CHAPTER 1
CHRONICLE OF A MASSACRE
Garimpeiro Amigo!
15th June 1993: six Yanomami youths are on the way back to Haximú, their village, deep in the Amazon rainforest. The trail follows the Orinoco river. They stop to eat the cassava flour they were given by some garimpeiros, or gold miners, at the last miners' camp they visited. The expedition has been only partly successful, because the miners have not given them a rifle they want. As they eat, they hear a crashing and snapping of twigs. It's the sound made by white men hurrying through the forest – Indians move through the forest silently.
Seven garimpeiros appear – Goiano Doido, Caporal, Careca, Goiano Cabeludo, Parana Aloprado, Luiz Rocha and Uricado Branco – the same ones who were playing dominoes when the Yanomami visited their hut to ask for food. They want the Indians to go hunting tapir with them. The Indians feel there is something strange about this sudden invitation, but the gold miners are armed, while they have only one rifle between them, so they agree. They fall into line along the narrow trail, 18 year-old Reikim leading the way, followed by the others, alternately gold miner and Indian. They walk on, until Paulo Yanomami, who is carrying the Indians' only rifle, stops, hands it to Bauxi and disappears into the forest to defecate, telling the others to go on, because he will catch up with them.
But the gold miners do not go on. Instead one of them seizes the arm of Bauxi, who is now holding the rifle, and fires his sawn-off shotgun at point blank range, hitting him in the abdomen. The other miners turn their guns on the remaining four youths. One of the Indians crouches down, his hands over his face, pleading in the few words of Portuguese he knows, 'Garimpeiro amigo!' (gold miner friend). Careca shoots him in the face and he falls dead on the path. Makuama and Kaperiano are also shot dead, and then three of the gold miners aim their guns at Reikim, taking it in turns to fire at him. He plunges into the trees, twisting and turning in a desperate attempt to escape the bullets. The first two miss; the third hits him. But by now he is hidden by the thick forest, and, reaching the bank of the Orinoco river, he plunges into it and submerges, just coming up to breathe.
Treading water, dazed and bleeding, he watches the riverbank. He sees the gold miners hastily bury three bodies, and search for the fourth victim, who, although fatally wounded, has managed to crawl away, probably falling into the river further along and being carried away by the current. One of the miners comes right down to the edge of the river in the search and sees Reikim hiding in the water. He scrambles back up to get his gun and finish him off, but realizing he has been seen, the youth swims further down river. Meanwhile Paulo Yanomami, from the bushes, has heard the shooting and dives into the river to escape. He swims as fast as he can, eventually corning ashore near Haximú. In the village he tells the others about the ambush. There is consternation.
Two days later, in spite of the danger, Paulo returns with a group of men and women to the scene of the killing to look for the bodies. As they approach it they find the wounded Reikim who has been hiding in the bushes. He tells them the place where the bodies are buried and describes what happened.
For the Yanomarni, the gold miners have committed not one, but two terrible crimes. They have not only killed, but they have buried the bodies of their victims. The Yanomami always cremate their dead. The Indians search unsuccessfully for the body of the fourth youth, then dig up the three bodies, carry them deeper into the forest and light a funeral pyre for each. After the cremations, the charred bones are put in baskets and taken back to the village for the funeral rites. Fifteen to twenty days later, the funeral ceremony is held. After a ritual hunt, the bones are pulverized and the ashes are placed in calabashes and sealed with beeswax. Three friendly villages are invited for the ceremony, Homoxi, Makayu and Toumahi.
Then it is time for revenge. In accordance with Yanomarni tradition, violent deaths must be avenged by menfolk. If the killers cannot be found, then other men must be killed – never women and children. A group of kinsmen sets out from Haximú, covered in black genipapo dye and carrying bows and arrows, machetes and their only rifle.
Revenge
After two days' walk the warriors near the mining camp and camp out for the night, their presence undetected. At ten o'clock the next morning, in the rain, they creep near the open-air kitchen where two men, Neguinho and Fininho – many garimpeiros are known only by their nicknames or first names – are cooking beans over a fire. An Indian called Macuxi steals behind a tree and shoots. Fininho is hit in the head and killed instantly. Neguinho, although hit in the back, escapes into the bush, while three other gold miners, hearing the shots, flee. The warriors then attack the dead miner, shooting arrows into the body, splitting the head open with blows from an axe. Before escaping back into the forest, they seize everything they can find in the hut, including bullets and the dead man's rifle.
