Davi Kopenawa at an assembly of the the Hutukara Associação Yanomami . Credit: Courtesy Luciano Padrã/Cafod

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 14 2014 (IPS)

Davi Kopenawa, the leader of the Yanomami people in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, who is internationally renowned for his struggle against encroachment on indigenous land by landowners and illegal miners, is now fighting a new battle – this time against death threats received by him and his family.

“In May, they [miners] told me that he wouldn’t make it to the end of the year alive,” Armindo Góes, 39, one of Kopenawa’s fellow indigenous activists in the fight for the rights of the Yanomami people, told IPS.

Kopenawa, 60, is Brazil’s most highly respected indigenous leader. The Yanomami shaman and spokesman is known around the world as the “Dalai Lama of the Rainforest” and has frequently participated in United Nations meetings and other international events.“The landowners and the garimpeiros have plenty of money to kill an Indian. The Amazon jungle belongs to us. She protects us from the heat; the rainforest is essential to all of us and for our children to live in peace.” -- Davi Kopenawa

He has won awards like the Global 500 Prize from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). His voice has drawn global figures like King Harald of Norway – who visited him in 2013 – or former British footballer David Beckham – who did so in March – to the 96,000-sq-km territory which is home to some 20,000 Yanomami.

Kopenawa is president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association (HAY), which he founded in 2004 in Boa Vista, the capital of the northern state of Roraima. Before that he fought for the creation of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory (TI), which is larger than Portugal, in the states of Amazonas and Roraima, on the border with Venezuela.

On Jul. 28, HAY issued a statement reporting that its leader had received death threats in June, when Góes, one of the organisation’s directors, was accosted on a street in the Amazonas town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira by “garimpeiros” or illegal gold miners, who gave him a clear death message for Kopenawa.

Since then “the climate of insecurity has dominated everything,” Góes told IPS.

Garimpeiros are penetrating deeper and deeper into Yanomami territory in their search for gold, in Brazil as well as Venezuela, encroaching on one of the world’s oldest surviving cultures.

Illegal gold miners damage the territory and attack the families of the Yanomami. Credit: Courtesy Colin Jones/Survival International

The Yanomami TI was demarcated just before the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. And it was the Rio+20 Summit, held in this city in 2012, that made Kopenawa more prominent at home, where he was less well-known than abroad.

“Davi is someone very precious to Brazil, but some people see him as an enemy. He is a thinker and a warrior who forms part of Brazil’s identity and has fought for the rights of the Yanomami and other indigenous people for over 40 years,” activist Marcos Wesley, assistant coordinator of the Rio Negro sustainable development programme of the Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA), told IPS.

The Rio Negro, the biggest tributary of the Amazon River, runs across Yanomami territory.

In the 1990s, Kopenawa managed to get 45,000 garimpeiros evicted from the Yanomami TI, Wesley noted. “He and Hutukara are the spokespersons for the Yanomami, for their demands. I can imagine there are people who have suffered economic losses and are upset over the advances made by the Yanomami,” he added.

“There are threatening signs that put us on the alert,” Góes said. “We are working behind locked doors. Two armed men were already searching for Davi in Boa Vista. They even offered money if someone would identify him. We are getting more and more concerned.”

The director of HAY explained that “our lives are at risk, and our elders advised Davi to take shelter in his community.”

Shaman Davi Kopenawa with former British football star David Beckham, who visited Yanomami territory in March. Credit: Courtesy Nenzinho Soares/Survival International

Although the Yanomami TI was fully demarcated, illegal activities have not ceased there.

“There are many people invading indigenous land for mining,” Góes said.

Kopenawa comes from the remote community of Demini, one of the 240 villages in the Yanomami TI. The only way to reach the village is by small plane or a 10-day boat ride upriver.

On Aug. 8, IPS managed to contact the Yanomami leader, just a few minutes before he set out for his community. But he preferred not to provide details about his situation, because of the threats.

“At this moment I prefer not to say anything more. I can only say that I am very worried, together with my Yanomami people; the rest I have already said,” he commented.

Five days earlier, Kopenawa had been one of the guests of honour at the 12th International Literature Festival in Paraty in the southern state of Rio de Janeiro. He talked about the violence facing his people, when he presented his book “The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman”.

