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TOUR MARAJO AND 0 ANGLES OF
ITUARY: CLAUDIO VILLAS-BOAS, E LIVED FOR HIS INDIA
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t BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
Brazil doesn't know the Amazon and neither did it learn how to take care of it. The whole country seemed taken by surprise when the worst ecological disaster hit that region recently. The fires that ravaged the state of Roraima burning 15% of its territory—an area roughly the size of Belgium—lasted 63 days and only ended thanks to unexpected heavy rains. The out-of-control blaze, which was caused in part by the El Nifio phenomenon, in part by the
slash-and-burn practices in the area, file up hospitals and left hundreds homeless scared Indians leaving them without gam and their plantation, killed wild animal and more than 12,000 cattle. The fires have shown how ill prepare is Brazil to deal with disaster. The federal government didn't show any interest i the situation before the tragedy made in temational headlines. Gustavo Krause, th Environment Minister, only went t Roraima after the fire had been extin guished. Alleging national security wor ries, the country also refused to accep international help. The blaze was alread raging for two months when Presiden Fernando Henrique Cardoso decided t send help. There is not much to be done with wha has been destroyed, but the dry season i near and there is danger of other and eve
worse fires. Ecological experts fear that some areas of the Amazon normally too humid to burn will be at risk when the drought begins in July. Extensive logging and farming have been taking over a region that is covered with pristine jungle. As the head of Greenpeace in Brazil, Roberto Kishinami, puts it: "The choice is clear. Either Brazil keeps on consuming the Amazon or it takes a longer term view and prizes biodiversity as an economic resource. Unfortunately, there are no signs it will take the more intelligent path." R.M.
8
26
Memory Claudio Villas-Boas: a life dedicated to the Indians
Ideas The darker side of author Jorge Amado
30
9
Short stories "Os Anos Frageis" and two more by Julio Cesar Monteiro Martins
Corruption Sergio Naya building on sand
11
Music Colorful Tim Maia noisily leaves the scene
13
Cover The Amazon burns and Brazil fiddles
15 Amazon A jungle overview
24
City Life Curitiba, always on the cutting edged
Cover by Aylan Mello
DEPARTMENTS 6 Rapidinhas
38
Travel Para, beyond Belem and Santarem
42
Music Dida, Bahia's female voice
22
44
Letters 48 The Cultural Pulse
Past Life and passion of Catullo da Panic) Cearense
51 Classifieds 52 That's
52
Special The trouble with preserving our past
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Publisher and Editor: Rodney Mello / Entertainment Editors: Sam & Harriet Robbins Book Review: Bondo Wyszpolski / Music Editor: Bruce Gilman BRAZZIL (ISSN 1091-868X) is published monthly by Brazzil - 2039 N. Ave. 52, Los Angeles, CA, 90042-1024. Periodicals Postage rate paid at Los Angeles, CA. Single copy sold for $2. One year subscription for 12 issues is $3 (three dollars) in the U.S., $15 in Canada and Mexico, and $18 (surface mail) in all other countries. No back issues sold. Allow 5 to 7 weeks to receive your first issue. You may quote from or reprint any of the contents with proper copyright credit. Editorial submissions are welcome. Include a SASE (self addressed and stamped envelope) if you want your material mailed back. Brazzil assumes no responsibility for any claims made by its advertisers
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5
The Last Funny Face It was a sixty-year career that started in the circus and took him to radio, cinema, and TV, making him one of the best known and cherished comedians of Brazil. Just before dying from cancer at age 88 in Rio on March 22, Moacir Brandao Filho, who was a consummate grimace maker, talked about his pride of never being unemployed. For Brandao, the transition to TV starting in 1954 at TV Tupi was easy. The whole country used to repeat one of his most famous catchphrases: "kill the old man, kill" when he worked on radio. His most remembered role was that of poor cousin on Balanca Mos Nay Cai (It Shakes But it Doesn't Fall Down) a program about a bunch of weird characters living on an odd building created by Max Nunes and Haroldo Barbosa. itt:t During the '50s the show' was a big hit on Rio's now-closed Mayrink Veiga radio. "Cousin, you are the best," he used to tell his rich cousin interpreted by late Paulo Gracindo.
Fast Lunacy With the express purpose of making life easier for Paulistanos (SAo Paulo residents) the state government has created what it called the Poupatempo (Savetime) program for those in need of getting an ID card. The new program working from a building at Praca do Carmo in downtown Sao Paulo, promises to hand over the ID the same day people apply for it, instead of having to wait for four or more weeks. Something very strange is
6
The Bare Skit Mylene Macedo, who was an efficient but anonymous secretary for a politician, became famous in the late '80s after she took it all off on the pages of Brazilian Playboy. She was ired, but her celebrity has helped her find plenty of new jobs like the one she holds right now: being the hostess of an erotic late-night show on cable TV. There isn't too much required from the former bunny in Mulher Maca (Apple Woman). She doesn't even have to take her clothes off, which is done by younger chicks. Her interviews also don't need any expertise since she stays in the titillating level asking intimate questions from other women who share with her the liberating experience of getting naked on the pages of a magazine. The half-hour show produced by WRC Producaes Audiovisuais is presented every Thursday on Canal Adulto on the TVA, TV Alpha, and Direct TV systems. Uruguay and Colombia have already bought the program, whose top-watched scenes are the strip-tease shows. Mulher Mac-a also covers rowdy parties, tells naughty stories, and has a how-todo-your-strip-tease routine.
