MEMBERS OF a tiny indigenous tribe emerged on Sunday from the Amazon rainforest, many for the first time, to prove their existence and demand greater protection for their lands.
The protest by 55 Awá and another 150 supporters is taking place in the town of Zé Doca in the eastern Amazonian state of Maranhão after the local mayor’s office had denied their existence.
Local authorities oppose a ruling by a federal judge that loggers, ranchers and other settlers from around Zé Doca who have invaded traditional Awá lands should leave.
The ruling in June last year gave squatters 180 days to evacuate demarcated Awá territory in what was seen as a major victory for the tribe. However, legal objections saw the ruling suspended; it is still to be enforced with satellite images showing that settlers have stepped up forest clearing and road building.
Tribe members left the forest on Sunday to stage their two-day protest which they have titled: " We Exist: Land and Life for the Hunter-Gatherer Awá".
In a telephone interview, Awá leader Mama said those who denied their existence only did so in order to seize their lands.
“Those who say we do not exist do so because they want to end with this land. We are here to show that we do exist and want to secure our lands. We are ready to talk but they must leave. This is not their territory.”
Indigenous rights groups working with the Awá say squatters on the tribe’s land are using the delay in implementing the judge’s ruling to clear more of the forest.
“About 50 per cent of their forest has already been cleared. The longer the delay in enforcing the ruling, the more time there is to destroy more of it,” says Madalena Borges of CIMI, a Catholic church-linked organisation that fights for indigenous rights.
Ms Borges said the mayor’s office, which has appealed the judge’s ruling, has so far not responded to an invitation to sit and talk with the Awá protesters.
According to FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s indigenous affairs agency, the Awá, with about 300 members, are one of only two nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes left in Brazil. Although most Awá now live in communities in touch with the outside world, a FUNAI expedition earlier this year confirmed the existence of a group of about 60 Awá who have had no contact.
The Awá’s lands first came under threat in the 1970s when Brazil undertook the Great Carajás programme to develop iron ore mines in the eastern Amazon with funding from the World Bank, Japan and the European Union. As part of the project a railway linking the world’s largest iron ore mine with the coast was built on Awá lands.
A condition of World Bank support was that indigenous land in the region be demarcated and protected. However delays in the demarcation process dragged on for years while the Carajás project continued. The roads and railways built to ship out the region’s mineral wealth led to an invasion of Awá lands by loggers and other settlers.
As well as seeing swathes of their forest home cut down, the Awá were also the targets of massacres by settlers as well as being victims of illnesses such as the ordinary flu to which they had little immunity.
“The picture is one of a people whose traditional territory has become completely fragmented and who have to seek refuge in the pieces of forest that have survived,” says Fiona Watson of Survival International, a campaign group that fights for indigenous rights. “The problem is the level of violence that comes with deforestation.”
Survival has documented one Awá massacre survivor who, after his family was attacked by ranchers, wandered alone in the forest for 12 years avoiding contact with white people before finally emerging more than 650 kilometres away from the tribe’s lands.