RE: The Yanomami and the Atomic Energy Comission.

[crebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Marxlist friends: I've been - and will remain retained by a writing
project (a long text on Postmodernity) until at least the end of the
year. But anyway I could read throughly the text about the Yanomami
today. The facts presented  are terrifying and explain a lot about the
plight of the Yanomami _today_.

The findings about the eugenic "experiments" on the Yanomami refer, it
seems, to the _Venezuelan_ Yanomami, and offer sure proof about the
correctness of the policy adopted by successive Brazilian governments
since the days of the military commisioner for Indian Affairs, General
Rondon (a Comtean Positivist, as so many of military involved in the
Republican coup of 1889) of denying access to the Indians for all kinds
of foreign missionaries, researchers and scientists, in order to avoid
further disturbances in their traditional mode of life. However, if the
Brazilian Yanomami were more or less saved from involvement in such kind
of shady "reseraching", they were put in dire straits by gold-diggers
invading their lands not only with epidemic virus and DSTs, but also
with boring hoses filling the rivers with silt , and, last but not
least, mercury used to amalgamate gold and thrown into the same rivers.
Therefore the theatrical political gesture made by the Brazilian
government, during the Collor presidency, of setting aside a huge
reservation -as great as Portugal - for the Yanomami.

Of course, that angers interests that toy with nationalist feeling by
pointing to the fact that the Yanomami are hindering the exploitation of
the huge mineral depots in the area, and that they must be allowed to
meld into a developing economy (as exporting raw materials at low
prices, insted of keeping they an strategical reserve, could be anything
other than the hallmark of a semicolonial economy; but them, the main
"intellectual" mouthpiece for such a view is the academic carreerist
Helio Jaguaribe, a friend of Cardoso's).

Neverthless, the American escalating involvement in Colombia poses a new
side-effect for the Yanomami. As the Brazilian government has refused
out of hand from any direct involvement in Colombia (sending Brazlian
recruits to die in Colombia is a move that would probably erode away the
very small legitimacy still held by the Cardoso government) the Northern
frontier of Brazil will need to be more or less guarded from the coming
Colombian turmoil, That will mean pressures to ressucitate a huge scheme
of settling an increased number of military garrisons along the whole of
said Northern frontier (and not only its Colombo-Brazilian section)
which means further pressures directed at slashing the Yanomami national
"park", or "favouring its economic development" by allowing miners and
gold-diggers in.Also, the military tend to regard the Yanomamis in
Brazil as possible pawns of an imperialist movement for the setting of
an international "environment friendly" protectorate in Amazonia, headed
by NGOs.

As it is, the fate of the Yanomamis at the Brazilian side of the border
will depend very much on the development of events in Colombia.

Carlos Rebello