Warning-Graphic Images follow.
For the first time in history, the Brazilian government, through it's National Truth Commission, is investigating atrocities committed by the military dictatorship (with the cooperation of the US Government) between 1964-1985. Napalm burned the bodies of hundreds, if not thousands, of indigenous people. The truth Commission in a preliminary finding have produced statistics showing that the number of indigenous people could be twenty times higher than previous estimates.
Wiki describes Napalm.
"Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine," said Kim Phúc, a napalm bombing survivor known from a famous Vietnam War photograph. "Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius (212°F). Napalm generates temperatures of 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius (1,500-2,200°F)."[21]
"When used as a part of an incendiary weapon, napalm can cause severe burns (ranging from superficial to subdermal) to the skin and body, asphyxiation, unconsciousness, and death. In this implementation, napalm fires can create an atmosphere of greater than 20% carbon monoxide[2] and firestorms with self-perpetuating winds of up to 70 miles per hour (110 km/h). One of the main anti-personnel features of napalm is that it sticks to human skin, with no practical method for removal of the burning substance. Napalm was used in the 1944–45 incendiary bombing of many Japanese cities that resulted in 330,000 deaths.[1]"
In a must read report from truth out, illustrates the horror unleashed on the native people of Brazil. The article notes that the objective of this assault was quite simple, a takeover of Indigenous people's land.
"From the north to the south and from the east to the west, accusations of genocide, assassination of leaders and indigenous rights defenders, slavery, massacres, poisonings in small towns, forced displacement, secret prisons for indigenous people, the bombing of towns, torture, and denigrating treatment were registered [with the State Truth Commissions]," Marcelo Zelic, vice president of the anti-torture group Never Again - SP, one of the organizations that makes up the Indigenous Truth and Justice Commission, created in order to provide documents and information to the National Truth Commission "
CIA agent Daniel A. Mitrione was sent by the United States in the 1960s to train police in Latin America. He principally worked with the police of the Brazilian dictatorship and Uruguayans in the "art" of interrogation, torture, and the repression of revolutionary social movements. Mitrione came under the Office of Public Security for the United States International Development Agency (USAID).
During his time in Brazil, Mitrione trained the military police in the state of Minas Gerais, who were responsible for building the prisons for indigenous people and for the formation of the Rural Indigenous Guard. "Marcelo Zelic found part of a film made by a German photographer, Jesko Putkamer. The clip shows a line of uniformed members of the Rural Indigenous Guard being applauded as they march by those present at the time, including military members. Two indigenous individuals hold a prisoner in a ‘pau de arara,’ (a technique used by the CIA), as evidence of the repressive techniques learned by the Indigenous Rural Guard," says the report (watch the video here).
The document also highlights the information contained in the book The Hidden Face of Terror, by AJ Lagguth, which contextualizes the origin of the presence of Dan Mitrione in Brazil and how it was related to the creation of the Rural Indigenous Guard and the Krenak Reformatory.
"In the first part of the 1960s, the US was more convinced than ever of its technical expertise - engineers, agronomists, the police - they were all holders of vital knowledge that should have been transferred to less-developed countries in the world. In Washington, Byron Engle was in charge of organizing a team capable of training police in Asia, Africa, and especially in Latin America," says the report from the National Indigenous Truth and Justice Commission. He adds, "That's where Dan Mitrione comes in. The creation of the Rural Indigenous Guard is the replica of the course that he gave to the police in Minas Gerais."
In 2006, historian Carlos Fico of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), discovered documents in an archive in Washington, which confirmed the participation of the United States in the military coup that the Brazilian people suffered in 1964. One of the documents, titled "A contingency plan for Brazil," was created with the help of Lincoln Gordon, the ambassador during the coup. The United States helped those who participated in the coup in order to put up a front against what he called "a communist intervention." The Brazilian State Department coined the operation "Brother Sam."
