Today, there are around 330,000 Indians in Brazil, spread between more than 200 tribes speaking 180 languages or dialects. When the Portuguese first arrived in the sixteenth century, there were over five million indigenous inhabitants.
The Tupi tribe was the first Brazilian "Indian nation" to come into serious conflict with the outside world. Twelve colonies had been established in Brazil by the Portuguese king, João III, to exploit trade in wood and sugar, but slavery and death were the only things that the Tupi got out of the exchange - a pattern which was to continue for the next five hundred years in Brazil. Perhaps even more devastating than murder or slavery was the spread of white man's disease : dysentery and influenza hit within the first two years; smallpox and the plague followed. When the Jesuit missionaries attempted to gather the natives into "reduction" missions, epidemics killed hundreds of thousands of Indians in just a few decades.
The first century and a half of contact was funded by the need for cheap labour and new resources. Spreading steadily into the savannas of the Ge-speaking peoples, and the forests of Pará and the Amazon, the colonists established cattle ranches, plantations, lumber extraction regions and mining settlements - all of which were met by considerable native resistance. Later, the development of vulcanization in the 1870s led to an international demand for rubber . Prices rose rapidly and, during the boom which lasted for almost fifty years, Indians were killed, moved around and enslaved by the rubber barons.
Even though it had always been going on, it wasn't until 1968 that the first reports accusing the Indian Protection Service (the forerunner of FUNAI) of "corruption, torture and murder" appeared in the world press. An example is the experience of the Nambikwara tribe, who have two main areas reserved for them. One zone of semi-arid scrubland lies to the east of the Cuiabá-Porto Velho highway (BR-364), an indigenous reservation since 1968; the other area is in the fertile Guaporé river valley, where most of the zone is taken over by cattle ranchers - the Indians complain of dung-polluted river waters. The progressive extermination of the tribe has been going on for years, initially with machine guns, then with FUNAI issuing certificates to allow cattle-ranching concessions to set up operations in Indian lands. In their attempt to save the Nambikwara from certain death, FUNAI tried to transfer the Indians south from the Guaporé valley to empty, arid scrubland. Many Indians became sick during and after the move - measles killed all the children of one group - and bedraggled, starving Indians could be seen walking back along the highways in 1976.
The government's Programme of National Integration (PIN) began in 1970. Aiming to colonize Amazônia by the construction of two highways - Transamazônica and Cuiabá- Santarém - the intention was to relocate some half a million families from the overpopulated and poor Northeast. Only some ten thousand have actually moved, but these alone have caused enormous devastation (mainly through unchecked diseases) to several tribes - Araba, Parkana, Kreen Akarore and Txukarramae. Other roads and further problems have followed. The Northern Perimeter highway (BR-210) affected the Yanomami; the road from Manaus to Caracarai (BR-17) upset the Waimiri-Atroari people; and the Cuiabá-Porto Velho road (BR-364) - known as the Polonoroeste resettlement project - not only seriously disrupted the Nambikwara Indian tribe but also severely disappointed many thousands of peasants who found the soil lasted three or four years at most and that malaria was a common problem. The latest plan is to link up the north and south Amazon roads by cutting a highway through Acre and around the borders with Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, thereby endangering more Amazonian groups at the same time as putting them under border security control.
