A Miracle and a Curse
A miracle: after centuries of dispossession and abuse, an area the size of Portugal became the Vale do Javari Indigenous Land, inhabited by five thousand Indigenous people in contact with state society and an undetermined number of refugees in remote places. The curse is the white man's doing: his hepatitis and his malaria, which threaten social integrity.
A Marubo girl waits at the Maronal health post to undergo the thick blood smear test, which will determine whether her fever is caused by malaria. Next to her is Kell, the Englishman's grandson.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 189 of Cáñamo magazine, September 2013.
The tribes of the Yavarí basin, “the most fearsome of the Upper Amazon,” did not recognize “Spanish nor Portuguese supremacy” and were “dangerous to travelers,” warned German naturalists Spix and Martius in the 19th century. The natives preserved their independence in the most remote of the great Amazon rivers, unexplored by whites until the rubber boom erupted in the second half of the 19th century…
Colombians, Peruvians, Brazilians—driven by an unrelenting industry. The jungle, an inexhaustible reservoir of rubber; the Indigenous peoples, enslaved labor; the “bosses,” unscrupulous whites from Manaus and Iquitos, enriched to the point of Horror by taking possession of what was not theirs: the rivers, the trees, the people. Territories the size of European states in the grip of a miserable man and his henchmen. First came the smile and the gifts: axes, machetes, trinkets. Then the demands and the violence: torture, executions, kidnappings of women and girls, rape. And always, rampant epidemics.
José Wadick, the Englishman, an Afro-Brazilian from the Northeast drawn by the boom, like so many others. Foreman of a rubber station in the 1930s. A controversial reputation: perhaps a protector of Indians, more likely an exploiter. A player in a world without morals, in a holocaust ignored because the civilized ones won and silenced their barbarity. The rubber trade declined after World War II, but whites (and blacks) persisted: timber, hides—maybe there was oil. In the ’50s and ’60s, official massacres were widespread; the army called them punitive expeditions.
Amelio Wadick, grandson of the Englishman, worked for the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), established in the Yavarí in the 1970s to find "savage" Indians, make contact, and integrate them into the civilized world. In 1982, they encountered the Korubo: irreducible, naked, resistant to Western insanity. Inexperienced officials approached clumsily: a mistake—resulting in death. It took FUNAI two days to return the bodies to Atalaia, at the mouth of the Yavarí. The town was enraged; they condemned FUNAI, they condemned the savages. “They are animals, they weren’t baptized, they have no soul.”
My friend Kell Wadick, great-grandson of the Englishman, was fifteen when he lost his father. In the soil seeded for vengeance, a flower bloomed: “Atalaia was a city completely overtaken by hatred toward Indigenous peoples. I overcame all that hatred—sometimes even from my own family—and joined the struggle on behalf of Indigenous peoples. I wanted to hear the other side of the story.” In 1990, he joined the Indigenous Mission of Alto Solimões and worked for the creation of the world’s most important Indigenous territory. In 2011, he graduated as an anthropologist with a thesis on the use of ayahuasca among the Marubo: he certainly heard their story.
Kell Wadick, great-grandson of the Englishman, son of a FUNAI worker killed by the Korubo, yet defender of the Indigenous peoples of the Javari Valley
Michael is Miguel, and he’s a gringo—blond, pale, tall. “I’m a philanthropist’s assistant, because I don’t have the means to distribute anything myself,” he introduces himself with a smile. He’s an evangelical missionary and knows that people like anthropologists or journalists don’t usually think highly of his kind. The aluminum speedboat slices swiftly through the beautiful dark mirror of the Yavarí. One hundred and fifty horsepower drive us forward, fueled by a massive gas tank. The missionary’s GPS reads 55 kilometers per hour. We’ll travel 950 kilometers to reach Maronal.
Hesíodo is a good-natured big guy with long arms and honey-colored eyes. He was born in Atalaia and has worked in the Terra do Javari for twenty years. He drives standing up, smoking a cigarette, his back leaning against the gas tank. Cotton-like clouds kiss the planet’s surface. A light, intermittent rain falls. The river’s winter has flooded the adjacent jungle, and the almost circular bends of the Yavarí can be cut through the vegetation. Hesíodo knows the shortcuts; he slows down, plunges us into the dense thicket of threatening branches, and brings us out again to the river. To the right, Peru. To the left, Brazil.
Carosso’s small house stands on a hill above the Curuçá River. The palm-thatched roof contrasts with the wall—a large blue plastic sheet; the tidy manioc garden is just the opposite of a satellite dish besides. With small, bright eyes and curly graying hair, the solitary mestizo warmly welcomes the noisy expedition: Indigenous people, mestizos, whites, men, women, children—contradicting in their harmony the atrocities of the past. Squatting on the dirt floor of the modest, orderly, clean kitchen, we sink our hands into the innards of the turtle; its shell has become a plate; it was placed alive on the coals, squirming as it roasted. Next comes a caiman tail. “In the city, everything costs money. Here you go out, kill a peccary, you’ve got fish and manioc. I already bought my TV, my satellite dish, my generator.” In the small house, we hang up our hammocks—ten people sleeping elbow to elbow.
