Venezuela investigating alleged massacre of indigenous people in the Amazon
Venezuela announced it is investigating an alleged massacre of indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest, after a tribal group told the government that a village of 80 natives was attacked in July from a helicopter.
In a statement, the government said it had received word of the alleged attack by a group representing the Yanomami tribe, an indigenous people native to southern Venezuela.
The area, along the country's long, remote border with Brazil, has a history of violent clashes between natives, gold prospectors, other would-be developers in the region and smugglers.
A spokeswoman at the Venezuelan public prosecutor's office said the government could not yet confirm the attack or how many people may have been killed.
Fellow Yanomami and an international native rights group, however, said only three people, from the village of 80, are known to be alive.
Luis Shatiwe, a leader of the Yanomami group, told a Venezuelan newspaper that the survivors were hunters who had been out of the village at the time of the alleged attack. The hunters, he added, heard a helicopter and gunfire and said a communal hut in the village was destroyed by fire.
Survival International, a London-based organization that seeks to protect native peoples, said in a statement that another Yanomami told the group that tribes’ people had found bones and charred bodies in the village.
The group and the government both said that word of the alleged massacre is just emerging because of the remote location of the village, a five-hour helicopter flight, or a five-day walk, from Puerto Ayacucho, the capital city of the southern state of Amazonas.
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Though this alleged real massacre is bad, it is arguably not as bad as the Government/military killings of the tribal settlement of North American Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in 1890.
Thirty years of slaughter, culminating in Wounded Knee, was a way of 'winning the wilderness' and 'wresting it from the savage'.
The Venezuelan Amazonia massacre is more akin to the Dakota Black Hills gold rush of 1868-76, where Custer and the military, who were unable to stem the 'white tide,' became duty-bound to protect the prospecting hordes and all their excesses.
Dee Brown's book 'Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee' (1970) expresses in great historic detail, the massacres, death marches, and burials of hope of the many nations of North America as the white new invading nations steam-rollered across the Continent.
The historic South American massacres of Cortes, et seq, become, today, only slightly more restrained by modern public opinion,
and have become much more 'efficient', as Cortes' swords and Custer's cavalry and Hotchkiss/Maxims, have become replaced by the modern killing machines - helicopters and the machine gun.
But, everything considered, a massacre is a massacre, whether 'efficient' and government-sponsored or not.
Nice attempt to re-direct to North America Geoff. You're talking about something that happened in the 19th century. Geoff will say that the “indians” in Brazil don't suffer as they're not real indigenous people because they wear t-shirts and Brazil is a utopia. Don't believe his crap or what Rousseff says. But hey, it's all in the name of “progress” right? That justifies it.
thanks for the Kindle-link.
Have been reading quite a lot of 'nasty history' recently; just doin' the American (US) Civil War ... 'The West': a great history coffee-table book with a good Civil War section, by Geoff Ward.
Thought I'd give you a break from Brasil .. and give a few historical parallels.
You don't have to like my point of view - or that of your Presidenta - but to stand still is to go backwards if everybody else is quietly progressing.
Credit to Dilma where it's due.
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