Tech - New Brazil plan to save Amazon tribes

Tom Phillips

Radar to be used to locate groups of isolated Indians


Rio de Janeiro: The Brazilian government has said it would employ heat-seeking radar in a last-ditch attempt to save the country’s remaining groups of isolated Indians. The body-heat sensors will be mounted on a Brazilian air force jet normally used to monitor rainforest destruction and will be used to locate an estimated 39 groups of isolated indigenous people, hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest.

The authorities hope the system will help to protect them from loggers, goldminers and ranchers.

Antenor Vaz, the coordinator for isolated tribes at Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, said the system would allow authorities to locate tribes without disturbing their way of life.

“We have been using planes more and more, not just to monitor [isolated tribes] but also to find new references,” he said. But even the use of small planes brought disruption to the tribes because they flew at low altitude, he said.

Brazil’s isolated Indians hit the headlines in May when aerial photographs of a remote tribe near the border with Peru were released. Several tribesmen could be seen firing arrows at the plane.

Mr. Vaz said the sensors mounted on planes flying at high altitude meant the tribes would not even know they were being monitored.

By locating Brazil’s last isolated tribes, campaigners hope the process of land demarcation can be speeded up, helping to guarantee the protection of their ancestral lands.

Campaigners say the Amazon may be home to the largest number of uncontacted tribes in the world. The authorities have long grappled with the dilemma of how best to treat indigenous groups who have had little or no contact with outsiders.

For hundreds of years colonisers and explorers have trekked through the jungle, coming into contact with these tribes, often with catastrophic results. There are thought to have been around six million indigenous people when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500. Today there are fewer than 3,00,000. Violence and western diseases such as flu have devastated many indigenous communities.

In the 1980s thousands of gold prospectors poured into areas inhabited by Yanomami Indians, in northern Brazil, triggering genocide, human rights groups claimed. Some sources say up to 20% of the Yanomami people died in seven years. Since the late 1980s government policy towards uncontacted tribes has shifted to a “stay away” approach. A handful of sertanistas, or explorers, work in the rainforest trying to locate tribes without coming into direct contact with them.

No life in danger


Fiona Watson, Brazil campaigner for Survival International, an indigenous rights group, said there could be as many as 20 uncontacted tribes living in the Amazon rainforest. “The idea of the remote sensors means you are not going to put any lives in danger [by making contact],” she said.

She said contact between isolated tribes and government employees had proved disastrous in the past, with 50% of some tribes being wiped out by disease in the first year after contact.

Mr. Vaz said the radar’s first mission would be to confirm the existence of isolated tribes in the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, a region that loggers, ranchers and soy farmers have turned into ground zero for rainforest destruction.

“The priority will be Mato Grosso where the process of devastation is happening the quickest,” he said.

He said members of the military and representatives of the National Indian Foundation would meet soon to plan “when and where” the flyovers would take place.

‘Emergency’


In an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, the president of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, Marcio Meira, admitted that time was running out for isolated Indians in the region. According to newspaper reports there were only two male members left of one of the region’s tribes, the Piripkura.

“The situation there is an emergency,” Mr. Meira said.

Ms. Watson said several of the region’s tribes were “facing genocide unless the Brazilian authorities take immediate action to demarcate and protect their land”. — Copyright Guardian News &Media 2008