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A People at Risk, Part Two: Vanishing Tribes of South America
| Article
# : |
18781 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
2,526 Words |
| Author
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Peter Gorman
Peter Gorman, a free-lance writer and collector for the
American Museum of Natural History, has researched and
written
extensively about the peoples of the Amazon. |
The plight of the indigenous tribes of South America first came to the attention of the international community in 1967, when eighteen Cueva Indians from Colombia's Amazon jungle were killed by a small group of cattle ranchers who had moved illegally onto the restricted Cueva homelands. Later arrested and brought to trial, the ranchers admitted the killings but questioned the charges. The Cueva were Indians, they argued, and everyone knew that Indians were animals, not people. There was even a verb in Colombian Spanish, cuevar that meant, "to hunt Cueva Indians." So what exactly was their crime, they asked.
The jury found them innocent by reason of "cultural ignorance." But media attention created by the Bernard Arcand documentary of the trial, Last of the Cueva, forced the Colombian government to reopen the case; at their second trial, the ranchers were found guilty of murder and given severe prison sentences.
While cases like the massacre of the Cueva and the miners' invasion of the territory of the Yanomami--the largest unacculturated tribe in the Americas--have become well known because of the media attention they receive, they are not unique: In the interior of the Amazon forest today, away from the eyes of cultural and environmental watchdog groups, the loss of indigenous tribe to disease, forced acculturation, and outright murder continues unabated.
A growing awareness
My own awareness of the slaughter of South American tribal peoples did not being until I began to explore the Amazon in 1984. I was one of several hundred passengers on a riverboat making its way between Pulcallpa and Iquitos on Peru's Ucayali River when one evening I overheard two men talking about expanding their timber operation on the Tapiche River, populated by the Mayoruna Indians. One of them said the Mayoruna would offer resistance to the encroachment; the other responded that they would have to killed.
That was all I heard; they saw I was listening and moved away. I did not believe they were serious until the following year when I ran into a small group of Mayoruna; they said that their village on the Tapiche had been burned some months earlier after an altercation with some madieros, timbermen. Even then it seemed improbable to me that people could simply burn whole villages with impunity, so I asked about the Mayorunas' story at the military post in Iquitos. Yes, I was told, there had been some small problems on the Tapiche, but they were
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