conomy
You Say Fair Between 1991 and 1996 Brazilian exports to the U.S. have stagnated at $1.3 billion, while Brazil has increased its Yankee imports by 131%, raising them from $252 million to $588. Brazilians in fact are having so many problems to get their agricultural products to American shores that they are about to take their case to the World Trade Organization. Brazilians believe the U.S. are good at talking about fair and free trade and open markets as long as the market is not its own. Brazil accuses Americans of using ruses to keep Brazilian products away, by charging high import tariffs, imposing quotas, and creating extremely rigorous sanitary restrictions. Another common practice is to accuse Brazil of dumping. The Brazilian Embassy in Washington has prepared a report on the barriers imposed by the United Sates to Brazilian products. According to the study, 16 products are not welcome into the States. They include fruits, orange juice, shoes, soy oil, and sugar. One special bone of contention is the U.S. charge that Camargo Correa Metais (CCM) wants to sell its metallic silicate used in the computer and electronic industry at lower prices than it sells in Brazil and has imposed a 35% tariff on the product. Brazil argues that there is no dumping, but the negotiations are stalled while the Brazilian company has already lost $150 million in exports to the U.S. in the last five years. Washington has also imposed a tax of 8.55 cents on each liter of orange juice in order to protect Florida's orange growers. In 1992, close to 90% of all imported orange juice in the U.S. came from Brazil. This had fallen, however, to 67% in 1996. The U.S. doesn't import beef and pork from Brazil either alleging the presence of aphthous fever and swine fever (hog cholera) in the country. Brazilian poultry also don't make the grade in the USA.
BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
Politics
Not So Fast Six months before the October election and with opponents still undefined, Fernando Henrique Cardoso's reelection bid doesn't seem so unsinkable anymore after the release of a Jornal do Brasil—Universidade Federal Fluminense poll. The poll published on March 21, 1997, was the first major indication of a shift against Cardoso among the Brazilian electorate. The JB-UFF poll found out that voters from the state ofRio—the second largest electorate in the country after SAo Paulo—in a imaginary dispute between the President and PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores—Workers' Party) candidate Luiz black) da Silva, better known as Lula, would split their vote equally between the candidates. In a runoff, Cardoso would lose the elections with 48% of the votes against 52% from Lula. In the 1994 elections, Cardoso won in 25 of the 26 Brazilians states. Cardoso would also lose if his opponent were former President Itamar Franco, who apparently will not be able to run since the PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democratic° Brasileiro—Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement), his party, has decided to back Cardoso. In such a scenario the split would be 51% to 49% in favor of Itamar. Cardoso would only win—with 58% of the votes—in a dispute against Ciro Gomes, ex-governor of the northeastern state of Ceara and former Finance Minister. Gomes is the presidential candidate from the PPS (Partido Popular Socialista—Popular Socialist Party). Another candidate, Dr. Eneas Carneiro from right-wing Prona (Partido da Reedificacao da Ordem Nacional—Party of the National Order Rebuilding) is a long shot. In a five-way dispute including Itamar or in a four-way dispute without the former president, Lula and Cardoso would have a tie on the first round. In a scenario including Itamar, Cardoso's predecessor would get 15% of the votes, while the President would get 25% and Lula 22%, a technical tie due to the 3% margin of error. Seven percent would vote for Eneas, 6% for Ciro Gomes, and 20% would void or leave their ballots blank. Without Itamar, Cardoso would get 28% of the votes against 27% for Lula. Invalid votes would be 24%, Eneas would get 9% and Ciro 8%. The number of people Who haven't made up their minds is 5%. Of all likely candidates Cardoso has the highest rejection index, with 38% of voters saying that "under no circumstance" they would vote for him. Only 15% said they would never vote for Luia, 14% said the same for Raman Even Eneas and Ciro Gomes had a lower rejection index, 27% and 26% respectively. Curiously enough the same survey found out that 65% of Rio's voters approve of Cardoso administration against 32% who disapprove. The UFF poll was tákenamong 1,300 Rio's voters on March 16 and 17. According to the poll's coordinator, professor Alberto Carlos Almeida, from UFF's Political Science Department, these results show that the government is losing the battle of image in the social area mainly on the unemployment front. "The opposition is being able to tie the unemployment situation to Fernando Henrique, although Rio has the lowest unemployment rate
BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
in the country." Losing His Cool In a show of how low his patience threshold is, the President could not graciously take the heat during a town-meeting-format TV interview with high-school students. Cardoso's degree of irritation was shown at SBT (Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão—Braziliaiii System of Television) TV Programa Livre (Free Program), presented by Serginho Grossman. Revealing an unexpected social onscience, the youngsters grilled the President on several subjects, including elections, unemployment, d ath penalty, abortion and drugs. The President went into an offensive mode when Leonardo Antunes, 16, accused him of giving evasive answers and asked the President if he considered it fair that a trash man made less than $200 hile a bureaucrat earned ore than $15,000. Visibly peeve , Cardoso lost his temper a d scolded the student who dared ob'ect to the residential reasoning: It is too much arrogance to say that I am not answering. I am trying to explain things. I could say that your question is gobbledygook, that I am the President oft e Republic and that I shouldn't even answer th You need to open your head. I've been here •r one hour talking with the greatest satisfacti n and you come and tell the President of the R public that he is not answering the questions And then you make a totally senseless quest on. "This is demagoguery, and w shouldn't use demagoguery even when we ar young. It doesn't sit well. You are young, ou make a confused question only because yo are in the presence of the President of the R public. Be more humble. Talk to me as an eq al, not like someone superior talking to a suba tern. I take it, but it doesn't sit well." The students screamed and hoot d the President, but he was 630 miles away, n Brasilia, while his inquisitors were in a TV uditorium in Sdo Paulo watching him on a screen. There were close to 450 middle nd highermiddle-class students who weren't baffled by Cardoso's title (President of the Re ublic) and most of them when addressing th President used the familiar treatment prono n voce instead of the more respectful senho . The only question dealing with the reelection drew jeers from the audience, he youngsters were more interested in discus ing Brazilian social problems: the contrast b tween the too rich and the too poor, educati n, health, unemployment, and lack of opport nities. Despite the lingering after-taste, the Palacio do Planalto (the Brazilian White House) declared the experience as being positive and concluded that it had served its ptirpose as a test. And apparently without any irony Cardoso let it be known: "I adore auditorium programs." Opposition candidate Lula used the students incident to criticize Cardoso for his slippery ways: "President Fernando Henrique is no more than a Vaseline jar", he told allies during a meeting of congressmen from the PC do B (Partido Comunista do Brasil Communist Party of Brazil). Former President Itamar Franco has also joined those peltir g barbs at Cardoso. He first called the President a "slippery eel", and_ a few days later said his successor was "Mr. Hyde", the mean side of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll.