This revenge is not enough for all of the Indians; while the rest of the people in the village are preparing to go to a feast at the nearby village of Makayu, three young warriors set out for a new attack. The leader is the brother of the dead youth whose body is still missing. Unable to perform the appropriate funeral rites, the brother has a special desire for revenge. The three reach a mining site. The deafening noise of the pumps covers the sound of their movements. They are close to a miner before he perceives their presence and throws his arm up, stopping the bullet aimed at his head. The three Indians escape and make their way back.
Fearing more attacks, the entire village of 85 people has moved out of their two communal huts and camped out at an abandoned cassava field, between Haximú and Makayu, where they believe they will be safe. There they wait for a formal invitation from the Indians in Makayu to the feast.
The messengers arrive. The Haximú Indians must go to the feast, but because of the miners' attack and their own counter-attacks, the community is on a war footing. They decide to send only adults without children to the feast, so they can get there and back quickly. The old people and the women with children are left behind. As women and children are never targets for Yanomami revenge attacks, there are no fears for their safety.
After the adults have left, the three young warriors who have attacked the gold miners arrive back. They have been travelling through the forest, avoiding the regular trails. This is why they fail to spot the heavily armed group of gold miners now on its way to seek revenge for the killing of Fininho.
Attack
When garimpeiros throughout the region learn of the death of Fininho, they are furious. The dead man is buried where he died, and the wounded Neguinho, found hiding in the forest, is carried for two days in a hammock to the Raimundo Nene airstrip, to be put on a plane and flown out for treatment. The gold miners decide that they will put an end to the Indian nuisance once and for all. They will kill everyone in the two communal huts at Haximú. The planning of the counter-attack begins.
Men are recruited from different mining camps; weapons and ten boxes of ammunition are collected. The four principal mining bosses in the region offer their support for the operation. To reinforce the garimpeiros' firepower and ensure success, two of them, João Neto and his brother-in-law Chico Ceará, hire gunmen and supply weapons and ammunition. Meetings are held to plan the attack. The other two leaders are Eliezer and Pedro Prancheta, who had written the note which provoked the first killings. The note read 'Let these suckers have it', and it was given to the six young Yanomami by the men at the first hut they visited, to pass on to the miners at the second hut. The Yanomami, who could not read Portuguese, had no idea what was written in the note, much less that it would be interpreted as a death sentence.
On 21 July, the revenge party sets out, determined to kill all the Indians at Haximú. The fifteen men are heavily armed. Between them they carry fifteen rifles, seven .38 revolvers, machetes and knives. After a trek of two days they reach the first Haximú communal house, but find it empty. They move on to the second house, but it is also empty. As it is getting dark they spend the night in the second hut, and the next morning start looking for the Indians. They discover the path that leads to the abandoned cassava field, and the makeshift shelters where the Yanomami are camping.
Massacre
23 July: early in the morning, most of the women leave to collect ingá fruit some distance away, taking with them many of the children. About nineteen remain in the camp, including the three young warriors. It is after 10 am when the group of gold miners reach the camp. They see children playing, women cutting firewood, an old blind woman sitting, a baby lying in a hammock. One man opens fire and the others follow, shooting at anyone, man, woman or child. Paulo Yanomami, surprised in his hammock, hears shots and sees a gold miner reloading to fire at him. Running for his life, he plunges into the thick vegetation that surrounds the huts. A handful of others, including several wounded children, also manage to escape and hide near him.
After shooting everybody they can see, the attackers search the huts, stabbing with their knives everyone they find there, injured and uninjured. Finally, in their vengeful fury, they mutilate the bullet-ridden bodies. Goiano Doido does not spare even a small baby lying in a hammock, wrapping it in a cloth and cutting it to pieces with a machete. The old blind woman is kicked to death.
When they have finished twelve Indians are dead: three old people – one man and two women; a young woman called Masena, visiting from Homoxi; three adolescent girls; three boys aged six to eight; a three year-old girl and a one year-old baby girl. The ground is soaked with blood. Among the terrified children who have escaped into the bushes is a ten year-old girl with a serious head wound from which she will later die, and two small girls of six and seven, wounded with leadshot in the face, neck and arms.
The survivors listen as the shots and screams gradually die out. They hear the goldminers saying 'let's go, let's go'. When they are sure the goldminers have gone, they creep out of their hiding places and back to the scene of slaughter. Among the bodies, Paulo Yanomami finds that of his three year-old daughter.
Sated with killing, the gold miners return via the village of Haximú and set fire to the two communal huts. They pile up all the cooking pots and utensils they can find and discharge their guns and rifles at them. Mission accomplished, they make their way back to the mining camp.
For nearly a month, nothing happens. The garimpeiros resume their mining operations, now undisturbed by Indians. Apparently the massacre has gone undetected. Then one night, listening to the news on Radio Nacional, they discover that the killing of a large group of Yanomami Indians has become national news and has provoked national and international indignation and outrage.
