs and Lucien Bodard’s visit was a rare exception. The brothers’ only contact with the outside world is their erratic radiotelephone and the Brazilian Air Force planes that fly in their supplies. The reservation is supported by government aid, and a little sly contraband in otter skins. Claudio and Orlando tame their quick-tempered charges by kindness, and the guns they possess are not to protect them' from the Indians but to protect the Indians from roaming adventurers, hunters and prospectors. Although the book has been exhaustively researched, the sense of much of . it. is .obscured by poor marshalling of material. It flows on, page after close-packed page, an Amazon of facts, much of it repetitive. One feels that further editing would have enhanced the work immeasurably. The translation is by Jennifer Monaghan and excellent black and white photographs add much to the text. The one map is inconclusively placed towards the end of the book, where reference is awkward.