happening, however. Those willing to use the new fast service are spending as many as ten hours in line, often staying overnight in the street in order to get a number that guarantees a place to have a same-day document. The Department is open to the public from 7 AM to 7 PM, but at 6 AM they start to distribute the numbers. Salesman Agnaldo Autori, 42, the first one in line recently, had arrived at the Department's gate at 10 PM the night before, as it is common in the U.S. for immigrants trying to legalize their situation. Talking to daily newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo he said: "I was able to get the first place and with that I am helping the government to disrespect the population even more." The line has also become a place for some entrepreneurial prostitutes and homeless people to make some extra money. They spend the night in line and sell their places in the morning for those who prefer paying instead of suffering an insomniac night on the street.
The Fear and the Fury More than anything else Cariocas (Rio residents) are threatened by their own aggressiveness. This is the conclusion of a study by the Pan-American Health Association in eight cities in Europe and the Americas. In Rio, the city chosen to represent Brazil, 8% of the 1,126 respondents had been victims of mugging while 6% had been assaulted in traffic or in the streets after a discussion with an unknown person. "Contrary to the prevailing perception, the rate of robbery, theft, and the number of people hurt by weapons is lower than in
7
emory
Indian's Old Dad In 55 years-40 of them living inside the jungle—dedicated to the Brazilian Indians, Claudio Villas-Boas amassed some impressive numbers. He helped to build more than 30 airfields in the middle of the jungle and opened more than 1,000 miles oftrails under the Amazon canopy. Claudio had also some 250 bouts of malaria, give or take a few fevers, and an unknown number of reports on his first-hand experience with the indigenous peoples. The sertanista (backland expert) died from a stroke in his apartment in Sao Paulo. According to Luciana Soares Santos, his secretary and caretaker for the last four years, his last words were: "Luciana, Luciana, call Orlando". He was suffering from severe depression for a year, according to brother Orlando, due to his retirement and distance from his beloved Indians. "Since he was single, work was extremely important for him," Orlando, who has two sons, Noel and Orlando, told the daily 0 Estado de S. Paulo. "I have a different temperament, I take care of my family and I am more agitated, holding conferences throughout Brazil." Taciturn among the white men, he loved to spend hours talking to his Indian friends. After a period of seven years in which he lived among the Indians without ever leaving, he lost all his documents. He was forced to get them all again when he decided to travel. The former president of Funai, Sidney Possuelo, also an indigenist and a friend of his, recalled a story of a chicken coop that Claudio built in the jungle to protect the birds from the bats. The shelter was so nicely done and the seriantsta loved it so much that instead of placing the chickens there. he moved himself to the new quarters and stayed there until his retirement. Claudio left unfinished .4 Arte (los Pajes (The Shamans' Art), a book he was writing. Orlando and Claudio wrote 13 books together besides documenting all their field-work. They were three brothers (from a total of 11 siblings) devoted to the same cause. The Villas-Boas Orlando, Leonardo and Claudio—became legendary in Brazil and around the world among environmentalists and human rights activists. Their names were constantly cited as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 1973 they were even nominated for the award, but they never got it. Claudio was born on December 8, 1916 in Botucatu, in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo. He was 27 years old when in 1943 he joined his two brothers in the Roncador-Xingu expedition also known as Marcha para o Oeste (March to the West), his first taste of the adventures lying ahead. At the time, Indians were not commanding quite the same respect as they get nowadays. The adventure continued until the mid-sixties and was told in detail in the book Marcha para o Oeste. The expedition perfectly suited President GetUlio Vargas' (1883-1954) desire to establish contacts with groups of Indians who were showing hostility against peasants trying to expand the agricultural frontier of the country as the incursions were presented at the time. In the wake of the Villas-Boas' effort, 34 cities and hundreds of villages were born. Together with his brothers, Claudio contacted some of the most feared tribes like the Kalapalos, Kayabi, Kamaiuras, Meinacos, and Txucarramaes, In 1973 they were able to contact for the first time in the north ofthe state ofMato Grosso the Kreen-Akarore Indians also known as Panaras or the giant Indians.
