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The Massacre at 11th Parallel occurred in November 1963, [1] when men hired by a rubber company killed 30 members of the indigenous Amazon group Cinta Larga and destroyed their village. [2] Only two villagers survived. [2]
The massacre was a part of the larger, ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil.
In the late 19th century, a rubber boom occurred in the Amazon, which had a largely negative impact on the native inhabitants. Indigenous people were used for slave labor in order to produce rubber. [3] The spread of various diseases and violence associated with the rubber boom reduced the indigenous population of the area by 90%. [3] [4] Many of the survivors fled into remote parts of the Amazon, where their descendants settled. [3] [4]
The 1920s conflict between the Cinta Larga group and rubber tappers grew in the 1960s. [3] In 1960, the feud was continuing when the Cuiabá-Porto Velho (BR-364) highway was inaugurated. [5] The Cinta Larga faced multiple threats including rubber tappers and prospectors prospecting for gold and diamonds. [5]
The massacre took place in the headwaters of the Aripuanã River in Mato Grosso, at the 11th parallel south, where the Brazilian firm Arruda, Junqueira & Co was collecting rubber. [3] The massacre was planned by the head of the firm, Antonio Mascarenhas Junqueira. He wanted to remove the Cinta Larga from the area. [3] He said, "These Indians are parasites, they are shameful. It’s time to finish them off, it’s time to eliminate these pests. Let’s liquidate these vagabonds." [3]
He then hired a plane to drop dynamite on the village and gunmen to attack the village on foot with machine guns to kill any survivors. [3] The gunmen, in one incident, took a baby from a breastfeeding mother and shot the baby's head off. [3] They then hung the woman upside down and sliced her in half. [3] Two villagers survived the attack while 30 perished. [2]
The attack came to light when one of the perpetrators, Atayde Pereira dos Santos, reported it and those responsible to the Serviço de Proteção ao Índio (SPI) Inspectorate in Cuiabá, after not being paid the amount of money he had been promised. [5] At the trial of one of the accused, the presiding judge said, "We have never listened to a case where there was so much violence, so much ignominy, egoism and savagery and so little appreciation of human life." [3] In 1975 one of the perpetrators, José Duarte de Prado, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, but was pardoned later that year. [3] He declared during the trial, "It’s good to kill Indians – they are lazy and treacherous." [3] Although 134 officials faced initial charges of alleged involvement in more than 1,000 crimes related to the massacre, none were jailed. [7]
Details of the massacre were included in the landmark Figueiredo Report of 1967, which led to the replacement of the SPI with the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI). [2]
The indigenous rights campaign group Survival International was founded in response to the report, two years after its original release by public prosecutor Jader de Figueiredo Correia. [7] More recently, Survival International used this massacre as an example of why disconnected tribes avoid contact with the outside world, in an article titled 'Why do they hide?' [3]
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Mércio Pereira Gomes is a Brazilian anthropologist who presently teaches at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Florida, in 1977, under the supervision of Charles Wagley, who at that time was considered the foremost Brazilianist in the United States and had done extensive fieldwork in Brazil. His dissertation was about the Tenetehara Indians of northern Brazil and in it Gomes expounded how this Indigenous people had managed to survive almost 400 years of relations with Western society. Years later, Gomes published his first book called Os índios e o Brasil, where he hailed the survival of Brazilian Indians as the most important news in the recent history of inter-ethnic relations in that country. This book was later translated into English by the University of Florida Presses (2000) with the title The Indians and Brazil. Other books by Gomes are O Índio na História, Antropologia, Antropologia Hiperdialética, and a new, expanded version of Os índios e o Brasil.
The Cinta Larga are a people indigenous to the western Amazon Rainforest of Brazil, numbering almost 2,000. Their name means "broad belt" in Portuguese, referring to large bark sashes the tribe once wore. The tribe is famous for shadowing Theodore Roosevelt's Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition, making no contact.
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Brazil's Indian Protection Service was a government agency created to administer indigenous affairs. It was created by President Nilo Peçanha in 1910 in response to pressure from Marshal Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon and international accusations of indigenous genocide. It was the first federal agency in Brazil to focus on the protection of indigenous peoples from violence and persecution.
The genocide of Indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is the intentional elimination of Indigenous peoples as a part of the process of colonialism.
The Figueiredo report is an investigative report by public prosecutor Jader de Figueiredo Correia, published in 1967, detailing the crimes committed by the Indigenous Protection Service against the native peoples of Brazil. The report had been commissioned by Minister of the Interior Albuquerque Lima, but had minimal repercussions for those involved. The report uncovered numerous incidents of genocide, torture, abduction, enslavement, biological and chemical warfare, sexual abuse, and land theft committed upon the indigenous peoples in Brazil, thereby documenting in part the genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil.
The genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil began with the Portuguese colonization of the Americas, when Pedro Álvares Cabral made landfall in what is now the country of Brazil in 1500. This started the process that led to the depopulation of the indigenous peoples in Brazil, because of disease and violent treatment by Portuguese settlers, and their gradual replacement with colonists from Europe and enslaved peoples from Africa. This process has been described as a genocide, and continues into the modern era with the ongoing destruction of indigenous peoples of the Amazonian region.
The Man of the Hole, or the Tanaru Indian, was a Native American who lived alone in the Amazon rainforest in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. He was the sole inhabitant of the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, a protected Indigenous Territory demarcated by the Brazilian government in 2007.
The Putumayo genocide is the term which is used in reference to the enslavement, massacres and ethnocide of the Indigenous population of the Amazon at the hands of the Peruvian Amazon Company, specifically in the area between the Putumayo River and the Caquetá River during the Amazon rubber boom period from 1879 to 1912.