“The landowners and garimpeiros have plenty of money to kill an Indian. The Amazon jungle belongs to us. She protects us from the heat; the rainforest is essential to all of us and for our children to live in peace,” he said.

He had previously denounced that “They want to kill me. I don’t do what white people do – track someone down to kill him. I don’t interfere with their work. But they are interfering in our work and in our struggle. I will continue fighting and working for my people. Because defending the Yanomami people and their land is my work.”

In its communiqué, HAY demanded that the police investigate the threats and provide Kopenawa with official protection.

“The suspicion is that the threats are in reprisal for the work carried out by the Yanomami, together with government agencies, to investigate and break up the networks of miners in the Yanomami TI in the last few years,” HAY stated.

Kopenawa and HAY provide the federal police with maps of mining sites, geographic locations, and information on planes and people circulating in the Yanomami TI. Their reports have made it possible to carry out operations against garimpeiros and encroaching landowners; the last large-scale one was conducted in February.

According to the federal police, in Roraima alone, illegal mining generates profits of 13 million dollars a month, and many of the earnings come from Yanomami territory.

Góes stressed to IPS that mining has more than just an economic impact on indigenous people.

“It causes an imbalance in the culture and lives of the Yanomami, and generates dependence on manufactured, artificial objects and food. It changes the entire Yanomami world vision. Mining also generates a lot of pollution in the rivers,” he complained.

“We know that in Brazil we unfortunately have a high rate of violence against indigenous leaders and social movements,” Wesley said. “Impunity reigns. Davi is a fighter, and will surely not be intimidated by these threats. He believes in his struggle, in the defence of his people and of the planet.”

In Brazil there is no specific programme to protect indigenous people facing threats.

Representatives of Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, told IPS that a request from protection was received from Kopanawa and other HAY leaders, and that it was referred to the programme of human rights defenders in the Brazilian presidency’s special secretariat on human rights.

But they said that in order to receive protection, the Yanomami leader had to confirm that he wanted it, and the government is waiting for his response to that end.

In this country of 200 million people, indigenous people number 896,917, according to the 2010 census.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The Autana tepuy or mesa – a national park and the “tree of life” for the Uwottyja Indians, seen from the river. Credit: Humberto Márquez/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
PUERTO AYACUCHO, Venezuela , Nov 26 2013 (IPS)

The presence of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is evident in Venezuela’s Amazon region, where the guerrillas can be seen on speed boats, in camps, or interacting with local indigenous communities.

“We see them once in a while passing by in a boat in the evening, dressed in green, armed, carrying supplies,” a veteran boatman, Antonio, told IPS standing next to the dark waters of the Cuao river, which runs into the Orinoco river in the southern Venezuelan state of Amazonas on the Colombian border.

Some 100 km to the south, in Maroa, a town of 2,000 people on the banks of the
Guainía river, which forms part of the border, “when the food for the Mercal [the government chain of stores selling food at heavily subsidised prices] arrives, part of it goes to the guys in the FARC,” a local told Catholic Bishop José Ángel Divassón, vicar apostolic in Amazonas.

And in Atabapo, another border town, “the FARC keep order and prevent theft,” while in indigenous communities “they try to set up camps and recruit young guys, who they offer work for three years,” he added.

Amazonas is a mineral-rich rainforest state with abundant rivers in southernmost Venezuela. Its huge 184,000-sq-km territory is home to just 180,000 people, 54 percent of whom belong to 20 different indigenous groups according to the 2011 census.

The presence of armed groups from Colombia is the latest affliction for this region which already suffers from isolation, a dearth of basic public services, and a lack of interest in its voters at election time, due to the sparse population and high poverty level.

The local environment and traditional indigenous ways of life have long been vulnerable to the impacts of activities such as illegal gold mining, which is only the most visible.

Amazonas governor Liborio Guarulla, an indigenous man who is a veteran left-wing leader opposed to the country’s leftist central government, estimates that there may be up to 4,000 Colombian guerrillas in this vast state.

In Puerto Ayacucho, the state capital, Guarulla told reporters that “five kilometres from here, they have held meetings with local shopkeepers to demand payment of a ‘vacuna’ [‘vaccine’ or war tax].”

The governor, who belongs to the Progressive Movement of Venezuela, believes the arrival of the FARC to Amazonas “is a result of the offensive unleashed by the army in their country in the last seven years, against the columns that they had as a rearguard in eastern Colombia, which have now spilt across the border.”