After his brother's death, Orlando talked about those heroic pioneer times: "At the beginning of the expedition we were admitted as manual workers because Flaviano de Mattos Vanique, the expedition chief, didn't hire but illiterate people. One day he found out we could read and Claudio became chief of staff, Leonardo began to take care of the warehouse, and I became the secretary." Orlando recalls several incidents with the Indians: "We started the expedition at Roncador do Xingu on the banks of the Araguaia River, marched to Rio das Modes (River of Deaths) and from there on to Manaus. It was a hard walk. In the Xavante region alone we had 18 skirmishes with the Indians, and it took us 11 months to cross a 200-mile area. In the Xingu area we started to meet Indians who had never been in contact with white men. Some were very aggressive, but they are all our friends today. We found out that the Indians had an organized, stable, and peaceful society where everybody lived well." Claudio helped spread the notion that Indians should not be acculturated and civilized, but that they should be left alone and as isolated as possible from the rest of the Brazilians. The creation of Parque Nacional do Xingu-reservation was the fruit, of this vision. The same with Funai (Fundacao Nacional do Indio— National Foundation of the Indian), the organization that replaced the SPI (Servico de Protecao ao Indio—Indian Protection Service). He was the most intellectual of the three and the one who least liked to socialize, talk, and to give interviews. Orlando, much more talkative, is 84 years old. Leonardo died in 1961 at age 43, the same year when pressured by the Villas-Boas, president Yank:, Quadros—he stayed in power a mere seven months before an abrupt and never-explained resignation from the presidency created the Parque Nacional do Xingu. By 1994, the Xingu Park dreamed by the VillasBoas as a "society of nations" had 6,000 Indians living in 18 settlements from different tribes. Claudio's last expedition in the jungle happened in 1976. At the time, he and Orlando tried without success to find an indigenous tribe. That same year he left his post a Diauarum, inside Parque do Xingu. He went then to Sao Paulo to live with his adopted son Tauarru, a 12year-old Indian who would die ten years later in a car accident. In 1976 Claudio talked about his fear for the future of the Indians: -Who, like myself, lived more than 30 years among the Indians, feels that they represent another humankind, with complex values that we are not able to grasp." I le used to say that the haste to conquer the Amazon was destroying the Indians. He also feared the encroaohment of garimpeiros (gold prospectors) over Indian territory and their diseases, bad habits like alcohol consumption and the poisoning of the waters with mercury. 111.-Ilmanaque do Sertao. (Backlands Almanac) it is registered how in 1947 the Villas-Boas reported by telegraph the reaction of the Indians to a solar eclipse: In order to reignite the sun, 200 warriors threw their arrows towards the sun while the children cried and the women painted their own bodies. Told about Claudio's death, chief Raoni, from the Kayapo tribe, reacted: "Now our father is gone. The Indians' father is dead. He used to tell us that everybody in the cities was crazy. He also taught us that the white man's life is not good for us."
BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
orruption
Built on Sand Brazil's latest national villain is called Sergio Naya, 55. The wealthy, silver-haired congressman from the state of Minas Gerais, has been expelled from his party, the PPB (Partido Progressista Brasileiro—Brazilian Progressive Party), and his colleagues are considering his impeachment since the 22-story apartment building Palace II in the upscale neighborhood of Barra da Tijuca in Rio collapsed on February 21, killing eight people and throwing 120 families on the streets. Naya is the owner of Sersan (Sociedade Empresas Reunidas Sergio Augusto Naya), the company responsible for the edifice's construction. Since the Palace II tragedy, much fraud was found on the résumé of the middle-class Armenian immigrant's son, who went to Brasilia, the Brazilian capital, at the end of the '60s and became a construction tycoon, helped by high-ranking officials during the military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985. According to his own account—Naya loves to brag— he has a $500-million fortune. His secret? "To mix economy with deception," he confided to a friend, adding: "The US is the country of opportunities, and Brazil is the country of deception." Extra-generous with big-shot friends whom he flies on his private $15-million Challenger jet and treats to $300 Cristal Rosé champagne, he compelled his employees to unbend nails used in a hotel construction to reutilize them on an apartment building being erected in Osasco, Sao Paulo. Worried with kidnappings, he is always followed by bodyguards and often carries his own machine gun. Single all his life; he is frequently accompanied by beautiful women, but rumor has it that he never stays more than one year with any one of them so they will not claim any of his fortune. He is also a very bad payer. Only in Brasilia there are more than 800 lawsuits against his companies. The government is his biggest creditor. He owes $48 million in a number of administrative actions filed against him, $14 million to Banco do Brasil and another $8 million to the INSS, the Brazilian Social Security service. It took a tragedy for the inspectors to find out that Naya's company had mixed beach sand with concrete in Rio. Seashells were found mixed with the concrete. They also found several other irregularities. Sersan used rainwater taken from puddles on the beach and cement that was already too old for use. Naya protests innocence and accuses his opponents of trying to subject him to a public lynching. In a videotape shown on TV Globo's Sunday show Fantastico, Naya was heard bragging about forging official documents and using low-grade building materials on his building projects, which were later offered for sale as first-rate constructions. In the tape shot four years ago Naya talks to a group of councilmen from the city of Tres Pontas in Minas Gerais. "Everything! buy is used, but it looks like new" he says, adding: "I signed an order for the government, I really do faisify. I gave the order to the Mayor, and he believed it was from the Governor." The outrage against Naya has almost obscured the most important issue,, which is Brazil's lack of rules and enforcement of an adequate building code. Critics of the status quo have pointed that without a serious revamping ofthe system, buildings will continue falling and people will continue dying. In the last seven years at least another six buildings collapsed in the country. In 1991, nine people died and 23 were hurt when a building toppled in Volta Redonda, state of Rio de Janeiro. The next year a concrete block fell over a crowd in the Pelourinhci Square in Salvador, state of Bahia, leaving 18 people hurt and eight dead. In 1994, a two-story building being erected in Sao Paulo went down killing three and hurting 14. Then in Guaratuba, Parand,a six-story building collapsed killing 40 people and hurting nine. The most tragic of these disasters was a totally preventable explosion occurred in 1996 in the restaurant area of Osasco Plaza Shopping, in Sao Paulo. Forty two people died and 472were hurt. The gas ducts in that case weren't up to code and there was no inspection to compel the owners to correct the problem. Last year, a 17-story building collapsed in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, in he interior of S'ao Paulo. There were no victims this time. On the political front, there are at least 44 congressmen being investigated, includirig Senator Ronaldo Cunha Lima, who shot an opponent in 1993 after his colleague criticized him on TV. For the record, Naya is building two $30 million 18-story hotel towers in Orlando, Florida. Construction has been delayed and stopped several times due to problems found by city building inspectors.
BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
most of other LatinAmerican cities," said Leandro Piquet Carneiro, University of sao Paulo's (USP) political scientist, in charge of the Brazilian side of the study, in an interview with daily newspaper 0 Estado de S. Paulo. According to him, most of the violence is not done by criminals but at home and by people Brazilians meet every day in the streets. The study also analyzed data from Santiago (Chile), Cali (Colombia), Caracas (Venezuela), San Salvador (El Salvador), and San Jose (Costa Rica). The cities of Madrid (Spain) and Houston (U.S.) were chosen for comparison. Brazil won first place in violence with a score of 1 followed by Cali, home of an infamous drug cartel with 0.8. Madrid had a rating of minus 2. On the up side the study revealed how optimistic Brazilians are about their future. In answering the question "Is the country getting better in the next few years?" C'ariocas got first place in the optimistic scale with a 0.8 coefficient. Brazilians had the highest mark for political tolerance too. Rio also appeared as the city with fewer people owning fire arms Only 4.6% of Cariocas possess guns.
The Biggest Yet In its most ambitious project to date, the Fundacao Bienal de sao Paulo is preparing an art expo to celebrate the 500 years of Brazil's discovery. The exhibit has a budget of $15 million and plans to be a comprehensive tableau of Brazilian art starting with Indian objects made before the arrival of Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500. Called Brasil 500 Anos—Artes Visuais (Brazil 500 9
Years—Visual Arts) the exhibit will be opened May 3, 2000. It was on that date, 500 years ago, that the first mass was celebrated on Brazilian soil. The exhibition will also be taken to several museums in Brazil, Europe and the United States where it will be shown in San Francisco (California), Austin (Texas) and Washington, DC. "This will be one of the most important expositions done by Fundacdo Bienal," said Julio Landmann, president of the organization, in an interview with daily Correio Brazilwnse from Brasilia. "For the first time the expo will have less renowned segments such as popular, Indian, and Afro-Brazilian art, and the images of the unconscious side by side with the most celebrated work like the art of the 18th century and the figurative painting of the 19th century." British historian Leslie Bethell will select works by Debret, Rugendas and other Europeans who have portrayed Brazil. The super expo, which intends to gather 2,000 works, wishes to be a source of reference for anybody interested in Brazilian art. The work will also be available in CDROM, video, book and the Internet.
