FUNAI

The Fundacao Nacional do Indio (FUNAI, National Indian Foundation) was established in 1967 by the Brazilian military government of Humberto Castelo Branco's successor, General Artur da Costa e Silva, to replace the SPI (Servico de Protecao aos Indios), which had been dissolved after a 1967 congressional investigation exposed its personnel for murdering, enslaving, and systematically exploiting indigenous peoples in their care. FUNAI was placed under military supervision and became the primary state mechanism through which the dictatorship managed indigenous populations during the Amazon development drive of the late 1960s and 1970s, a period in which roads, dams, and mining operations penetrated territories inhabited by tribes with no prior contact with Brazilian national society.

Creation After the SPI Scandal

The SPI had been Brazil's indigenous affairs agency since 1910, founded on a positivist philosophy of gradual integration. By the 1960s, SPI personnel had accumulated decades of documented abuses: murder of tribal leaders, theft of indigenous lands, forced labor, deliberate introduction of disease, and sale of indigenous women. The 1967 congressional investigation by attorney Jader Figueiredo produced a report documenting these crimes and naming specific SPI officials. The Figueiredo Report, running to thousands of pages, was used by the military government to abolish SPI and replace it with FUNAI, ostensibly on a reformist basis but in practice simply reorganizing the bureaucracy under tighter military control.¹

Interior Minister General Afonso Augusto de Albuquerque Lima and Figueiredo promised justice. A civilian, Dr. José de Queiroz Campos, was named FUNAI's first president. The Xingu National Park was expanded from 22,000 to 30,000 square kilometers, and three new Indian parks were established: the Aripuanã Park in western Mato Grosso and Rondônia, the Araguaia Park on the Ilha do Bananal, and Tumucumaque Park in Pará. New single-tribe reserves were recognized, including a 3,000-square-mile reservation for the Beiços-de-Pau. Of the 100,000 to 200,000 Indians estimated to be living in Brazil in 1957, some anthropologists claimed fewer than 50,000 had survived by the time FUNAI was created.²

Military Supervision and the 1967 SIL Survey

Under military supervision, FUNAI contracted the Summer Institute of Linguistics to conduct a survey of indigenous tribes in the Brazilian Amazon. The resulting 1967 publication "Indians of Brazil in the Twentieth Century," produced through the Institute for Cross Cultural Research (identified by The Nation as CIA-connected), documented "potentially hostile tribes," mapped their locations across the Amazon basin, and catalogued their populations and degree of contact with Brazilian society. The survey provided intelligence for the military government's planning of Amazon development, identifying which areas required "pacification" before resource extraction could proceed.³

SIL founder William Cameron Townsend moved quickly to secure FUNAI's cooperation. Meeting the new head of FUNAI at an Inter-American Indian Conference in Mexico, then lobbying the Brazilian ambassador, Townsend rode a public-relations wave into the office of President Costa e Silva on September 1, 1968, and won agreement in principle for a ministerial-level contract giving SIL gasoline, JAARS flight rights, and FUNAI's assent. A 1969 letter from SIL's Dale Kietzman cited FUNAI's creation as proof that the old service had been thoroughly reformed and that the foundation had "called in all missionary organizations to consult on ways in which the missions could help with the administration of education and welfare in areas where the government could not be active."⁴

The Bandeira de Mello Presidency

Queiroz Campos, besieged by charges that his sister had stolen material from Indian hospitals, was forced to resign. His successor, General Oscar Bandeira de Mello, ran FUNAI with the goal of generating the highest return on its legal 10 percent cut of the income from the Indian tribal estates it managed, a modus operandi intentionally modeled on the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. The congressional intent behind the 1967 law was to turn "tribal patrimony into productive assets [so that] it will be able to support them, as happens in the U.S.A." In 1976, Bandeira de Mello left FUNAI to become a director of Sanchez Galdeano, a firm pursuing cassiterite (tin ore) deposits in the lands of the Surui Indians in Rondônia.⁵

