SPI

The Servico de Protecao aos Indios (SPI, Service for the Protection of the Indian) was the Brazilian federal agency responsible for indigenous affairs from its founding on September 7, 1910 through its abolition in 1967. Created by Decree No. 8,072 of June 20, 1910, the SPI was initially named the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios e Localização de Trabalhadores Nacionais (SPILTN), with the additional mandate of resettling landless Brazilian workers. Marshal Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who had led telegraph-line expeditions through the Amazon and made first contact with numerous isolated tribes, was its founding director and served until 1930. By its final decade, the agency had become one of the most comprehensively documented cases of state-organized atrocity against indigenous peoples in the Americas.

Rondon and the Pacification Doctrine

Rondon developed his pacification strategy inside the rubber zone between 1890 and 1910. His men left gifts on jungle trails for Indians hiding from the advancing telegraph crews and, if attacked, offered no resistance, under the famous order "Die if it be necessary, but kill never." His success won official acclaim in June 1910, when the Brazilian government established the SPI, appointed him its head, and decreed that Indians could live peacefully in assigned territories, would work only of their own free will, and had full right to profit from their work.¹ The doctrine's first applications already showed its limits: most of the Botocudos of Minas Gerais were killed before SPI pacified the survivors in 1911 to 1914 and resettled them at SPI posts, where, in the authors' words, they "quickly despaired and disappeared into graves." The Kayapó do Sul, pacified and integrated, were extinct by mid-century.²

For decades SPI's unarmed agents were presented internationally as the lone example of how a state could achieve capitalist growth without genocide. In 1957, human rights advocates nominated the dying Rondon for the Nobel Peace Prize, just as, in the authors' judgment, the agency was entering its terminal stage of corruption.³

The CIAA Rubber Program

During World War II the SPI became entangled in the United States rubber procurement effort run by Nelson Rockefeller's CIAA. In 1942 J.C. King, then surveying the Amazon for Rockefeller, visited the SPI director for the state of Pará, who told him no permanent white colonization was possible until health protection was extended to the seringueiro rubber tappers. CIAA field officer Ernest Maes proposed that SPI posts protect Indian rubber workers from exploitation, noting that SPI had already recommended twenty new posts "to control the purchase of rubber from the Indian collectors," and John Collier, the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, pressed Rockefeller to accept, calling SPI "the only official Brazilian agency responsible for the protection of the Indian population." Rockefeller flatly rejected the proposal and assigned sponsorship of Indian labor to Brazil's Ministry of Labor, the very agency that had nearly let SPI die of starvation funding in the 1930s.⁴ In January 1943, Rondon was so disturbed by reports of exploitation of Indian rubber labor that he pleaded in the Inter-American Indian Institute's journal América Indígena for SPI's techniques to be extended to the rubber frontiers of Peru and Colombia, to no avail.⁵

The Xavante Campaign

The wartime rubber programs prompted President Getulio Vargas to establish the Central Brazil Foundation to sponsor the conquest of the Amazonian interior. Its 1943 "Great Expedition of Central Brazil and Xingu-Roncador" crossed the Rio das Mortes in 1944 into the lands of the Xavante, the most powerful tribe of central Brazil. After eight months of frontal assaults against the expedition's trenches, the Xavante surrendered to the proclaimed love of the SPI advance team, agreeing to let the expedition pass on the promise that they would be left in peace.⁶ SPI completed the pacification of the Xavante in 1946; within a dozen years the BR-010 highway from Belém to Brasília was driving through the lands between the Xingu and Tocantins rivers, bringing the first of a million settlers, with pastureland feasibility evidence supplied by Nelson Rockefeller's IBEC Research Institute.⁷

Militarization and the Indian Trick

SPI was, in the authors' phrase, "one of the first victims of Brazil's runaway development." In Goiás, Governor Ludovico, an old Vargas crony, confined the state's Indians in 1941 to a seventy-six-square-mile zone that became their prison; French author Lucien Bodard, who interviewed the governor, wrote that "he had handled them in such a way that they died on their own, like sick animals, without assassins," with the help of "the experts of the SPI."⁸ In Mato Grosso, speculators (often local politicians) used corrupted SPI agents to assert Indian land rights over settlers' improved plots, denounce the settlers as stealers of Indian land, strip their titles, then remove the Indians to remote reserves and pass the titles to friends. This "Indian trick" peaked in 1958, when Mato Grosso's legislators passed a land-restitution law whose compensation terms were published in only two copies; by the time the public learned of it, the legislators had claimed the buy-back funds in their own and relatives' names.⁹

The military took over the SPI in 1958, the year Juscelino Kubitschek began construction of Brasília in earnest. By 1963 the destruction of the Amazonian Indians had grown in direct proportion to military control over the corrupted agency. French anthropologist Alfred Métraux wrote that the SPI postos were "not only centers of demoralization and exploitation, but veritable traps. Once caught in them, the Indians are condemned to rapid extinction." Darcy Ribeiro, who had worked for SPI, judged that the last four years of military administrations had brought the service "to the lowest point of its history, bringing it down in certain regions to the degrading condition of an agent and prop of the despoilers and murderers of the Indians." Brazilian government files recorded that measles, smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis were deliberately introduced among the Indians of Mato Grosso by land speculators.¹⁰ The Karajá of the Araguaia River numbered some 4,000 in the 1930s; by 1967 about 400 remained, their lands taken over by cattle ranchers under the oversight of SPI agents.¹¹

