Brazil: The Vanishing Indian

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Like the North American Indian be fore him, the Brazilian Indian has had no worse enemy than the white man —and the white man's ways. Early Portuguese colonizers and their descendants enslaved natives by the thousands, butchered whole tribes as a warning to others and ruthlessly flogged, tortured or starved any Indian worker who stepped out of line. Brazil's Indian Protection Service, organized in 1911, was supposed to end all that, but the killing continued. The country's Indian population, once in the millions, has now dwindled to a mere 75,000.

Last week the Brazilian Indians' plight caused a worldwide outcry that may just save them from extinction. Newspapers from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and Washington focused on their problems. An open letter asking help for the Indians was sent to Brazilian President Arthur da Costa e Silva by a group of French anthropologists, including Claude Levi-Strauss, who set forth his philosophy of structuralism in Tristes Tropiques, which he wrote after studying the Brazilian Indian (TIME Essay, June 30, 1967). Meeting in Mexico, the sixth Interamerican Indigenist Congress demanded protection for Brazil's Indians, most of whom constituted the last primitive tribes outside New Guinea.

Murder & Loan Sharking. Behind the sudden concern was a 20-volume Brazilian government report that revealed the scope of the carnage, and even implicated Indian Service officials themselves. Working on their own or with local land speculators, officials were accused of systematically murdering or terrorizing Indians in order to force them off their land. Once a tribe vacated land, the property reverted to the government and could then be picked up cheaply. In only two years of service, the government claimed, former I.P.S. Director Luis Vinhas Neves (1964-66) committed 42 separate crimes against the Indians—including collusion in several murders, torture, and the illegal sale of land; he also raked in more than $300,000.

Another former director, Moacir Ribeiro Coelho (1962-63), reportedly committed 41 crimes, ranging from embezzlement to loan-sharking with Indian Service funds. In Paraná state, Lauro de Souza Bueno and four of his relatives—all Indian Service employees—made a family affair of their corruption; according to the government, they embezzled Service funds and tortured and enslaved dozens of Indians. Vinhas, Ribeiro, the five Buenos and 52 other persons—more than half of them members of the Service—have been formally charged with crimes ranging from embezzlement and collusion in murder to slavery and misappropriation of Indian property.