In 1968, FUNAI issued King Ranch and Swift (the latter a subsidiary of Deltec) a certificate declaring that 180,000 acres the companies wanted in Pará were not occupied by Indians, a necessary legal prerequisite for operating with investment tax credits from SUDAM, the Superintendency for the Development of the Amazon. When King Ranch and Swift petitioned Pará to annul the Indians' land tenure titles, the Pará government and FUNAI initially resisted, but Interior Minister General José Costa Cavalcante and the federal mining company Cia. Vale do Rio Doce intervened on the side of Rio Tinto, forcing FUNAI into an accord that began dismembering the Indians' reserve. None of the trans-Amazon projects was opposed by FUNAI. In October 1970, President Médici announced an agreement between FUNAI and SUDAM to pacify some thirty tribes known from the SIL survey to live along the route of the Trans-Amazon Highway, and revealed a new Indian Law empowering him to relocate tribes for six reasons, including "to work valuable subsoil deposits of outstanding interest for national security and development."⁶

Crenaque and the Indian Guard

FUNAI under Bandeira de Mello operated a detention center at Crenaque in Minas Gerais, where an "Indian Guard" seized recalcitrant tribesmen who resisted the regime's laws and development projects and subjected them to imprisonment, hard labor, and forced indoctrination. The commander of Crenaque, Manuel dos Santos Pinheiro, was a captain in the federal military police commissioned by Bandeira de Mello while the FUNAI president was still a functionary of the regime's military intelligence division, an arm infamous for its use of torture during interrogation. Pinheiro had first drawn his superiors' attention by putting down a revolt of Maxakalí Indians against squatters in the Jequitinhonha Valley. The full story took two years to surface.⁷

In 1971, FUNAI allowed the Cuiabá-Santarém highway to slice a forty-kilometer northern section off the Xingu National Park. "You cannot stop the development of Brazil on account of the Xingu Park," Bandeira de Mello explained. The Txukahamei tribe, whom Senator Robert Kennedy had visited in 1965, was decimated by measles and bronchial pneumonia brought in by the highway crews. "We want to integrate the Indians into Brazilian society," Bandeira de Mello continued, "to make them Brazilians, like we are."⁸

Yanomami Lands and the 1976 Expulsions

On Brazil's border with Venezuela lay uranium deposits the regime had targeted for nuclear development, in the traditional lands of the Yanomami, the largest unacculturated tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, numbering between 10,000 and 15,000 people. When anthropologists and ecologists sought relief for the tribes from river blindness spreading along the Northern Perimeter Highway, the head of FUNAI, General Ismarth de Araújo Oliveira, explained that the medicine to control the disease was expensive and killed the Indians because they lacked sufficient physical resistance. After a cassiterite discovery on Yanomami land was revealed in 1976, the military regime expelled all foreign anthropologists from Yanomami territory on "national security" grounds. As FUNAI's official in Pôrto Velho told the authors in October 1976, "FUNAI's main philosophy is to integrate the Indians into civilization, so that someday there will be no Indians."⁹

In 1976, FUNAI also banned the Catholic CIMI from Indian reserves and barred foreign anthropologists from "border" areas where most isolated tribes lived. Indian resistance nonetheless grew through CIMI-sponsored leadership conferences, and in 1980 Indian leaders assembled at Campo Grande to form the UNI, Brazil's first national Indian organization. When FUNAI argued in court that the Xavante leader Mário Juruna was its legal ward and could not leave the country to attend the Fourth Russell Tribunal in Rotterdam, it lost; Juruna chaired some of the tribunal's sessions and went on to become the first Amazonian Indian elected to the Brazilian Congress.¹⁰

Amazon Development and Indigenous Destruction

FUNAI administered Brazil's official indigenous contact policy during the peak years of Amazonian development (1968-1985). The military government's road-building programs (especially the Trans-Amazon Highway), large-scale dam construction (including the Balbina and Tucurui dams), and mining operations penetrated territories under FUNAI's nominal protection. FUNAI "contact expeditions" preceded construction crews into territory inhabited by uncontacted tribes, with the express purpose of pacifying populations that would otherwise resist intrusion. By 1970 FUNAI lease policies had opened Indian lands to American companies: eleven firms were prospecting inside or near the Aripuanã Indian Park, and the Rockefeller ally J. Peter Grace's W. R. Grace & Company, along with IBEC director Walther Moreira Salles's joint mining venture, were among companies authorized by FUNAI to prospect for tin in indigenous reserves.¹¹

In 1969, Nelson Rockefeller's classified report to President Nixon on his Latin America tour recommended expanded US military aid and counterinsurgency support for the Brazilian military government, including in the Amazon region. The US Air Force had been invited into the Brazilian Amazon for aerial mapping of mineral deposits in 1964 by then-Ambassador Lincoln Gordon.¹²