By Kim Shipton
After taking an eye-opening journey to the depths of the Amazon forest, environmental journalists Stafford Sanders and Julie Browning spoke at a public forum in Sydney on June 27 organised by the Latin America solidarity group RACLA.
Sanders and Browning, who had filed reports for ABC radio and 2SER-FM, described how 20 years of military government had continued policies of unequal land and wealth distribution, and brought only half-hearted attempts to save the Yanamabi Indians and the Amazon ecosystem.
Greed, corruption and international agricultural and industrial projects had chased the Indians from their lands.
Over five weeks, Sanders and Browning witnessed the Indians' conditions and discussed health issues such as birth control with them. They travelled from Rio to Sao Paulo, through the poverty-stricken city of Manaus, to the north via Boa Vista and on to Salvadore.
"There are 180 different Indian nations now living in the Amazon with a wide range of lifestyles, which are now being rapidly urbanised", said Sanders. "Until five or six years ago the Yanamabi Indians had little or no contact with anyone."
Since the garrimperos (miners) arrived, pushing them from their lands, "their estimated population of 15,000 has decreased to 9000 as a result of their poor resistance to the new diseases the garrimperos have brought in".
Malaria, tuberculosis, flu, yellow fever, measles and cholera had overcome the Indians' poor resistance. "In the case of malaria, the Indians' living habits such as digging water holes which become stagnant and attract breeding mosquitoes, have made their situation worse."
Sanders and Browning discovered that activism has been growing. Indians, rubber tappers and conservation, religious and education groups had joined together "with a sense that things had to change", said Browning.
The rubber tappers arrived 200 years ago and violently pushed the Indians from their homes. However, the rubber tappers are now suffering along with the Indians. Since Malaysian rubber is now cheaper, the workers are fighting the effects of poverty.
"The rubber tappers want to keep on living in the forests. They don't want to come to town and buy their sugar and coffee; they
want to be able to grow their sugar and coffee and work within their fragile ecosystem. They want to be self-sufficient and feel that they have some control", said Browning.
She described the people's attempts to set up schools for their children, writing their own books and teaching about plants and medicine.
In Boa Vista, Sanders and Browning visited the "Casa do Indio", a Catholic protection home and hospital for Indians in times of desperation and hunger. Two nuns sneaked Sanders and Browning into the home after they had been prohibited by officials from recording conversations with the Indians.
Casa do Indio was described as a depressing place: "People are very hungry. Often a lack of food would keep them waiting for up to 24 or 48 hours ... and this, we were told, was fairly common."
Sanders and Browning also researched the issue of birth control in Brazil. Many methods are too expensive for the poor, who had turned to cheaper alternatives such as sterilisation and a recent US "experiment" called Norplant.
Norplant, which involves the insertion of a pill beneath the skin at the top of the arm, has been tested on Brazilian women since the late 1980s. The pill can't be removed without medical assistance.
Browning explained that women couldn't simply go back to their doctors and say "I'm feeling sick, I'm feeling nauseous, I think it's because of Norplant, can you please take this out of my arm." Sanders added: "What seems to happen is that for people who seek and want to learn more about what sort of contraceptive drug they could take, this was offered to them as though it wasn't a trial".
A lack of information persists. In a case where the oral contraceptive pill has been used, a woman had been giving it to her children after noticing she had gained weight.
In the case of sterilisation, Sanders explained that it was the black population which had mostly experienced it. "The blacks believe it has been a racist campaign introduced by the US and Europe to try to reduce the population."