This culminated in a complaint brought forth in 1997 by a Brazilian Human Rights group called Torture, Never Again, which documented that at least 20 military members graduated from the School of the Americas (SOA) in the United States, better known as the "torture school." The group maintained that at least two instructors from SOA were directly connected to repression and human rights abuses, including false imprisonment and torture, using methods such as the electric prod, asphyxiation, and injections of "truth serum."
Pau de Arara device developed during the Brazilian military dictatorship. It can also refer to a physical torture technique designed to cause severe joint and muscle pain, as well as headaches and psychological trauma. (Photo: Indigenous Truth and Justice Commission of Brazil)
The Dictatorships economic interest.
"The entire process of the construction of indigenous prisons and the ethnic concentration camps is connected to the liberation of the land for the large land-holders. The militarism arrived together with the implementation of agribusiness, along with the national and industrial integration, such as in the case of the application of Aracruz Cellulose, in the state of Holy Spirit," Benedito Prezia, from the Indigenous Pastoral of Sao Paulo.
An indigenous woman from Brazil who was cut in half by the hands of landowners. (Photo: Indigenous Truth and Justice Commission of Brazil)
First Contact and death:
The complaint sent to the Second International War Crimes Tribunal in 1974 related a seemingly endless number of cases where ethnic groups in the Amazon were decimated or suffered the consequences of the Brazilian government's development policy. It also gives details about the tactics used by the corporations and by the FUNAI in the "pacification" of the native peoples.
In 1970, for example, the first contact was established with a group of Paracañas in the river valley of Pacajás, in northern Brazil. United States Steel, a US steel monopoly, had already managed to obtain, in conjunction with the state-owned company Vale do Rio Doce, the permits to exploit the iron deposits in the area. "The interest demonstrated by US Steel in the ‘pacification’ of Paracaña is not unusual,” read the complaint. “They gave a lot of support to the expedition of the FUNAI, and a helicopter descended into an open clearing to log the forests on indigenous lands."
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Another case that is cited by the document identifies the direct action of the corporations that entered into contact with the ethnic group the Tembes, on the border of the states Pará and Maranhão. "They felt unconcerned about the advance of economic expansion, since they had the land titles in their possession,” read the document. “However, the FUNAI-backed King Ranch, a huge agriculture corporation from the United States, certifying that indigenous people did not exist in the region [this was a document demanded by the Superintendent of Development in the Amazon (SUDAM) to authorize projects favored by fiscal incentives.]" Immediately afterward, the company began to request, together with the government of Pará, the cancellation of the land titles of the Tembes people.
The use of Napalm.
One of the tactics employed was the use of napalm. In her testimony before the Truth Commission of Sao Paulo, the reporter Memélia Moreira, who provided coverage during the military regime, wrote that genocide was perpetrated by the State against indigenous people. She also said that in one of the reports evidence was found that napalm was used in the territory of Waimiri Atroari during the construction path of the BR-174 highway, from 1967 to 1977.
"I saw it, I picked it up and I took a capsule of napalm with me," says the reporter, who was a speaker at the 4th International War Crimes Tribunal in 1980 in Holland, during which Brazil was declared guilty of violating human rights. "They were bombed at least two times in 1975 and 1976. Many times the indigenous people, who did not speak Portuguese well, wanting to refer to death, would point in the direction of the sky."
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Egydio Schwade is a theologian and coordinator of the Amazon Truth Commission. During the period of the construction of the BR-174 highway, he was the executive secretary of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), and reports that at least 2,000 indigenous Waimiri Atroari died during the construction of the highway. "Fathers, mothers, and children died, towns were destroyed by fire and by the bombs. People resisted and ran into the forest in search of refuge in the neighboring towns. This was the political and lived geography experienced by these people since the beginning of the construction of BR-174," says the Amazon Truth Commission report.
Schwade worked with indigenous education projects, using the methods of Paulo Freire, in the mid-1980s. The extermination always appeared in different forms of expression in the Waimiri Atroari town. "With the creation of the first drawings and letters, they projected the weapons that Kamna - a reference to white people - used to kill them. These methods included planes, helicopters, bombs, firearms, electric cables and strange illnesses. Entire communities disappeared after military helicopters passed over or landed in their towns," says the report.