The Last of the Villas Boas Brothers Orlando Dies

The "Sertanista" Orlando Villas Boas, a leading advocate of indigenous rights who never shied away from recounting his adventures in Brazil's vast Amazon rain forest, died at the age of 88 on Thursday December 12, 2002 at Sao Paulo's Albert Einstein Hospital, where he was hospitalized on Nov. 14 with an acute intestinal infection.

The sociable Villas Boas was was born in 1914 on his father's coffee plantation near Botucatu, 150 miles northwest of Sao Paulo and he was the last surviving of four brothers who dedicated their lives to protecting Brazil's Indian tribes. One of nine children, he and his family moved to the capital when he was 15. Villas Boas became a clerk, but he was not cut out for city life. 

In 1941 when he was 29, he joined his brothers - Claudio, Alvaro and Leonardo - in the Roncador-Xingu expedition created by the government to chart areas for future towns and cities in the Amazon and also to chart the little-known mountains and dense forest of central western Brazil.

The Roncador-Xingu expedition lasted for 20 years, opening up 1500 kilometers of trails, exploring 1000km of rivers, including six previously unmapped ones, carving scores of airstrips out of the forest and founding more than three dozen towns. The 14 indigenous nations which lived along the banks of the Xingu river had no previous contact with outside society and it fell to the Villas Boas brothers, by now the leaders, to negotiate with the Indians to allow the expedition to pass.

From the very beginning, the brothers adopted the code of behavior bequeathed by the general who laid the telegraph lines through the Amazon in the 1920s, Marshal Candido Rondon: "Die, if necessary but never kill."

The brothers realized that the Indians had no protection against the society that would advance along the tracks opened up by the expedition, and from then on Orlando and Claudio, in particular, devoted themselves to creating an area where the indigenous nations of the Xingu area would be safe. They were joined by anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro and public health doctor Noel Nutels, and the result was the Xingu National Park, an area of 26,000 square km where 15 different, previously warring, tribes learned to live together. They belonged to the four main language groups of indigenous peoples in Brazil: Aruwak, Karib, Ge and Tupi. The park was the first of its kind in the world.

It was during this expedition, from 1943 to 1960, that the Villas Boas brothers helped establish Western civilization's first contact with several Indian tribes - the Xavantes (1948), Jurunas (1949), Kayabis (1951), the Txucarramaes (1953) and the Suyas (1959).

The brothers witnessed the harm that roads, airstrips and contact with the white man caused to the Indians, prompting them to become their most outspoken defenders.

Orlando and Claudio, the most famous of the four, eventually moved in with Indians and stayed in the jungle for 32 years. In 1961, they persuaded the government to create its first, and probably most successful, reservation - the Xingu National Park.

Seventeen Indian nations were transferred from ancestral lands to the 5.6 million-acre reservation in northern Mato Grosso state. Today, more than 3,000 Indians live there in relative isolation from white culture.

Orlando Villas Boas became the first director of the park. In 1969, he married Marina, a nurse who went to work there, and their first son was born and raised in the park. To avoid the occasional devastating epidemics of influenza, he arranged with the Sao Paulo Medical School under Dr Roberto Baruzzi for regular visits by health teams and programs of vaccination. Today the population of Xingu is increasing.

The brothers' battle to protect the Indians was based on four points that Villas Boas once listed as:

-Keep other Brazilians and tourists out of the reserves.

-Do not impose "white man's logic."

-Refrain from meddling in village affairs.

-Keep traditional healers' medicinal knowledge out of the hands of "biotech pirates" who sell rare flora and fauna to pharmaceutical companies in rich nations.

For their work in creating the Xingu Park and their help in the defense of the country's indigenous population, the two surviving Villas Boas brothers, Orlando and Claudio, were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 and 1975. Orlando had already received the Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1967 for his work.

Over the years the park took in more tribes threatened by the invasion of their lands, including the Kreen-Akarore or Panara, which Villas Boas himself had contacted in 1973 when the military regime decided to build a road through their territory. Villas Boas became disillusioned, saying, "each time we contact a tribe, we are contributing to the destruction of what is most pure in it". The two co-authored at least 12 books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

In 1967, Orlando founded Brazil's Indian Affairs Bureau. In later years, he held a largely honorary position there, from which he was unceremoniously fired by fax in January 2000. The bureau said he wasn't entitled to the salary of some $730 a month since he had been awarded a special pension of the same amount the previous year.

But one week later, Villas Boas received an apology from outgoing President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and an offer from the Land Reform Ministry to work on a project to teach Indians environmentally sustainable farming techniques.

He turned down the offer because it involved too much traveling between Sao Paulo and Brasilia, the capital.

Villas Boas survived more than 250 bouts of malaria.

He is survived by his wife and their two sons, Orlando Villas Boas Filho, 33 and Noel, 27, and by his unique creation, the Xingu National Park, a green oasis surrounded by extensive areas of devastated forest.

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