Saucy lnconformist -We don't need anyone anymore. The same people who enslaved us invented the technology that liberated us. Now I am "www". (August '96)
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"I've been waiting for a great love. Meanwhile I stick around practicing so I won't forget how to do it." (May '93)
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"In the Globo TV soap operas, blacks only get in the kitchen." (November '92) "I had my course of roguery and drugs in the U.S. I learned it all and very early because over there everybody snorts, everybody takes it, everybody burns pot, fucks, takes syrup and balls." (February '91) "With two whiskey bottles I want to see which bouncer can hold me. I'll bite their ears off." (January '89) "Thank you. With this money I'm going to buy myself a Sony machine." (On receiving a Sharp Award for life achievement) "I don't burn, I don't snort, and I don't drink. My only problem is that sometimes I lie a little." (Often said with a joint in hand)
Booksmarts From April 29 until May 10, sao Paulo will be holding its 15a Bienal Internacional do Livro (15th International Book Biennial). Organized by CBL (Camara Brasileira do Livro—Brazilian Chamber of Book) the expo will show 150,000 books-4,000 of them will debut at the exhibit—and is expected to receive 1.5 million people. According to CBL's president, Altair Brasil, the So Paulo book expo is the third biggest book fair in the world losing only to the ones held in Frankfurt (Germany) and Chicago (USA). There 10
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ErUUMID - Ca EXTRA moortia mix. warm. tot. OfTERATIVIL
Personification of the soul and funk in Brazil, this colorful, controversial, much-loved and muchhated character deserves a place in the hall of fame of the best MPB (MOsica Popular Brasileira— Brazilian Popular Music) musicians. With typical irreverence Tim Maia so described the formula for his soul-music-style success: "Half of my songs are armpit warmers and the other half underwear soilers." He died on March 15, at the age of 55, after an agony that lasted one week at the ITU of NiterOi's Hospital Universitario Antonio Pedro. He was on stage singing the first song of his show, "Nä° Quero Dinheiro, SO Quero Amar" (I Want No Money, I Just Want to Love), when he started feeling ill and was taken in a hurry to the hospital. Sebastiao Rodrigues Maia was born in Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, on September 28, 1942. He was the 18th in a family of 19 siblings. At six he started to help the family by delivering the homemade food prepared by his mother, Maria Imaculada Maia. Tim learned to play guitar as a child and he was 15 when he formed his first band, The Sputniks, with Roberto Carlos, an unknown who would later receive the epithet of King and become the most lasting best-selling recording artist in the country. The group was short lived though. In 1957, with $12 bucks in his pocket and no knowledge of English, the singer decided to make America. He
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lied that he was a student to the immigration authorities and adopted the name of Jimmy, for Tim's dream was to make movies, but living by himself in New York, he washed dishes, helped in a house for the elderly, played in small bands, created his own group (The Ideals) and even robbed to survive. In 1964, the US Immigration caught up with him and sent the singer back to Brazil after he was condemned for smoking pot and served six months in prison. He was by then 21, had acquired a taste for soul and funk, and had become fluent in English. Back in Brazil, he was ostracized getting his first chance only when legendary singer Elis Regina—she died in 1982 from a lethal concoction of cocaine and whiskey—invited him in 1970 to participate on her LP, singing "These Are the Songs", in English. PolyGram signed him that the same year. His first album, Tim Maia, contained some of the hits that he would sing for the next three decades, among them: "Azul da Cor do Mar" (Blue as the Sea), and "Primavera" (Spring). In 1971, he recorded "Gostava Tanto de Voce" (I Liked You So Much), another perennial success. Other of his big hits were "Corone Antonio Bento" (Colonel Antonio Bento), "Cristina", "A Festa do Santo Rei" (The Holy King Celebration), "Nao Quero Dinheiro" (I Want No Money), "Um Dia Eu Chego La" (Some Day I'll Get There), "Descobridor dos Sete Mares" (The Seven Seas Discoverer), Voce e Eu, Eu e Voce (Juntinhos) (You and Me, Me and You (Close Together). Nationally respected music critic Tank de Souza called him an "apostle of musical competence. On the other hand, Tim was always a big mouth, literally and figuratively. A pot-bellied heavy weight he owned a powerful voice to sing those memorable tunes composed by him that get inside you and keep replaying themselves. He could gulp down three bottles of whiskey a day. Drugs followed him all his life. His mouth was also a powerful machine gun that didn't spare friends or foes. He never forgave Roberto Carlos, for example, for not having helped his former partners at the Sputniks. He has also made virulent attacks against radio and TV stations accusing them of being involved injabacuM (payola) to build and destroy musical careers. Tim became a folkloric character whom people couldn't trust.
