Brazil (Oxfam Country Profiles) - Softcover

Rocha, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0855984333 ISBN 13: 9780855984335

Verlag: Oxfam Professional, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

The Brazil Country Profile presents a country that is the ninth richest economy in the world, yet, which is in terms of human development, one of the poorest. It provides a concise account of the historical and political background to Brazil, where for 500 years the rich and powerful have fought ruthlessly to defend the status quo, but where a growing popular movement is working for sustainable change.

Much of this Country Profile is told through the personal testimonies of Brazilians themselves. Traveling widely, the author talked to people on farms and on street corners; in rainforests and shantytowns; at football matches and carnival celebrations. These people talk about their lives and their hopes for the future in this diverse and contradictory nation.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jan Rocha, a former correspondent for the BBC and The Guardian, lives in São Paulo and is the author of several books on Brazil.

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Brazil

By Jan Rocha

Oxfam Publishing

Copyright © 2000 Oxfam GB
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85598-433-5

Contents

Introduction, 5, 
The original Brazilians, 9, 
Black Brazil, 16, 
Land for the few, 20, 
Exploding cities, 26, 
The coup, 33, 
Human rights, 37, 
The political system, 40, 
The economy, 46, 
Communications, 52, 
Education, 55, 
Children at work, 58, 
Health, 60, 
The Northeast, 63, 
Babassu, 67, 
The amazing Amazon, 70, 
Football, 75, 
Carnival, 77, 
Conclusion, 79, 
Facts and figures, 80, 
Dates and events, 81, 
Sources and further reading, 82, 
Acknowledgements, 84, 
Oxfam in Brazil, 85, 
Index, 87, 

CHAPTER 1

The original Brazilians

Five hundred years after the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral first set foot in Brazil, small groups of indigenous people still flee from contact with white people deep in the Amazon rainforest. When the Portuguese sailors sighted land on 22 April 1500 and dropped anchor off the coast of Bahia, several million indians were living in what is now Brazil. Hundreds of different nations spoke hundreds of different languages. Today that rich diversity has been reduced by centuries of slaughter, disease, and persecution to a little more than 300,000 indigenous people, who belong to 215 nations and speak 175 languages. Within a few decades of the arrival of the Portuguese, the great nations who inhabited the forested coastal regions with their plentiful game, fruit, and fish had been decimated by sickness and slavery. Some became allies of the colonisers, but many retreated west to escape from the advance of the slave traders. The Guarani in particular took refuge in Jesuit sanctuaries known as reducoes, in the south of Brazil and in Paraguay. But in 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil by the Portuguese Crown, for standing in the way of the slavers and setting up 'a state within a state'.

Legalised theft in the Amazon

Today sixty per cent of Brazil's indigenous population live in the Amazon region. Officially demarcated indigenous reserves cover just eleven per cent of Brazil's total territory. Since the 1960s, government policy of opening up the Amazon region by building roads and hydro-electric dams and encouraging cattle-ranching and mining has again threatened many indigenous communities with cultural destruction, disease, and death. Those who live in gold-rich areas, like the Yanomami, have seen their land invaded by thousands of wildcat miners. Other groups who lived in the path of proposed roads and dams, like the Waimiri Atroari, the Nambiquara, and the Parakana, were forced to move. The military who took power after a coup in 1964 saw the Amazon as an 'empty' region, which needed to be populated and developed. Indigenous communities, even when they numbered thousands of people, did not count. Instead, hundreds of thousands of small farmers, expelled from their own land in the south by dam-building and large-scale mechanised soya farms, were transferred to the tropical rainforest region with the promise of cheap land. Any sort of company, including banks and airlines, could obtain generous tax-breaks if it bought land in the Amazon and cleared forest to set up giant cattle ranches. The official indian affairs agency, FUNAI, which was run by an army general, issued scores of 'negative certificates', declaring areas to be empty of indigenous people, when in fact they were home to indigenous populations.

The result was disastrous. After ranchers arrived in 1971, an epidemic of measles killed every single Nambiquara child under the age of 15. The Surui population fell from 1200 to 251 in nine years, as small-scale farmers from the south invaded their land. By 1982 there were only 571 Waimiri Atroari left. In 1968 they had numbered 3000, before work began on the Balbina dam, a private cassiterite-mining project, and the road that slashed through their rainforest territory. Disease and malnutrition carried off 15 per cent of the Yanomami population, 1500 men, women and children, when 40,000 gold-miners invaded their lands between 1987 and 1989. Sometimes indians were deliberately murdered. In 1988 14 Tikuna were shot dead by loggers. In 1993 gold-miners killed 18 Yanomami, most of them women and children. In both cases the murderers had invaded indigenous land, and the indigenous people got in their way. Some of the gold-miners were brought to trial and sentenced, while the trial of the loggers drags on.

Many indian communities now face a new threat from legislation. A government decree introduced in 1995 allowed the limits of their reserves to be challenged by third parties, even though the demarcation process had involved lengthy studies by anthropologists and topographers. A Bill to authorise mining in indigenous areas without proper safeguards for the environment or the indigenous communities is being considered by Congress. More than 30,000 claims from Brazilian and overseas corporations have already been filed with the government's minerals-production department, waiting for the new law to be passed.

Indigenous people unite in defence of their lands

When the onslaught on the Amazon began, indian communities had little contact with each other. In 1974 a group of chiefs, tuxauas, met for the first time to talk about what was happening to their communities. They each spoke a different language, but they soon discovered that their problem was the same: how to protect their land from invaders bent on exploiting it for their own profit. By the government, the ranchers, and the settlers, land was perceived in economic terms, as a source of income and profit. But for the indians it was much more. Their land contained the spirits that governed their lives, the bones of their ancestors, and their tribal memories. It was what gave them their collective identity as Surui, Macuxi, or Xavante.

From that first meeting, demarcation – the official establishment of geographical limits which respect the area traditionally inhabited by an indigenous community – emerged as the overwhelming demand of the indians. The 1988 constitution recognised the rights of the indigenous communities to their own ethnic and cultural identity, as well as their land rights. In 1989, indigenous leaders united to form what later became known as COIAB (the Co-ordination of Indigenous Organisations in the Brazilian Amazon), which today represents 163 ethnic groups – a total of more than 200,000 people – and campaigns for demarcation, investment in sustainable agriculture, and health and education services appropriate to the needs of indigenous communities. 'Bio-piracy' is also a major concern, with indians recognising the need to protect indigenous knowledge of herbal medicine and the properties of animal, insect, and plant life from commercial exploitation and expropriation by pharmaceutical companies.

All indigenous areas were supposed to be officially demarcated by 1993, but in spite of the mobilisation of the indigenous population, successive Brazilian governments did little or nothing to carry out demarcation until funds became available under the Pilot Programme to Conserve the Brazilian Rainforest, approved by the G-7 group of industrialised countries at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In the same year, at a meeting held near Brasilia, 350 leaders from groups all over Brazil set up CAPOIB (Council for Indigenous Peoples and Organisations), to present their own proposals for a new indian statute then...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Oxfam Professional
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0855984333
• ISBN 13: 9780855984335
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 88
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland