Once the landscape would have been lush rainforest. What is most striking about the Funai undercover video of the loggers – apart from the sheer size of the trunks – is the absence of jungle in the surrounding landscape. This is extinction taking place before our eyes."ĭeforested areas in Brazil. If this is not stopped now, these people could be wiped out. The land-grabbers use pistoleros to clear the land. There are immensely powerful people against them. I have interviewed Awá who have seen their families shot in front of them. "I have talked to Awá people who have survived massacres. "It is not just the destruction of the land it is the violence," said Watson. Earlier this year an investigation into reports that an Awá child had been killed by loggers found that their tractors had destroyed the Awá camp. They have said to me: 'If we have no forest, we can't feed our children and we will die'."īut it appears that the Awá also face a more direct threat. They are being invaded by loggers, settlers and cattle ranchers. "It is an extremely small population and the forces against them are massive. "The Awá and the uncontacted Awá are really on the brink," she said. A third of the rainforest in the Awá territory in Maranhão state in north-east Brazil has since been destroyed and outsiders have exposed the Awá to diseases against which they have no natural immunity. It was, according to Survival's research director, Fiona Watson, a recipe for disaster. A road-building programme quickly followed, opening up the Awá's jungle home to loggers, who moved in from the east. The railway cut directly through the Awá's land and with the railway came settlers. The EEC gave Brazil $600m to build a railway from the mines to the coast, on condition that Europe received a third of the output, a minimum of 13.6m tons a year for 15 years. Their troubles began in earnest in 1982 with the inauguration of a European Economic Community (EEC) and World Bank-funded programme to extract massive iron ore deposits found in the Carajás mountains. According to Survival, they are now the world's most threatened tribe, assailed by gunmen, loggers and hostile settler farmers. The Awá are one of only two nomadic hunter-gathering tribes left in the Amazon. The 51-year-old, who starred in last year's hit movie The King's Speech, and came to prominence playing Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, delivers an appeal to camera calling on Brazil's minister of justice to send in police to drive out the loggers. In a video to be launched on Wednesday, Firth will ask the Brazilian government to take urgent action to protect the tribe. This week Survival International will launch a new campaign to highlight the plight of the Awá, backed by Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth. Human rights campaigners say the tribe has reached a tipping point and only immediate action by the Brazilian government to prevent logging can save the tribe. Members of the tribe describe seeing their families wiped out. Hired gunmen – known as pistoleros – are reported to be hunting Awá who have stood in the way of land-grabbers. People are pouring on to the Awá's land, building illegal settlements, running cattle ranches. But it is not just the loss of the trees that has created a situation so serious that it led a Brazilian judge, José Carlos do Vale Madeira, to describe it as "a real genocide". It is a scene played out throughout the Amazon as the authorities struggle to tackle the powerful illegal logging industry. All they could do was video the lorry and add the film to the growing mountain of evidence showing how the Awá – with only 355 surviving members, more than 100 of whom have had no contact with the outside world – are teetering on the edge of extinction. Yet as they travelled through the jungle early this year, the small team from Funai – Brazil's National Indian Foundation – did not dare try to stop the loggers the vehicle was too large and the loggers were almost certainly armed.
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