We continue the journey. The guard raises his shotgun in greeting, standing between two large signs where the federal government warns that from this point on, we’re entering protected land, off-limits to outsiders. The last white people were expelled in 2001; entry is only permitted with authorization from Indigenous authorities and supervision by FUNAI. We pull up to the shore. Manoel Chorimpa, an Indigenous leader, hands over some cartridges and food to the man, who informs him of the boats that have already passed through on their way to the gathering. His youngest daughter has a terrible rash on her cheek. Manoel examines her, looks at me, and nods silently.
Hesiodo and Manoel Chorimpa, on the way to Maronal.
Manoel, our host, left Maronal at the age of thirteen to study in Cruzeiro do Sul. Since the late 1990s, he has worked for FUNAI, patrolling the territory to prevent incursions by loggers, hunters, or drug traffickers. “In the eighties and nineties, under pressure from timber companies, the Indigenous people did a lot of extraction. Hunting was also heavily impacted, because we had to feed the workers. But now things are recovering—it’s more balanced.” Caimans flee the beaches as we pass; dark-furred mammals are startled by the roar of the motor; macaws fly vividly above the green canopy.
The missionary asks Manoel about the material needs of the few villages we pass: schools, health posts, landing strips. He jots the answers into a little notebook. He speculates on possible aid from the “philanthropic” organization he represents, funded by Baptist churches in Indiana and South Carolina. The gift is the key to access. He’s red as a tomato—his cap flew off shortly after we left Atalaia.
Kell, the Englishman’s great-grandson, boards the little diocesan launch: fifteen meters, two cabins, kitchen, bathroom. The crew isn’t around. “I used to travel a lot on this one.” Alongside Father Joseney and several Indigenous leaders, he navigated the region’s rivers to ease intertribal tensions—stolen women, raided villages, bloody skirmishes. In 1991, the Conselho Indígena do Vale do Javari was founded, bringing all the peoples together in a successful alliance for the Terra Indígena Vale do Javari: a territory the size of Portugal, now inhabited by five thousand Indigenous people in contact with Western society (from the Marubo, Kanamarí, Matís, Matsés, Kulina, and Korubo peoples), and an undetermined number belonging to unknown groups who have chosen to seek refuge from the Global Plague in the most inaccessible corners of the forest.
From the back of the boat, I dive into the cool, murky water. My travel companions watch in alarm. “Yacaré preto,” they warn. Black caiman: aggressive and formidable. I scramble back aboard. They offer me a bucket with a rope tied to its handle. The surrounding jungle is not a garden but a threat—an opportunity only for those who know it. The crew emerges from the forest—they’ve hunted three birds. We enjoy a delicious broth over jokes, stories, and laughter. The musician hired for the festival sets up his synthesizer, tries out some forró and cumbia tunes; the humidity has silenced a few keys, which he presses with a comically disgruntled expression.
The journey ends on the third day in the Marubo village of Maronal. We are greeted by the warm, smooth skin of young women who flank us, holding our arms, chattering melodically. They do not meet our eyes. They’re adorned with long strands of beads wrapped around their arms and calves. The whole village has gathered at the dock. Fireworks burst. A man wearing a feathered crown leads the procession; to the rhythm of his chant, we walk through the village, recognizing, being recognized. We enter the warm twilight of a maloca, dance in circles to the beat of the maguaré drum, and breathe in the thick atmosphere of smoked meat and hearth smoke.
The young women of Maronal welcome us with dancing, adorned in festive attire.
Erected at the center of a clearing meticulously cleared of vegetation, surrounded by a ring of small houses and another of fruit trees, the maloca shelters the extended family under its elongated structure of poles and palm leaves, arranged in perfect symmetry. The beauty of simplicity. A door at each end; a central space between the two rows of columns supporting the structure; the sides divided for each of the family’s couples (their hammocks, their smoking hearth); bunches of plantains hanging from the crossbeams; the women’s space at one end, the men’s at the other.
Paulo, the young owner, stands while we eat, attentive to the plates of roasted meat, manioc, chili, and masato, which he places on the dirt floor between the two benches flanking the main door of his maloca. We eat until we’re full; it’s a culture of abundance. At fourteen, Paulo went to study in Atalaia. “I was there for a year and seven months. It was a seminary, and they expelled me because I had a daughter.” He returned to the calm of his village. “There’s no violence. There’s meat, there’s food.” He notices a half-empty plate and hurries to refill it.
“In the old days, the Marubo lived at the headwaters of the streams. Here, where the river is larger, there’s more illness,” Paulo explains. The Marubo’s semi-nomadic lifestyle and dispersal didn’t suit FUNAI, which in 1972 convinced the different families to concentrate in Maronal, where it could care for them (and control them) more easily. Sedentarization is problematic: the game retreats, the gardens are farther each year, human crowding brings health issues. “People want to move back to the headwaters, but here we have the school, the health post…” And the soccer field, and the radio, and the airstrip.
