Logging companies keen to exploit Brazil’s
rainforest have been accused by human rights organisations of using
gunmen to wipe out the Awá, a tribe of just 355.
Survival International, with backing from Colin Firth, is campaigning to stop what a judge referred to as ‘genocide’
Trundling along the dirt roads of the Amazon, the giant logging lorry
dwarfed the vehicle of the investigators following it. The trunks of
nine huge trees were piled high on the back – incontrovertible proof of
the continuing destruction of the world’s greatest rainforest and its
most endangered tribe, the Awá.
Yet as they travelled through the jungle early this year, the small team
from Funai – Brazil’s National Indian Foundation – did not dare try to
stop the loggers; the vehicle was too large and the loggers were almost
certainly armed. All they could do was video the lorry and add the film
to the growing mountain of evidence showing how the Awá – with only 355
surviving members, more than 100 of whom have had no contact with the
outside world – are teetering on the edge of extinction.
It is a scene played out throughout the Amazon as the authorities
struggle to tackle the powerful illegal logging industry. But it is not
just the loss of the trees that has created a situation so serious that
it led a Brazilian judge, José Carlos do Vale Madeira, to describe it as
“a real genocide”. People are pouring on to the Awá’s land, building
illegal settlements, running cattle ranches. Hired gunmen – known as
pistoleros – are reported to be hunting Awá who have stood in the way of
land-grabbers. Members of the tribe describe seeing their families
wiped out. Human rights campaigners say the tribe has reached a tipping
point and only immediate action by the Brazilian government to prevent
logging can save the tribe.
The Awá are one of only two nomadic hunter-gathering tribes left in the
Amazon. According to Survival, they are now the world’s most threatened
tribe, assailed by gunmen, loggers and hostile settler farmers.
Their troubles began in earnest in 1982 with the inauguration of a
European Economic Community (EEC) and World Bank-funded programme to
extract massive iron ore deposits found in the Carajás mountains. The
EEC gave Brazil $600m to build a railway from the mines to the coast, on
condition that Europe received a third of the output, a minimum of
13.6m tons a year for 15 years. The railway cut directly through the
Awá’s land and with the railway came settlers. A road-building programme
quickly followed, opening up the Awá’s jungle home to loggers, who
moved in from the east.
It was, according to Survival’s research director, Fiona Watson, a
recipe for disaster. A third of the rainforest in the Awá territory in
Maranhão state in north-east Brazil has since been destroyed and
outsiders have exposed the Awá to diseases against which they have no
natural immunity.
“The Awá and the uncontacted Awá are really on the brink,” she said. “It
is an extremely small population and the forces against them are
massive. They are being invaded by loggers, settlers and cattle
ranchers. They rely entirely on the forest. They have said to me: ‘If we
have no forest, we can’t feed our children and we will die’.”
But it appears that the Awá also face a more direct threat. Earlier this
year an investigation into reports that an Awá child had been killed by
loggers found that their tractors had destroyed the Awá camp.
“They are chopping down wood and they are going to destroy everything,”
said Pire’i Ma’a, a member of the tribe. “Monkeys, peccaries, tapir,
they are all running away. I don’t know how we are going to eat –
everything is being destroyed, the whole area.
“This land is mine, it is ours. They can go away to the city, but we
Indians live in the forest. They are going to kill everything.
Everything is dying. We are all going to go hungry, the children will be
hungry, my daughter will be hungry, and I’ll be hungry too.”
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