Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

Indigenous group patrols to expel invading loggers in Amazon

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Associated Press

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ALTO RIO GUAMA INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil — A bit after sunrise, dozens of Indigenous Tembé men began preparing for the important day ahead. They danced, chanted and donned matching black T-shirts before setting off on motorbikes into Brazil’s Amazon forest.

Self-declared “forest guardians,” their aim was to find and expel illegal loggers and miners within their territory on the eastern edge of Brazil’s Para state. Emblazoned on their T-shirts was their group’s name — Ka’Azar, which in their language means “Owners of the Forest.”

“For a long time, since I was born, I heard my father and the elders talk about the need to fight the loggers in our lands,” said Ronaldo Tembé, a 21-year-old member of the 40-man patrol. “We are trying to combat deforestation within our reserve, which is becoming increasingly precarious.”

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Categories: Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations

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  1. While I was in prison, I met a very old fellow prisoner, whose job in about 1960 was in Africa: He was hired by some respectable wildlife organization, and his job was to kill poachers. Not capture them. He’d get into his ‘ghillie suit’, make a ‘blind’, and await the arrival of those types. No, he didn’t kill the “Great White Hunters”, nor did he kill the subsistence people. Basically, if you hunted big game with an AK-47, he would kill you. He didn’t even have to clean up: Overnight, the wildlife itself cleaned up. His “cleanup crew”.

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    • That’s a very interesting tidbit! “Death in the Long Grass” is one of my favorite reads. During that same era, Chapstick was being paid by wildlife groups to kill hundreds upon hundreds of elephants. Stack’em for nature.

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      • This same guy escaped the Belgian Congo during the 1960 incident, with a few other people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Congo He told me of welding armor onto a large, mine-type dump-truck, filling it with guns from the local armory, and escaping.
        He eventually arrived in Rhodesia, which as far as i can tell from the map is about 200 miles away.

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