The FARC, which took up arms in 1964, is the oldest left-wing insurgent group in Latin America. Since November 2012 it has been involved in peace talks with the Colombian government in Cuba.

In May, FARC rebels under the command of Antonio Medina made contact with leaders of the Uwottyja or Piaroa indigenous community, who live along the middle stretch of the Orinoco – Venezuela’s biggest river – and its tributaries, to establish a cooperative relationship, José Carmona, the shaman of the Caño de Uña community, told IPS.

“We told them no, that both their presence and that of the miners offend our traditions because we are peoples who want to live without weapons – we only have machetes for our crops and shotguns for hunting,” Carmona said.

After the meetings, Uwottyja organisations issued a public letter addressed to the FARC in which they expressed “our total disagreement with your presence and movements in our territory.”

The Uwottyja also said they rejected trading with the FARC “or the hiring of indigenous persons” by the guerrillas, and urged the insurgents “to find a way to return to your country”.

César Sanguinetti, a lawmaker with the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela and a member of the Curripaco indigenous community, who live in the south of Amazonas and the southeast of Colombia, told IPS that “we are a sovereign country that should not permit incursions by any kind of armed force, and as a nation and a government, we demand respect.”

Other local indigenous people such as Uwottyja schooteacher Juan Pablo Arana and Yanomami health worker Luis Shatiwe say the guerrillas are aggravating the problems faced by native communities in obtaining supplies, because in order to acquire food, fuel and other goods indigenous people have to compete with those who smuggle contraband across the border.

“We travel hours to get flour, sugar, oil, rice or coffee, sometimes going all the way to Puerto Ayacucho,” Arana told IPS in the Raudal de Seguera community at the foot of the Autana tepuy – a mountain with vertical sides and a flat top – which is sacred to his people.

“And it’s expensive because of the cost of gasoline and oil [for the boat or canoe engines], and sometimes we get there and the products have run out in the Mercal shops.”

Venezuela’s gasoline is the cheapest in the world at 1.5 cents of a dollar per litre. But prices here suffer from other kinds of distortions.

A 200-litre barrel, which costs 20 bolivars in Puerto Ayacucho – as much as a can of soda – “costs thousands of bolivars on the upper stretch of the Orinoco, up to 8,000 or 10,000. Indigenous people’s canoes are closely inspected by the military, but apparently they let the boats of the miners or smugglers go by,” Shatiwe said.

Hundreds of small-scale miners pan for gold in Amazonas, even though mining is banned in this state.

And Guarulla remarked that “A shipment of 100,000 litres of gasoline that reaches the town of Maroa, which has only one power plant, runs out in just three days. Who is it being sold to?”

Divassón said “The big problems that we have identified are illegal mining, which destroys the habitat of the communities, the presence of irregular armed forces from Colombia, and sensitive issues like the lack of electricity, problems with other services, and scarcity of goods, and insecurity.”

What does reach Amazonas is the sharp political polarisation seen in the rest of the country. The sheet metal roofing for homes in indigenous communities is red if it was donated by the government of President Nicolás Maduro, or blue if it came from Governor Guarulla.

Meeting on health and food security in the Caingangue Guarita Reserve in southern Brazil. Credit: Courtesy of Marcos Antonio Ribeiro

By Clarinha Glock
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil , Jun 1 2013 (IPS)

Healthcare for Brazil’s indigenous minority is in poor health, according to U.N. experts, missionaries, social workers and native people themselves.

Ida Pietricovsky, an adviser to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the northern city of Belem do Pará, stressed the lack of systematic information on the health of indigenous people.

Speaking to IPS, officials at the Health Ministry’s communication office blamed the shortcomings on the incomplete transition in healthcare for indigenous communities, which in 2010 began to be transferred from the National Health Foundation (FUNASA) to the Special Secretariat on Indigenous Health (SESAI).

Whatever the case, the situation is hindering the implementation of public policies catering to the specific needs of each indigenous group.

“It’s a very serious problem, and we are trying to discuss it with SESAI,” Pietricovsky told IPS. The way information is gathered differs from region to region, she said, which makes it difficult to compare data.

UNICEF and other U.N. agencies have set up offices with multidisciplinary teams to serve the Food Security and Nutrition Monitoring System and thus improve nutrition in every Special Indigenous Health District, in conjunction with SESAI.