SIL Coordination

SPI invited the Summer Institute of Linguistics into Brazil in the mid-1950s, after Darcy Ribeiro, seeking a counterweight to the agency's growing corruption and militarization, met SIL linguist Kenneth Pike at the Rio Conference of Americanists. The first translators, Dale Kietzman and his wife Harriet, arrived in 1956; in 1957 SIL teams were placed at the SPI post among the Terêna (the same year Nelson Rockefeller took possession of Fazenda Bodoquena on former Terêna lands) and near an SPI post among the Kaiwá. By January 1959, William Cameron Townsend had placed eleven SIL teams in the Brazilian Amazon, all working closely with SPI and some living at SPI posts.¹² SPI's military director, Colonel Moacyr, took a personal hand in helping SIL import a JAARS Helio Courier and sought to use SIL's Pioneer 530 radio transmitters to "amplify the SPI network" of control over the tribes.¹³

Just before the 1964 Brazilian coup, SPI's official overseer, the National Council for the Protection of the Indian (CNPI), itself dominated by the military officers who ran SPI, ordered a survey of Indian tribes in the Brazilian Amazon in support of the road-building agenda, and turned to SIL to cover the tribes of the southern Amazon valley. Kietzman compiled the results into Indians of Brazil in the Twentieth Century, published in 1966-1967 by the Institute for Cross Cultural Research, a division of Operations and Policy Research, Inc., which the New York Times identified in February 1967 as a recipient of CIA funds. The book mapped "areas of potentially hostile Indians" across the basin, described SPI throughout as the Indians' protector three years after Ribeiro's denunciation, and was edited by Janice Hopper, widow of the head of Project Camelot.¹⁴ Nine of the tribes later reported to have suffered genocidal practices or outright attacks while in SPI custody, including the Xavante, Karajá, Kadiwéu, Borôro, Guaraní, Maxakalí, Canela, and Ticúna, were "occupied" by SIL teams.¹⁵

The Cintas Largas Massacre

The incident that detonated SPI's final crisis was the 1963 massacre of a village of Cintas Largas Indians in northwest Mato Grosso, where the trans-Amazonian highway link from Cuiabá to Pôrto Velho was under construction with $52.6 million in AID loans and $1 million in donated U.S. Army equipment, and where deposits of cassiterite, the essential tin ore, had been discovered. An expedition launched by the firm of Arruda and Junqueira flew a Cessna over a Cintas Largas village armed with sugar, to lure the Indians into the open, and dynamite; survivors of the bombing were hunted down and killed. The massacre came to light only because one of the killers, Ataide Pereira, confessed to his priest, Father Edgar Smith, who recorded the account and delivered the tape to the SPI. Over the following years, four defendants died before trial (two drowned "while on fishing trips," the pilot reportedly in a plane crash, the expedition leader at the hands of revolting rubber tappers), and Father Smith was killed in an auto accident. Austrian anthropologist Georg Grünberg branded the massacre genocide in a 1966 journal article that also recounted the attempted extermination of the neighboring Beiços-de-Pau.¹⁶

The Figueiredo Report

Grünberg's article set the stage for the nationalist interior minister, General Albuquerque Lima, to refer the case to Attorney General Jader Figueiredo in September 1967 and to launch a full investigation of SPI's treatment of all tribes in its care. Figueiredo's investigators traveled 10,000 miles and visited some 130 SPI posts, amassing twenty volumes of evidence. The official 5,115-page report, released in March 1968, cited case after case of systematic atrocities committed with SPI collaboration: clothing infected with smallpox, poisoned food supplies, children forced into slavery, and women forced into prostitution. Albuquerque Lima decreed that SPI had to be abolished and that 134 of its 700 functionaries would face formal judicial inquiries; the published list of their crimes filled a newspaper page in small print. Major Luis Neves, the head of the SPI, was alone accused of forty-two crimes, including embezzlement of $300,000, illegal sale of Indian lands, and complicity in a series of murders. Figueiredo told reporters that some $62 million worth of Indian property had been stolen since the military takeover in 1958, and that the service "was for years a den of corruption and indiscriminate killings."¹⁷

The report's tribal litany included the Guaraní, counted at 3,000 to 4,000 by Ribeiro in 1957 and reduced to about 300; the Borôro, whose cattle were illegally sold off by SPI agents at the Teresa Cristina reserve named for Rondon's memory (his mother was part Borôro); the Nambiquára, mowed down by machine-gun fire; the Patachós, injected with smallpox when they believed they were receiving vaccine; the Canelas, massacred by hired guns; the Maxakalís, given firewater and shot when drunk; and the Beiços-de-Pau, fed gifts of food laced with arsenic and insecticide. 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.¹⁸

The military government of Humberto Castelo Branco's successor, General Artur da Costa e Silva, used the revelations to abolish the SPI and replace it with FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio), created under a 1967 law with military supervision. Very few of the accused SPI agents were ever punished, and the reform proved more organizational than substantive: FUNAI pursued the same integrationist agenda through the peak Amazon development years.¹⁹ Rio's Jornal do Brasil predicted at the time that "the Indian Protection Service investigation will wind up in the United Nations. The crime is genocide and violation of the rights of man." Instead, by September 1971 National Geographic could describe FUNAI's predecessor in a single sanitized sentence: "Over the years the old service had grown cumbersome and tangled in red tape."²⁰