The New Yorker Radio Hour - Exploitation in the Amazon

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

This week, Jair Bolsonaro, the President of Brazil, ignored the advice of his own health minister, and went for a walk in the capitol, declaring “We’ll all die one day.” Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist elected to the Presidency in 2018, is known for flouting conventional wisdom. He is especially cavalier about the environment. Several weeks ago, he introduced a bill to allow commercial mining on protected indigenous lands in the Amazon. Jon Lee Anderson, a New Yorker staff writer, recently returned from Brazil, where he was reporting on the effects of these exploitative practices on one indigenous group in particular, the Kayapo. He says that Bolsonaro’s mining bill, like so many of his more radical policies, will have effects that are almost impossible to predict. “The indigenous people are the last defense for some of the world’s last wilderness areas. Its habitats, its ecosystems, the animals that live within it, the medicinal plants that we have yet to even know exist—the indigenous people turn out to be the final custodians,” Anderson says. “And, in some tragic cases, they are also the handmaidens to their own destruction. And it’s always been that way, and that’s what people like Bolsonaro understand.”   Audio used from the video of the late Chief Mro’o’s was produced by Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist at the Goeldi Museum, in Brazil. Additional music by Filipe Duarte. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This past week, the president of Brazil, Jayao Bolsonaro, ignored the advice of his own health minister's call for social distancing in light of COVID-19. Bolsonaro went for a walk in the Capitol declaring, We'll all die one day. He's faced backlash for this reckless attitude, and there have been calls for resignation for members of Brazil's left.

Most Brazilian state governors are flat out ignoring Bolsonaro's advice. Now, Bolsonaro's approach isn't all that surprising. He's long been known to spurn the advice of experts and scientists. He's perhaps most well known for his disregard for environmental concerns, favoring economic growth first and foremost. For Bolsonaro, protecting the Amazon rainforest, is just a hindrance to Brazil's economy.

Several weeks ago he introduced a bill to allow commercial mining on protected indigenous lands. John Lee Anderson has reported from every country in Latin America and not long ago he returned to Brazil to look at how the influx of gold miners is affecting one indigenous community there. Here's John Lee Anderson. I've been to Brazil a number of times over the years

and to the Amazon as well. The jungle really begins in southeastern Parastate. It's below the mouth of the Amazon, which when it meets the Atlantic Ocean, is about 200 miles wide. The mountains in the distances are still jungle. It's just a green carpet that goes on forever.

And once you're down there in these vast trees that have their... It's an entire ecosystem. The water is... Look from the sky. It's so clear. It's so clean. Hundreds of indigenous groups live in the Amazon,

and one is a group known as the Kayepo, about 9,000 people living in an area the size of Ohio. It turned out that I have two friends in Brazil, both of whom have had long-standing relationship with the Kayapo. One is an American who's lived in Brazil for many years. He speaks various languages, including indigenous languages, Glenn Shepard. He's an ethnobotist, wonderful guy.

He knows the Kaepo extremely well, has for over 25 years. And the other is Felipe Milanese, who's a teacher of humanities in Bahia. And he agreed to come with me. They are a stranger of San Paulo. And he is American. He's a great Orlandist. They spoke to me.

They spoke to me. about the late chief who had set up this village called Tdijam. Torejam is the Kayapo village that was set up around 2011 by Chief Murot, a young chief of the Kayapo who moved there to start a new community. When Felipe and I arrived in Torejam, one older woman immediately came to to Felipe, and she and other women around her erupted into this keening, wailing, crying. And this is, I understood later, a traditional greeting. It's a morning greeting.

She knew that Felipe had known Mudo, and therefore they would lament together this beloved person that they had once known who was no longer with them. It went on for about 10 minutes. Both Glenn and Felipe spoke to me about Murdo as a man of vision, as someone who wanted the best for his people, as someone who recognized and valued the traditions of the Kayapo and didn't want to lose them. He also wanted his people to be educated,

and he had strategically positioned his village at the edge of the great territory in order that they have access to schooling and also health clinics. Back in 2013, not long before Murdo died, Glenn Shepard, the ethnobotanist, went to Turejam and recorded

this small interview with Murdo. White people are destroying our environment. Even the government is destroying nature. He was about to head off on a journey to the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, to meet with then-President Dilma Roussef, and to present her with a letter on behalf of the Kayapo people. So we're going to Brasilia to ask them to stop. White people have to respect Indians.

