Brazil
Fires Indian Expert
By
PETER MUELLO
Associated Press Writer
01/29/00
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- The
founder of Brazil's Indian Affairs Bureau and a pioneer of indigenous rights
said Saturday that the government had fired him because it no longer wanted to
pay his salary.
Orlando Villas Boas, 86, said he was notified of his dismissal by fax. He
was semiretired and held a position with the agency that was mostly honorary.
Villas Boas said it seemed the bureau had fired him to save his salary,
worth $730 a month. The explanation from the bureau, known as Funai, was that he
wasn't entitled to a salary since he was awarded a special pension last year,
also of $730 a month, or 1,315 reals.
"I never made much money, and a thousand more or less won't make
much difference. It's the way I was fired,'' Villas Boas said by telephone from
his home in Sao Paulo.
"I and my brothers created Funai. I chose the name. After 40, 50
years, Funai decides I'm not worth anything,'' he said. "I guess we're just
like the Indians -- unprotected by the state.''
No one was available at the agency on Saturday to comment. Bureau
President Frederico Mares de Souza Filho, who signed the fax, reportedly was
visiting tribes in the Amazon region.
Villas Boas and his three brothers, Claudio, Alvaro and Leonardo, were
pioneers in Brazil's Amazon, pushing into the uncharted jungle in the 1940s to
make contact with tribes that had never seen Westerners. They witnessed the harm
that roads and airstrips caused to Indians and became outspoken defenders of
Indian rights.
Orlando and Claudio, the most famous of the four, eventually moved in
with Indians and stayed for 32 years. In 1961, they persuaded the government to
create its first, and probably most successful, reservation -- Xingu National
Park.
Seventeen Indian nations were transferred from ancestral lands to the 5.6
million-acre park in northern Mato Grosso state, 870 miles northwest of Rio de
Janeiro. Today, more than 3,000 Indians live there in relative isolation from
white culture.
Orlando, the last surviving brother, urged the Indians to resist intrusion by any means necessary. He is revered by tribal leaders, and in 1998 he was honored in Xingu at a Kuarup, a scared ritual for the dead, in tribute to his deceased brothers.