He was famous for not showing up at his own shows and for sometimes appearing so drunk that he was not able to perform. The singer was always in the courts. In 1992, he was condemned to pay $20,000 to an agent for having missed 11 engagements. At the end, without a contract or a recording company willing to work with him, Tim had to fmance and record his own discs. Tim was also a bad employer not paying his musicians and used to threaten reporters who dared to criticize him or simply not like his work. He had at least six children. One of them he only knew when the youngster was already 17. Officially he married five times and had three sons: Jose Carlos, 32; Marcio, 23; and Telmo, 21. Some critics were fast to point to the hypocrisy of Globo TV network, which had banned Tim from their station for years, but were quick to present specials and tributes to the "great musician' as soon as his heart stopped and the ratings showed it was a smart move. The TV station management forbade him from ever singing at Globo in 1993, after he didn't show up for a scheduled presentation in the Domingao do Faustao show. Recently Tim had vowed to be a candidate for the senate in a platform of giving a voice to Blacks and children, creating an Afro-Brazilian univer sty, and protecting musicians from the multinational recording companies. In 1988 he also talked about running for mayor of Rio de Janeiro, but he never did. "I am biceio," he used to say about himself Bicao is slang for people who go to a party without an invitation. Partial discography: 1974 - Tim Maia Racional 1978 - Tim Maia Disco Club (re-re- • leased in 1995 as Sossego) • 1979 - Reencontro e Tim Maia (in English) 1982 - Nuvens 1983 - Descobridor dos Sete Mares 1984 - Me De Motivo 1985 - Tim Maia 1986 - Telefone 1987 - Somos America 1988 - Carinhos 1991 - Tim Maia Interpreta Clossicos da Bossa Nova 1992 - Ao Vivo 1993 - Tim Maia 1997 - Tim Maia e Os Cariocas, What a Wonderful World - Oldies But Goodies, Pro Meu Grande Amor, Amigo do Rei • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
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will be new books by Brazilian poet Joao Cabral de Melo Neto and Portuguese novelist Jose aramago and foreign bestselling authors like Jostein Gaarder and Ghita Mehta ill be present to autograph their books. The book industry is booming in Brazil with 50,000 titles being released in 1997 alone. In 1990 the yearly output was less than half that amount. On the other hand, the number of books per printing has been falling. While in 1992 general books (they exclude didactic works, which represent 53% of all books sold) had an average printing of 4,603 copies, this number had fallen to 3,221 in 1996, contributing to the high price ' of books in Brazil. Book Award There were 1,560 candidates this year to the Jabuti, the prize given in 15 categories—three authors in each category are selected—by Camara Brasileira do Livro to the best Brazilian literary works. Just to show how hard such a selection can be, renowned writers Moacyr Scliar (A Majestade do Xingu—The Majesty of the Xingu River), Frei Betto , (Entre Todos os Homens— Among All Men), Deonisio da Silva (Teresa), Dalton Trevisan (234), Decio de Almeida Prado (Seres, Coisas, Lugares—Beings, Things, Places), Elisa Palatnik (Contos de Futebol—Soccer Short • Stories), and Rubem Fonseca (Historias de Amor), were all candidates for the trophy but didn't make the final cut. Lealdade (Loyalty) by Marcio Souza, A Casa do F'oeta Tragic° (The Tragic Poet's Home) by Carlos Heitor Cony, and Urn Crime Delicado (A Delicate Crime) by Sergio Sant' Anna won as best novels. In short story, prizes went to Raduan Nassar with Menina a
Caminho (Girl on Her Way), Flavio Moreira da Costa with Nem Todo Canario E Belga (Not Every Canary is Belgian), and Joao Silveri° Trevisan with Trocos & Destrocos (Rubbish and Wreckage). Other areas awarded Jabutis were administration, business and law, children's books, children's book illustration, didactic books, economy, editorial production, essay and biography, human sciences, journalism, natural sciences and medicine, exact sciences, poetry, technology and computer, and translation. The prize is important for the prestige it brings. The Premio Jabuti 98 comes with a paltry $900 check.
Frigging Talent With a name like Funk Fuckers you wouldn't expect this band to be playing gospel and being prude and they aren't. The naughty attitude revealed in the band's name continues in the musicians' names—their ages vary from 20 to 23: B. Black, a.k.a. Bernardao Erntico (Erotic Big Bernard); Jimmy Love; Yurinando (a play with urinating); Baruco Cagiiete (Baruco, the Snitch); Mortadelo "Bass" Gee; and Leon Experienza. Created in Rio in 1993, the Funk Fuckers, according to their leader B. Black, draw their inspiration from Yankee bands like Run DMC, Dead Kennedys, and Beastie Boys and domestic rockers Titas, Paralamas, and Kid Abelha. They produced their two initial CDs, but now have been picked up by major recording company BMG. Their foul-mouthed lyrics, however, have kept most of their songs off the radio stations' playlist. Thanks to MTV they are having some exposure nowadays. A sample lyrics from one of their most tamed songs, "Mica": "...Quero me aprofundar no sua pessoa, ginecologicamente falando... vem ca meu bem, vamos fazer urn oba-oba voce me mostra sua coisa cu lhe mostro minha trosoba" I want to get deep in yourself, gynecologically speaking... come here sweetie, let's make whoopee you show me your thing I'll show you my shmuck
Stripping for Joy "People take off their clothes to make children, to be more exposed to the wind, and to feel the sea. I took off mine to show my joy." This was timbaladacreator Bahiano (from Bahia) singer-composer Carlinhos Brown explainin why during Carnaval he did go in the buff in the streets of Salvador, capital of Bahia, on the back of a trio eletrico, a wired-for-sound truck. According to Brown, his rejoicing demonstration didn't last more than three seconds, but that was enough time to snap pictures of his nudity, which was splashed in Salvador's papers the next day. Apparently some people were offended, and the singer was sued accused of an ; obscene act. Some papers wrote that his nude scene was in protest against a trio-eletrico jam during Camaval. He denied it and swore that he did not intend to offend anyone.
