Word: amazon
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...also one of the last places where the bloodshot eye of the fatigued humanist can still see in progress the fatal consequences of Eldorado: the destruction of indigenous peoples. Lucien Boclard, a French journalist and author (The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam), takes it all in, from the first Amazon man hunts in the 16th century to the huge inland island of Bananal where today Indian survivors stage ceremonies and even wars for tourist dollars in a government-built "primitive" village...
...money, of course, that began the extermination of the Indians some 400 years ago. Portuguese adventurers, as thick as piranhas, swarmed up the Amazon, slaughtering all the Indians that seemed unfit for slavery. When the Indians, who had no concept of regular work, proved uneconomical, black Africans were imported. Indian, white and black blood blended into mulatto culture, which continued to prey on the tribal Indian. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries in the Mato Grosso, private armies of bandeirantes pillaged for gold, diamonds and slaves. Thousands of Indians who were not killed by gun died because they lacked...
...rubber boom of the 19th century uncovered more tribes and spoils in the Amazon's west. To harvest "the trees-that weep," new horrors were devised. Down-and-outs from all over Brazil were lured with big promises, only to find themselves victims of a kind of grocery slavery. Overextended credit at the company store, accompanied by threats of death from company gunsels, kept the rubber workers toiling vainly to clear their debts. They were usually cheated and left to rot among their isolated stands of dried-up trees while the profits went to Manaus, that rococo Sodom...
Whatever road Brazil eventually takes, it will probably be a disaster for the remaining Indians. The Amazon will be further penetrated for its wealth, resulting in the callous elimination of more tribal peoples. It is a familiar story, especially to North Americans, who had the despair of their dead Indians raised to a grand passion in last year's bestseller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Bodard's brutal epic does even more. It gives North Americans a rerun of their own haunted past as seen through Brazil's uneasy present...
Copulatorium. Some five miles from the caves, Sales discovered still more evidence of the Amazon culture: a huge stone with stairs carved into its side. The top of the rock was artificially smoothed and was probably used as a platform; on it are side-by-side carvings of a triangle and phallus, the only male symbol found in the area. Sales concludes that the stone was the Amazons' copulatorium, or ritual mating site...