Panicking, they decide to leave the area immediately, and begin the two days' march to the clandestine Raimundo Nene landing strip, where the planes that supply the mining camps operate. There they force their way on to the first planes to appear, threatening to kill anyone who informs on them, saying 'we'll do the same we did to the Indians'. Among those recognized at Raimundo Nene are Pedro Prancheta, João Neto, Pedão, Chico Ceará and Goiano Doido. From Boa Vista, most of them disperse to different parts of the Amazon, some perhaps to neighbouring countries. Meanwhile, equally panic-stricken, the survivors of the massacre have hastily cremated their dead and fled the scene, terrified that the garimpeiros will return to finish them off.
CHAPTER 2
'THE YANOMAMI ARE WEEPING'
Like a slow-burning fuse, news of the massacre travelled from the depths of the forest, gathering speed until it exploded in Brasilia, the Brazilian capital. On 17 August, 24 days after the attack on Haximú, the Boa Vista coordinator of the Brazilian government's Indian affairs department, FUN AI, received a handwritten letter from Sister Alessia, a French nun working for the government health service at the Yanomami village of Xidéia. It said:
The Indians from Yababak are all here. The tuxaua [chief], Antonio, says they do not want to go back because the garimpeiros went to a maloca nearby and killed seven children, five women and two men, and destroyed the maloca. A few men managed to escape. I believe it is true because they are terrified. I asked the FUNAI people here to send a radio message asking the Federal Police to investigate the case. They said that first they needed to be sure. They went to an airstrip near here to see if there were garimpeiros there, but what happened was at a maloca on the border with Venezuela by name of Haximú, we don't know how many people live there. We just have news of it from Indians here who visit there. It's a maloca which has little contact with Mapi. I ask you to see what you can do. Talk to FUNAI there so we can discover the truth.
Thank you,
Sister Alessia
The next day, 18 August, Sister Alessia's letter was sent to FUNAI's headquarters in Brasilia, and to its president, Claudio Romero, marked 'for your information'. Romero acted quickly: he requested a Brazilian Air Force helicopter to take a team to the scene of the alleged massacre, tentatively identified as somewhere between the villages of Homoxi and Xidéia.
In Brasília the Ministry of Justice, to which FUNAI is subordinated, lies just across the road from Congress. The same afternoon the Minister, Mauricio Correa, was due to make a statement about changes in indigenous legislation to one of the permanent congressional committees, so he had invited Romero to go with him. As they crossed the road and walked down the slope towards the futuristic building that houses the Congress, Romero mentioned the news that had arrived earlier. He said that up to 70 Indians might have died.
Bombshell
In August 1993 not much was happening in Brazil. The main story was the national soccer team's progress in the preliminary rounds of the World Cup (which they went on to win). So when, at the end of his statement on indigenous policy, the Minister asked the deputies to be quick with their questions because he was concerned about the news he had just received of a massacre, and was in a hurry to find out more about it, the bored journalists lethargically covering the session came suddenly to life. The Minister mentioned the numbers he had been given by Romero: maybe 60 or 70 dead. Within minutes phones were ringing in the newsrooms of every newspaper, radio and TV network in Brasilia, Rio and Sao Paulo, and the Indian massacre became the lead story on every bulletin.
The next morning, 19 August, the front page of every major Brazilian newspaper carried the story. The Folha de S. Paulo headline screamed 'At least 19 cut to pieces by garimpeiros. The next day the same paper's headline read: 'Forty die in Yanomami massacre: FUNAI expedition finds mutilated and cremated bodies'. For the next week the Yanomarni dominated the news. The numbers escalated, there were denials and accusations and diplomatic incidents. Politicians, policemen, military chiefs and anthropologists brandished theories about the motives, causes and consequences of the massacre. Some tried to deny it had ever taken place, calling it a farce. The world's press took up the story. Reporters poured into Roraima looking for bodies.
The survivors, meanwhile, completely unaware of what was happening in the outside world and still terrified of the vengeful fury of the garimpeiros, continued their headlong flight through the forest.
Later in the day on 19 August the first direct news of the massacre arrived in Brasilia in a radio message sent by FUN AI official Wilk Celio. Accompanied by federal police agents he had flown over the area in a helicopter and seen two communal houses 'totally destroyed by fire'. After landing they found domestic utensils peppered with bullet-holes and slashed with knives. The message read: 'human skeletons in an advanced state of decomposition were found stop indians said that bodies had been carried by relatives to the Simão maloca for the cremation ceremony stop from the description of the survivors we estimate that there were at least 30 people in the village.'
