THE CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAS IS NEAR-
ing completion. The final large redoubt of uncon-
quered territory, the Amazon, is being rapidly subju-
gated by the combined efforts of government, private
capital and multilateral banks. Today’s conquistadors
prefer to call it development, modernization, or simply
progress. But it remains a war with a bloody toll of death
and destruction-and with mounting armed opposition
from those they would conquer: Indians, rubber tappers,
Brazil-nut gatherers.
The destruction of tropical rainforest and its alarming
implications for global climate has entered the conscious-
ness of the mainstream. But widespread concern for
endangered flora and fauna has inspired surprisingly
little interest in the forest’s traditional human inhabitants
who are fighting their own extinction in the cruel ecol-
ogy of conquest. Their struggle is the subject of this
Report.
The 136,000 Brazilian Indians who live in this terri-
tory the size of Europe have built a fragile yet growing
movement with allies around the world. In From
Warclubs to Words, ethnobiologist Darrell A. Posey,
who has lived with the Kayap6 people for 12 years, tells
how the tribe moved from primitive warfare to the so-
phisticated world of national politics, building ties to en-
vironmentalists to fight the army of developers. In Na-
tive Realpolitik, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, former
president of the Brazilian Association of Anthropolo-
gists, lays out the myriad of tactics used by the indige-
nous resistance to stymie government development pol-
icy.
B RAZIL’S
RATIONALE
FOR
ITS WAR
OF
conquest could well have been voiced by nine-
teenth century U.S. politicians: The Amazon is a vast
“empty” territory to be “won,” in order to fulfill the
nation’s manifest destiny and protect its national
security-and, as James Madison would have added, to
provide an escape valve for dispersing the discontent of
the industrializing South. As sociologist Stephen G.
Bunker, author of Underdeveloping the Amazon, shows
in The Eternal Conquest, four centuries of such “de-
velopment” has only enriched absentee owners, leaving
the region socially impoverished and environmentally
degraded.
Though Brazilian officials are quick to decry foreign
plots to keep the country underdeveloped, indigenous
resistance and international outrage-particularly recent
World Bank reluctance to fund environmentally destruc-
tive projects-has forced Brazil to adopt the rhetoric of
the ecologist. In October, President Jos6 Sarney sus-
pended incentives for ranching and logging, launched a
new federal agency called “Our Nature,” and an-
nounced a total review of Amazon policy. Rather than
“occupation” and “integration,” government planners
now speak of “agro-ecological zoning” and “rational
development.” As Manuela Carneiro da Cunha notes,
the government has now taken to turning Indian lands
into “national forests,” supposed nature reserves where
logging and mining are to be permitted.
With a $2 million budget for the ceremonies to inau-
gurate the new environmental agency, and no budget to
actually staff it, Brazil’s change of heart may be little
more than a sophisticated effort at public relations. Yet
the fact that a new policy has been floated is indicative
of the new political reality achieved by the resistance:
one in which multilateral banks will not fund whatever
mega-project Brazil puts forth; in which any initiative
that affects Indians will face a protracted fight in Bra-
zil’s Congress; and in which Amazon policy is a hotly
contested issue in this year’s presidential campaign.
ONQUEST IS ESSENTIALLY A ONE-SIDED
battle between the old and the new. While launched
by government policy, that battle has already taken on a
dynamic of its own, driven by the basic laws of capital-
ism. In The Sacred Cow geographer Susanna B. Hecht
concludes that the explosive growth of cattle grazing-a
primary vehicle of conquest-is now beyond govern-
ment control, fueled by unchecked land speculation.
Old ways, while environmentally sounder, are often
brutal, violent and exploitative. The resistance, there-
fore, is not simply conservationist. As Hecht’s Murder
at the Margins of the World-the tale of the rubber
tappers union led by Chico Mendes-shows, it is a so-
cial struggle which could well be characterized as class
war. The resistance to conquest does not seek to turn
back the clock but rather to challenge the dynamics of
capitalism which threaten us all.
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