Indians respect white people, but they don't respect us. That's why we're going to Brasilia, to talk with the government, to ask them to stop all this. If they destroy our environment, it will make life very hard for us, for our children, for our grandchildren. The Kayapo, you know, our hunter-gathers, they live within nature, and have a specific relationship with each of the animals. Several generations live together in a single room. That's how they live in hammocks. They sleep in the big house at night.

And then in the evenings, they sit out in front, looking out into the big dirt circle. And there's a men's house open-sided in the middle of the dirt circle where the men get together and talk. And they have sort of talking nights. Amongst the Kayapo, the kinship relations are rather complex, but while I was in Tudejam, I met one of the late Chief Muro's younger relatives,

a man called Belen. When I was a child, my father, my mom, me would be a god and my mother, me could have in Olde Gorotiri. He grew up in Al-Korotiri. He's the best educated and the first university-educated Kayapo of his community. And over the days,

he became the person that I spoke with the most. His father taught Darryl Posi about medicinal plants. Belengen is in his early 40s. He's a stocky man, medium height, has a nice face, big round face.

Very strong. The Kaipomen are strong. They have hard black hair. And he was always painted. He wore this extraordinary red and yellow paint, and he had the black geometric designs on his chest and torso and fantastic-looking person.

Few illnesses. and few white people. Was the life better then or no? Belang never never really. Belang never really criticizes. He speaks in a gentle way. He doesn't opine.

So how is it since the gold miners are here? Is it better or is it worse? And he would say, well, there's more malaria now. Do you feel fear? Because there's all of these strangers in your forest. Yes, it's very dangerous. There's many murderers here.

Brazil was under dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, and there was a lot of brutality. It was Goulart's leftist leanings and the fear that he would turn Brazil into a Castro state that led to an army revolt and his downfall. And it began the great immigration into the Amazon via this great dirty road that they built to westernize Brazil.

Wherever roads go, people go. The Brazilian military understood that. And when they seized power in the 60s, it was their obsession to play. populate the interior of Brazil. It is also the beginning of the most controversial road in Brazil, the BR163. The Brazilian dictatorship built this road in the 1970s. Their intention was to populate the rainforest and exploit its resources

under the slogan Land without people for people without land, ignoring the tens of thousands of indigenous Indians who were there already. But the road was never finished. In the 70s there were dozens of massacres of indigenous people in conjunction with the trans-Amazonian Highway. The first people who come might be little, you know, just people who want to just survive. They might want to clear an acre of land to grow some yucca and some beans. But soon you have the guys who are looking for the valuable hardwood.

Some of these hardwood trees can net you $100,000. And with money people, come hard men. and then you have the ranchers who realize I can have a million-acre cattle ranch and wait, that Indian tribe is there? The state tells me as long as there are Indians on it, we have to leave them. But if there's no Indians on it, it's mine.

Kill them. In 1985, the dictatorship was over. The country returned to democracy, such as it exists. They had a constitution in 1988, which consecrated for the first time, the rights of indigenous people. I would say that under Lula, he made a great effort to uphold the Constitution and the constitutional rights of those people who had been traditionally marginalized in Brazil.

And they were incorporated into the economic and social life in the country in a way that they weren't before. But then there was a downturn in the country's economy amid rising discontent. And in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected. There are some of Brazil's most remote and untouched regions. But now President Bolsonaro wants to tap into the riches of protected indigenous reservations. His proposed bill delivers on a campaign promised to open up the land to mining, energy and other projects. This is a big step forward. It depends on Congress, but we will face pressure from environmentalists.

Those people from the environment, if I could, one day, I would confine them to the Amazon, since they like that. since they like the environment so much. This is the man that the Brazilians have chosen as their president. He wants the Indians land, you know. He wants them off. And he's been pushing since day one to take over the indigenous reserves, to get rid of them, and to push a mining bill that he has finally presented to Congress to allow commercial mining on indigenous land. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We're listening to John Lee Anderson's reporting from the rainforest of Brazil about the push from the government there to allow mining on indigenous land, in particular gold mining, which has become extremely lucrative as the price of gold has gone up and up. Thousands of gold miners have flocked into the indigenous territories looking for gold. Today, the price of gold is roughly comparable to that of cocaine, and I wanted to find out how this gold.

gold boom was affecting the indigenous people in the Amazon. Every few years, the Kayap have a coming-of-age ceremony. They call it the naming ceremony for the young boys who become adolescents. As part of that ceremony, they're given headdressers. As part of that ceremony, they're given feather headdresses. made from the feathers of macaws and from parrots. And Belen was the designated feather hunter for his group within the Kayapo.

And he ran across some white men prospectors in the jungle quite far from Turajam. He knew that they were doing gold mining illegally on that part of the territory. He told Murdo that he'd met these prospectors and that they clearly, were interested in building this road through the jungle so that they could prospect right through.

And Murdo sent word back saying, no, we don't want that. Murdo hoped he could get the best of the outside world, you know, schools for the children, health clinics for the people, to improve their health and their education. But with that contact has also come a desire amongst the young men inevitably for things like motorbikes or clothing or funky haircuts. And sadly, also, you know, alcoholism, prostitution, I mean, just outside the reserve, there's a brothel and a bar, and the changing diet and lifestyle that they're acquiring and which seems to be, you know, really affecting them in a negative way. When those prospectors spoke to Belen, they were really speaking not only for their own interests, but. with the backing of another Kayapo chief who had already allowed them to do prospecting in his

territory. Belain himself was related to both chiefs and so was seen as a kind of go-between. Now, the Kayapo in the last few decades, they haven't openly fought with one another. There's still kind of mutual respect. You know, one chief will see if another community, usually through their chief, is willing to go along with an idea. And they either go along with it or they don't. Murdo opposed it. And so for a number of years, it was stopped. Unfortunately, soon afterwards, Murdo died.

And it was not long at all before the road was built. From what I understand, the deal. was made by his own brother, Juan Piranha, as they call him, Piraña being the fish, the carnivorous fish. But he was also called, I was told, Juan Cachasa. Kashasa is the Brazilian liquor made from sugar cane. He liked to drink. He took some money, and in return they went ahead with the road, and they built it.

And the gold prospectors just poured in. and overwhelmed Tudajam. And now the area around Tudajam, it's like a fringe of trees, but just beyond it. It's a sea of mud and mercury and machinery and devastation. I met one man, Jorge Silva, as a hired gun, basically, you know, as the hoseman in his gold mining pit. And he had a look in his eye,

and he wanted me to know that he was no dummy. And he had studied physics, but had never been able to teach it. So he'd done all kinds of different jobs. He'd taught soccer in a high school. He'd done this. He'd done that. And he said to me,

all of us know that we're screwing the forest. It's not like we don't know. He said, but we don't have any other way to make money and make a living. And it was a very tragic thing to hear him say that. And again, I feel that that's an indictment of the state, of the government, of that country that, of any country that allows its people, abandons its people to such an extent that the only way they can make a living is to destroy their own land.

That's very sad. And I think he was a voice of a kind of larger tragedy. Through longstanding agreements, the Kayapo are supposed to receive 10% of the proceeds of what the gold miners extract from the land. as far as I could ascertain, they don't seem to really have the ability to know what the prospectors actually get out of the land. They more or less take them at their word. And if they once had a system to ensure that they got their 10% royalties, they seem to no longer have that ability. in the overflight I did with Felipe of the Tudajam and the Forest Beyond, and when we were astonished and horrified to see the extent of the destruction,

we also saw airstrips that are on Kayapo territory, that are clearly being operated by prospectors and prospecting groups themselves, which clearly told us that the Kayapo had lost control because it meant that these miners could take the gold out of Caiapo, land and fly it right out. When you think about all this land and all these lives are being destroyed for gold, it's pretty devastating.

What is gold? What good does it do? It's for wedding bands? Really? Millions of acres of primeval forests get destroyed for wedding bands? Is that right? And apparently, you know,

every little smartphone we use has some filament of gold. and if you add it all up, it's actually a significant portion of the gold that's being bought. It's groups of criminals now funding massive operations and moving into an area where there are vulnerable people

to take the gold from them. They're not getting even their 10%. They are terrified of the men and they don't know what to do about it. And the president of their country is backing up the thugs. That's what's going on. The indigenous people are the last

defense for some of the world's last wilderness areas. Its habitats, its ecosystems, the animals that live within it, the medicinal plants that we have yet to even know exist, the indigenous people turn out to be the final custodian. And in some tragic cases, they are also the handmaidens to their own destruction. And it's always been that way. And that's what people like Bolsonaro understand.

You know, here I am speaking with such passion about gold, and yet I'm wearing some. And I think we all are. You know, we need to be more conscious about the ways in which we consume this planet and know about how it's come to be on us. John Lee Anderson. You can find his article, Blood Gold in the Brazilian rainforest at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Riannon, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gophane in Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.