![]() ![]() The farmers were served with notice to leave and were offered land elsewhere in the state if they did so. It was crawling with heavily armed soldiers and equipment. ![]() Their camp on the edge of the Awa reserve was like a forward military base in Afghanistan. The effort saw the Brazilian army, air force and military police working alongside the country's environmental protection service in a mission co-ordinated by the indigenous people's agency, Funai. ![]() They were being flown by the environmental police to see the results of Operation Awa, an unprecedented attempt to clear the Awa's territory of the invaders who were destroying their forest and setting up farms on their land. I will never forget watching Pirai and his friend Hamo step nervously into a helicopter for the first time. I had been invited to witness the culmination of a Brazilian government effort to stop the destruction of the Amazon. In 2014, four years after my first visit to the Awa, I got an invitation that proved that the rainforest and the people who live in it can be protected. Last week, Bolsonaro said he would stop illegal deforestation by 2030, but he also said that the world would need to pay Brazil $1US billion of foreign aid a year to help fund the effort. It is the highest rate of deforestation in the Amazon since 2008. The president also claimed that indigenous people did not want to live like "cavemen" and has encouraged mining and agriculture in the world's largest rainforest.Īnd the effects can be seen in the latest figures for deforestation, environmentalists maintain.īetween August 2019 and July 2020, 11,088 sq km of rainforest were cleared, according to Brazil's space agency (Inpe). He argued that poverty was the biggest threat to the Amazon and said that he believed the Amazon needed to be "developed" as part of the modernisation of Brazil. For decades, loggers and farmers have been invading their ancestral lands and clearing the forests.Īnd two years ago the threat to the Awa got even greater.Ī right-wing ex-army officer, Jair Bolsonaro, became the president of Brazil. They live in a 289,000-acre forest reserve in the poverty stricken eastern Amazonian state of Maranhão. The Awa are some of the last people on Earth who still try to live as traditional hunter-gatherers but that has been becoming increasingly difficult. When I visited in 2010 my best friend in the community, Pirai, told me sometimes they could hear chainsaws in the rainforest near their village. The conservation charity Survival International has called the Awa the "most threatened tribe on earth". They remain good natured despite the plight the community faces. It was clear my visit was a source of great entertainment for the Awa. I squealed when I rested against a spiky tree, tripped over the roots on the jungle path and gagged when they offered me a lightly charred and faintly rotten monkey to eat.Įach mishap prompted a new gale of laughter from my hosts. The Awa found my bumbling incomprehension about the ways of the jungle hilarious. ![]() After all, some of the older tribespeople had grown up in the Amazon rainforest without ever having contact with the outside world.īut it quickly became clear that I was the real curiosity. I had expected a yawning cultural chasm would make connecting with them difficult. I felt like Mr Bean, the rubber-faced TV character played by Rowan Atkinson, when I first visited the Awa people over a decade ago. ![]()
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