Drowsy women, boys in jeans with expensive cameras, shirtless elders leaning on spears adorned with long necklaces hanging from their nasal septum, representatives of all the ethnicities of the Terra do Javari, Catholic missionaries with hippie looks recording the debate on a laptop. The cement floor and zinc roof of the communal building guarantee stifling heat. At the table, Father Joseney speaks about biopiracy and intellectual property: “You know many plants that the multinationals are interested in. A scientist takes forty years to discover something like ayahuasca, but you tell them in two minutes.”
Smoked meat and yuca cooked in abundance.
At night, the elders inhale rapé and drink ayahuasca at the entrance of the maloca. They converse with serious or distant expressions while the children dance in a circle under the tungsten light. A generator and gasoline sit in the most remote corner. The Catholic missionaries sit beside the elder knowledge keepers. “They are doing the evening prayer,” says a taciturn young man who regards my presence with disdain: “There has been a lenient attitude toward allowing outsiders into this festival. The indigenous land is a protected area, and no one can enter without permission from FUNAI in Brasília.” He accuses the evangelical missionaries of wanting to “change the values.” Not like the Catholics, he assures: “We help them respect their culture but don’t force them to practice the faith. They come to that if they want.”
Miguel Michael is undeterred by the competition; he has a mission and a strategy: “We want to see what problems you have so we can help.” His organization could provide support flights in case of medical emergencies. “We are willing to spend that money for a human life, which is precious.” He laments that Brazilian authorities have not allowed the entry of an (evangelical) medical mission. “We want to help, but there are government barriers. But if the indigenous person insists, FUNAI accepts it.” The Catholics are suspicious and question them.
In the health post, Daniel pricks the thumbnail of an elder, a woman, a crying girl; they have a fever, possibly malaria. Drops of blood fall onto the slide; the parasite is searched for under the microscope. Daniel, the nurse, analyzes dozens of samples each day at the Maronal health post. One year there were 3,609 cases diagnosed across the entire Terra; the next year 2,608; the last year 2,090. The population is less than five thousand. “The biggest problem with malaria control is that the indigenous people don’t use mosquito nets and don’t want poison sprayed inside the malocas because they say it irritates the children’s skin.” It could also be hepatitis, but there is no way to know since they lack the necessary equipment for testing.
Health problems, threats, and solutions are debated at length. It is reported that infant mortality in the Terra is double the average for Brazil, the great Latin American power. The Catholic missionaries draft a brief and clear final document: the unsustainable health situation, the government’s lack of attention, the need to invest in infrastructure and healthcare personnel, and the importance of valuing traditional medicine and combining it with Western medicine.
Missionary Miguel/Michael takes notes of the needs.
Father Joseney left the priesthood, got married, and had beautiful children who have accompanied him to Maronal. A charismatic driving force behind the movement that culminated in the creation of the Terra: “In the nineties, there were five thousand loggers working here. There wasn’t a stream from which they didn’t extract fine wood: cedar, mahogany… They would enter the malocas and take away all the workforce for logging. There was a lot of cachaça.” Illegal exploitations operated in collusion with the Federal Police and FUNAI, institutions that were “very corrupt.” Joseney managed to expel the illegal loggers. He was hated: insulted in the streets, doused with beer. “Too much land for too few Indians,” they told him.
Miguel Michael perseveres during meals in the maloca, sitting among the gathered men. “The Bible is a book for all cultures: for the United States, for the jungle peoples. Good things come from outside, like boots, and bad things come like cachaça. God doesn’t want us to get drunk because then we lose sensitivity, fights happen, and people sleep with someone else’s wife. I spend the money and then I vomit it.” The elders nod indifferently, already familiar with the evangelical missionaries: the New Tribes missionaries stayed among them for several years; they banned “satanic” rites and denounced shamans as impostors, madmen, or Satan’s followers.
Politics gives way to folklore: what once happened in the flow of daily life is now represented as spectacle. Dance groups rehearse choreographies performed in front of an audience armed with digital cameras. An archery competition takes place: two men in their fifties hit the target at thirty meters; the young have grown up among shotguns and barely know how to hold the bow. Facial paintings and body adornments become the subject of a fierce contest.
A generator and gasoline trigger the closing dance: the musician brought from Atalaia connects his synthesizer to huge speakers and sings joyfully in the jungle night. Cachaça rains down on the clearing in front of the maloca. The elders, their torsos adorned with white necklaces, smile with excitement; it will not be ayahuasca they take tonight. The women parade proudly adorned, very respectful of their aesthetic tradition. The youth get stubbornly drunk; the other day no longer exists. Even Pastor Miguel Michael ventures into the sinuous forró dance with several young women, whom he tries to seduce... for his church, very properly, in the name of God: that is his mission. Mine ends at this point.
