BRAZIL:A recent appearance in a Brazilian village by one of the country's 'uncontacted' tribes has brought the question of their survival into focus, writes Monte Reelin Colider, Brazil
At first, few believed the story that two brothers told about four unknown Indians who suddenly appeared one afternoon on the outskirts of their village.
Like most Kayapo Indians, the brothers, Bepro and Beprytire, live in a government-demarcated reserve, wear modern clothing and get energy from solar-powered generators. But the four unclothed visitors were a different kind of Kayapo.
They spoke in an antiquated tongue that seemed a precursor to the language spoken in the village, located in the Capoto-Jarina Indian Reserve in central Brazil. The four men had come from a tribe that had remained in the forest, the brothers said, untouched by the modern world.
Over the next seven days, the doubt expressed by the villagers evaporated when they saw more than 60 of the Indians emerge from the forest, sleeping in huts on the edge of the village.
Then as quickly as they had come, the Indians disappeared. They haven't been seen since.
Their brief appearance this spring was enough to put them into the centre of a debate that is increasingly challenging governments throughout the Amazon region: how do you protect the rights and territories of isolated populations when the locations of those groups remain largely unknown?
In recent months, Brazil and Peru have set aside protected areas for so-called uncontacted groups, which have never been spoken to and rarely, if ever, glimpsed. Brazil is believed to have more uncontacted tribes than any country in the world - the government estimates as many as 67 tribes could be living in complete isolation.
Because the Amazon region is shrinking by thousands of square miles a year, the chances of encounters involving such groups grow, and the issue has become a significant focus for the Federal Indian Bureau, or Funai, the government agency that oversees indigenous groups.
Indigenous rights advocates have issued calls to protect largely unexplored areas of the forest from logging and mining. But the renewed focus on such groups has also sparked suspicions among sceptics, who believe the groups could be mythical and suspect the numbers are exaggerated by special interest groups seeking to block exploration.
"It is like the Loch Ness monster," said Cecilia Quiroz, legal counsel for Perupetro, the Peruvian state agency in charge of doling out prospecting rights to energy companies eager to explore the country's vast interior.
Megaron Txucarramae grew up in the village where the Indians appeared in late May. He was two when anthropologists first made contact with his own branch of the Kayapo tribe in the 1950s. He regularly heard his elders tell the story of how one part of the tribe had fled the anthropologists' advances to remain alone in the woods, never to be seen again.
Now Megaron is the regional representative for Funai in Colider, the nearest city to Capoto and two nearby reserves. The land, set aside for the Indians and protected from development, is a sprawling green expanse of dense jungle - the three Kayapo reservations in the area are roughly the size of the Czech Republic.
When he heard of the recent appearance, Megaron flew to the village of Kapot to collect evidence. He took a miniature tape recorder with him, giving it to one of the brothers to slip into his pocket while he spoke to the Indians. Taking pictures, he concluded, was out of the question.
"No one had a camera, and even if someone had had one, they were afraid of machines," Megaron explained later.
The group remained highly suspicious of the villagers, agreeing to talk only to the two brothers. They accepted bananas and cassava but rejected rice because it wasn't part of their traditional diet, Megaron said.
One of the old men in the group had a scar on his side, a wound that the villagers attributed to a run-in with illegal loggers, who were involved in bloody confrontations with Indians in the region in the 1990s. "The man told Beprytire he had been hurt by a 'strong sound'," Megaron said. "So we are guessing that he had been shot."
Most of the Indians were unclothed, though some of the men wore penis sheaths and most were partially covered by body paint. Some of the men also had plates inserted in their lower lips, creating the decorative protrusions seen in various Amazonian tribes.
Megaron closed the village to visitors, a lockdown that remains in force, afraid that the previously uncontacted Indians could easily become sick. In the past, when uncontacted tribes were introduced to other populations, maladies as simple as the common cold proved deadly.