The initiative first began to work with children from the Xavante indigenous community in the western state of Mato Grosso, a region with high levels of mortality related to malnutrition and diarrhea.

“The idea is to train the teams to prevent further deaths,” Pietricovsky said. “Child mortality in indigenous areas is double the national average, and improvements in the indicators have been very slow.”

The latest report on violence against indigenous people by the Catholic Indigenous Missionary Council, based on 2011 figures, includes a chapter on healthcare neglect.

The report describes 53 cases of negligence in healthcare in 16 states, which affected a total of 53,000 people. The northern state of Amazonas accounts for the largest number of cases.

The study is based on newspaper and magazine articles from the different regions and missionary reports. It says the general complaint in indigenous communities is that there is a shortage of health professionals, medication, equipment, transportation and assistance – in short, that they have been abandoned by the health system.

From north to south, the needs are similar in this immense country of 198 million people. Of the total population, 900,000 people self-identified as indigenous in the 2010 census, belonging to 305 different ethnic communities who speak 274 languages.

In Dourados, a city in the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, the native reserve’s proximity to the city has driven up levels of alcoholism, diabetes and hypertension among the indigenous people.

The demarcation of the land of the Yanomami, who live in the north of the country, forced members of that group to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and has left them confined in areas that are near army garrisons.

As a result, they began to eat processed foods, because fish are scarce in the rivers and streams in their settlements. And when they seek medical assistance at the municipal health posts, they run up against discrimination and rejection.

“We are fighting for every community to regain its autonomy and a central role in feeding itself,” Sandro Luckmann, a member of the Council of Missions among Indigenous people (COMIN), run by evangelical churches, told IPS.

COMIN has been working for 30 years with the Caingangue people in the Guarita Reserve in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, whose capital is Porto Alegre.

The Caingangue people are the third-largest native group in Brazil, and Guarita is their biggest settlement, according to the 2010 census.

Luckmann pointed out that ensuring healthcare and food security form part of a broad process, which includes finding new means of production.

“The demarcation of indigenous lands does not create the conditions to guarantee food security for the community,” he said. “There are programmes run by one government or another, but no stable public policy,” he complained.

In Guarita, Caingangue men and women must find work in meat-packing plants in nearby cities, or as temporary workers harvesting apples, onions or grapes on plantations where they sleep in precarious barracks.

“There are stories that in the meat-packing industry, the indigenous workers are given the worst jobs, the ones no one wants to do,” Luckmann said. “They commute up to four hours by bus, to work an eight-hour day, and then ride back again to be able to sleep in their homes.”

He pointed out that article 231 of the Brazilian constitution establishes that the demarcation of ancestral indigenous territories must guarantee the groups’ physical and cultural survival and the subsistence of their communities. But that does not happen, he said.

“When we talk about food security and sovereignty, we have to think about the territory that indigenous people occupy, and understand that the changes in their living conditions give rise to nutritional deficiencies and health problems,” he said.

Marcos Antonio Ribeiro of the Caingangue community, who coordinates SESAI in the Guarita Reserve, confirmed that the change from the traditional eating habits of his people to a less diversified diet based on processed foods had led to a rise in undernutrition, anemia and vitamin deficiencies.

In the past, the Caingangue people’s diet was based on the cultivation of corn, squash and beans, the harvesting of wild fruits and nuts, and fishing.

But the community’s diet changed because of the ease of acquiring commercially processed foods, the lack of land to farm, and the indiscriminate use of pesticides, which has killed off several native plant species.

Ribeiro explained to IPS that the dietary changes not only cause health problems, but are also harmful to the Caingangue culture, because there is a series of rituals associated with eating and food.

For example, “when a youngster is going to eat crumbs from a cornmeal cake, the oldest person in the house rubs his body all over and makes him previously drink an infusion, because the Caingangue believe that without this ritual, youngsters will be weakened and will suffer cramps as adults,” he said.

The Caingangue, who in the past depended on medicinal herbs, now want to see health professionals. And when they do, they are found to have high levels of diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol and triglycerides.

“And in recent years, there have been cases of cancer of all kinds in indigenous people of all ages, even children,” he said.

Ribeiro, who has an educational background in nutrition, is promoting a return to traditional knowledge in indigenous institutions and communities. His own mother died of complications from diabetes, becoming part of statistics that are still invisible to the health authorities.