WAR IN THE AMAZON
THE CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAS IS NEARing completion. The final large redoubt of unconquered territory, the Amazon, is being rapidly subjugated by the combined efforts of government,...
...In From Warclubs to Words, ethnobiologist Darrell A. Posey, who has lived with the Kayap6 people for 12 years, tells how the tribe moved from primitive warfare to the sophisticated world of national politics, building ties to environmentalists to fight the army of developers...
...But it remains a war with a bloody toll of death and destruction-and with mounting armed opposition from those they would conquer: Indians, rubber tappers, Brazil-nut gatherers...
...The final large redoubt of unconquered territory, the Amazon, is being rapidly subjugated by the combined efforts of government, private capital and multilateral banks...
...The resistance, therefore, is not simply conservationist...
...Their struggle is the subject of this Report...
...The destruction of tropical rainforest and its alarming implications for global climate has entered the consciousness of the mainstream...
...As sociologist Stephen G. Bunker, author of Underdeveloping the Amazon, shows in The Eternal Conquest, four centuries of such "development" has only enriched absentee owners, leaving the region socially impoverished and environmentally degraded...
...As Manuela Carneiro da Cunha notes, the government has now taken to turning Indian lands into "national forests," supposed nature reserves where logging and mining are to be permitted...
...and in which Amazon policy is a hotly contested issue in this year's presidential campaign...
...In The Sacred Cow geographer Susanna B. Hecht concludes that the explosive growth of cattle grazing-a primary vehicle of conquest-is now beyond government control, fueled by unchecked land speculation...
...As Hecht's Murder at the Margins of the World-the tale of the rubber tappers union led by Chico Mendes-shows, it is a social struggle which could well be characterized as class war...
...With a $2 million budget for the ceremonies to inaugurate the new environmental agency, and no budget to actually staff it, Brazil's change of heart may be little more than a sophisticated effort at public relations...
...But widespread concern for endangered flora and fauna has inspired surprisingly little interest in the forest's traditional human inhabitants who are fighting their own extinction in the cruel ecology of conquest...
...Though Brazilian officials are quick to decry foreign plots to keep the country underdeveloped, indigenous resistance and international outrage-particularly recent World Bank reluctance to fund environmentally destructive projects-has forced Brazil to adopt the rhetoric of the ecologist...
...Yet the fact that a new policy has been floated is indicative of the new political reality achieved by the resistance: one in which multilateral banks will not fund whatever mega-project Brazil puts forth...
...Old ways, while environmentally sounder, are often brutal, violent and exploitative...
...While launched by government policy, that battle has already taken on a dynamic of its own, driven by the basic laws of capitalism...
...in which any initiative that affects Indians will face a protracted fight in Brazil's Congress...
...Today's conquistadors prefer to call it development, modernization, or simply progress...
...The resistance to conquest does not seek to turn back the clock but rather to challenge the dynamics of capitalism which threaten us all...
...ONQUEST IS ESSENTIALLY A ONE-SIDED battle between the old and the new...
...In October, President Jos6 Sarney suspended incentives for ranching and logging, launched a new federal agency called "Our Nature," and announced a total review of Amazon policy...
...The 136,000 Brazilian Indians who live in this territory the size of Europe have built a fragile yet growing movement with allies around the world...
...In Native Realpolitik, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, former president of the Brazilian Association of Anthropologists, lays out the myriad of tactics used by the indigenous resistance to stymie government development policy...
...politicians: The Amazon is a vast "empty" territory to be "won," in order to fulfill the nation's manifest destiny and protect its national security-and, as James Madison would have added, to provide an escape valve for dispersing the discontent of the industrializing South...
...Rather than "occupation" and "integration," government planners now speak of "agro-ecological zoning" and "rational development...
...B RAZIL'S RATIONALE FOR ITS WAR OF conquest could well have been voiced by nineteenth century U.S...
Vol. 23 • May 1989 • No. 1