In the 1970s, 185 members of the Panara tribe died within two years of discovery after contracting such diseases as flu and chickenpox, leaving only 69 survivors.
Antonio Sergio Iole, head of health services for Funai in Colider, quickly assembled a team of doctors and Kayapo assistants ready to travel to the village at a moment's notice. They immediately realised how many difficult questions the tribe's appearance had raised for local authorities.
"Even the simple things are complicated," said Iole. "How should we act in the first moment we approach them? Would they accept vaccine? Would they let us inspect their mouths? Listen to their hearts? Would they allow a doctor to treat the women? How would they physically react to treatment? Some vaccines have side effects - how would they interpret a fever? And how would they react if we had to take someone away, even if it was for their own good?"
After the tribe left the village, Iole - still in Colider - began to notice that some other people around town were sceptical. How could a group of people remain uncontacted in the 21st century? Could someone be making this whole story up for some sort of personal or political gain? "I don't believe it - this is an area with lots of loggers and farmers who are always going out into the forest, making studies," said Albeni de Souza (22), a university student. "Someone would have seen them before."
Researchers in the state prosecutor's office in Cuiaba, surrounded by annotated maps of central Brazil and stacks of file folders, believe they have a pretty good idea why the reclusive Kayapo emerged from the forest: many of the "uncontacted" tribes of the area are on the run from loggers and land-grabbers.
Mario Lucio Avelar, the state prosecutor, said logging interests have squeezed several indigenous groups in the area so much that their traditional ways of life are vanishing. It's genocide, he said, and he intends to prosecute accordingly.
Avelar is pursuing genocide charges against a group of loggers and businessmen who he says have caused a group of 18 to 25 uncontacted Indians - called the Rio Pardo tribe - to abandon their traditional lives as planters and become nomads.
"We are not necessarily talking about assassination, but they are making the survival of the tribe's way of living impossible," Avelar said. "The loggers invade, prevent them from growing crops, hunting or practising their culture. Without those things, the tribe cannot survive."
It's a new approach to protecting uncontacted tribes, but it is still unclear whether it will work. Avelar has frozen some assets of the loggers; formal charges are still a couple months away, he predicted.
Though the Kayapo Indians showed themselves in a protected area believed to be free from logging, Avelar said they might have been similarly dislodged from a traditional lifestyle elsewhere.
But scepticism spreads easily in towns such as Colider, where logging companies and farmers have cleared most of the surrounding area and small planes regularly fly overhead. From the air here, the land looks much like the American midwest - a patchwork of farms. The picture is much different less than 250 miles away in Kapot - unreachable by car and boat - on the edge of an Amazon forest that is almost as big as the continental United States.
Several years ago, Brazil's government changed its policy on isolated tribes: instead of taking the initiative to try to contact them, it now aims only to protect them. Contact is made only if the Indians themselves initiate it or the tribe is in imminent danger.
Funai officials plan to fly over the forest in the coming weeks to try to locate the area where the tribe is based, Megaron said. The plan after that is to build a small field station in the forest - not to contact them, but to protect the area and make sure loggers and farmers do not come near them.
That plan, of course, would be unnecessary if the Indians chose to make contact again - a possibility that many of the local Kayapo hope happens.
"Everybody wants to see them, because we love to compare them with ourselves," said Bepko (26), a Kayapo who lives in the village of Kubenkokre in a nearby reserve. "We just want to hear their stories and learn about what their lives have been like."
According to the tape recording made by the brothers, there is evidence that at least some in the tribe would like to return. Megaron said he was able to decipher the language sufficiently to determine that a young member of the tribe was trying to convince his elders that the contact was a good thing.
"The son told his father not to be afraid, that they would protect each other," Megaron recounted. "He then talked to his mother and tried to tell her that everything was okay and that the other group of Kayapo was their relatives."
It was later, Funai said, that a tribal leader emerged from the forest and persuaded everyone to leave the village.