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The Darker Side of Lust "I'm not used yet to men's looks. They seem to be eating me with their eyes." Scheila Carvalho Ladeira from E o Tchan band may feel a little uncomfortable, but she is enjoying every second of her new acquired status as Brazilian men's newest object of desire and induction to sin. Brazil's most coveted brunette was chosen by popular vote during TV Globo's Domingao do Faustao (Faustao's Big Sunday) show as a counterpart to blondeshell dancer Carla Perez. With Carla's imminent departure to more innocent pastures to star on her own TV kid show, Scheila should reign supreme, until they find a tawny match for her, that is. As a E o Tchan's dancer Scheila has the obligatory prominent buttocks (for the record, her hips measure 37", her breasts 33 and her waist 26, all of this framed by a 116-lb,, 5"5' body). Her flesh attributes are so impressive that her appearance in Playboy on February provoked a run to the newsstands, and the sale of magazines zoomed past those sold when La Perez' nakedness was featured. Scheila has been dancing professionally since she was 10. Born and raised in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais, she used to accompany her mother to country fairs. After some tithe looking at the shows held there, she started dancing and mimicking singers like Simone and Daniela Mercury while her mom sold churros. She dreamed that one day she would go to college and graduate in PE, but she couldn't get the money for that. The Playboy exposure BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
For the stone-age Yanomami Indians, the end of the world seemed imminent in March when the smoke from out-of-control fires in the state of Roraima invaded their settlements. Smoke for them means trouble and forebodes bad tides. Without food—rivers were drying up, game was killed or fled, fruits and plantations burned—they had to do something they avoid: to look for food among the white man. "Since the area in which they live is covered by smoke, the Yanomami are very depressed, said French anthropologist Bruce Albert who has lived among the Indians since t he '70s. "This is for them like a sign of the Apocalypse." For all other Roraima's residents, these were also trying times. What's believed to be the worst blaze ever in the Amazon destroyed houses and culture fields, killed animals and burned virgin forests that may have been destroyed beyond any possible regeneration. Amid all this tragedy there was a sad and disturbing behavior: that of the Brazilian authorities who let it all burn down until they were pressed into action by the international press outrage. EMERSON LUIS
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oraima, a wedge of jungle and savanna be tween Guyana and Venezuela has caught fire. Out-of-control flames in a povertystricken frontier land in the middle of the Rmazon jungle, which for so-long has been called the lungs of the planet, has once again served as a wake-up call for the world. Are these signs oftimes to come, in which the world' g most important ecosystem will apocalyptically end up in flames? Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, had never seen so many foreign and illustrious people. At the end of March, the few hotels and lodges in town were filled to capacity. Politicians, including presidential hopeful Luiz 'natio Lula da Silva and former President Jose Sarney; foreign and Brazilian journalists; members from several worldwide Non Governmental Organizations (NG0s), they all flocked to the city. The gathering had all the makings of an ecological bash inside the Amazon jungle if it weren't for all the human suffering and the ecological tragedy taking place. Clearing fields with fire is a common practice in the Amazon. It is used as a fast and cheap way to clear the terrain in preparation for planting by big companies as well as the caboclos (poor settlers who live in the region) and the Indians themselves. The law forbids the use of fire for clearing fields, but the slash and burn method is used routinely by ranchers and farmers who can be sure of their impunity. It was this traditional practice that misfired this time and the flames raged out of control. Add to this the fact that Roraima was hit by a harsh period of drought—Boa Vista saw only 30 mm of rain from September to March, 8% ofthe rain it usually gets—brought in by El Nifto and the presence of strong winds, and we have a perfect recipe for a catastrophe. Together, all these ingredients concocted the worst fires ever in the region registered in books or that anyone can remember. . The military accused big and subsistence farmers of keeping on setting their fields ablaze even after the fires got out of control because they heard that the government would pardon the bank loans of those hit by the fires. Accused of causing the Amazon catastrophe, small farmers don't seem to feel any guilt. Talking to weekly newsmagazine, isto1, Mariano Pereira, a 55-year-old small farmer who cultivates manioc and rice in the municipality of Mucajai, explained: "We don't have a tractor, young man. The only way is to burn when we need to plant ". Not everybody is blaming El Nifto and the farmers, though, for the drought and the ensuing fires. Environmentalist Jose Lutzenberger, for example, believes that the main cause of the Roraima's fires is the forest devastation occurring in the state of Para. Lutzenberger, who was Environment Secretary during the Fernando Collor de Mello administration, says that the Amazon creates its own weather. According to him, the cutting of big trees in Para has prevented what he calls evapotranspiration, which occurs in the heart of the rainforest. There the vegetation is so thick that 20% of the rain never reaches the soil staying over the canopy evaporating and forming clouds. Two thirds of the water that infiltrates the land through the transpiration of the 14
plants form other clouds that irrigate faraway parts of the forest. Without trees the rainwater is being absorbed by the soil or running to the rivers. Lutzenberger, who is an agronomy engineer, explains: "Before, the humid and green forest didn't burn. Now, a little burning in a rancher's field causes such a huge fire because the region doesn't see rain for two, three months." And he added: "It is now fashionable to blame El Nifio for everything, but this phenomenon might have contributed only secondarily for the little rain in the Amazon." Lutzenberger accuses the federal government of never "giving a damn" to the devastation in the Amazon, which according to him has reached 500,000 square km (193,000 square miles), an area bigger than California and slightly smaller than France. SMOKE AND MISERY In January the fires were already out of control, what led the state of Roraima to declare a state of emergency. Appeals in the newspapers, radio and TV that farmers stop burning their fields went unheeded. Subsistence farmers, Indians and big proprietors stuck to their traditional way of slashing and burning. In the past the burning could be easily controlled due to the high humidity of the area and the primary rainforest. A three-month drought has changed this scenario, though. The Ibama (Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaveis— Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) has forbidden the use of controlled fire in all the areas hit by the drought even those utilized for the subsistence cultures. Government-owned Radio Nacional da Amazonia was expected to start, though a little late, a campaign to educate the public about the risks of using fire to clear the land. "A lot oftrees burned in their bases are dying, so next year there will be more burning, and it will be even worse," said Professor Philip Fearnside of INPA (Institut° Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonia— National Institute for Amazonian Research), a non-governmental organization linked to Universidade Federal do Para. He adds: "We have started a process in motion, which will destroy the whole forest." By the end of March there was talk that 19,000 square miles of Roraima's forest and savanna had already been burned. The numbers varied wildly, however, not only because of the difficulty to measure the extent of the blaze, but also due to shifting political interests. The government would inflate some numbers to get more help, for example, or would cut a little the size of the estimate not to seem too irresponsible in the face of the catastrophe. How much damage have the fires caused? Estimates varied wildly from 6,000 square km (2,300 square miles) to 30,000 square km (11,500 square miles)—that would be size of a country like Belgium— were either burned or at risk. Satellite photos released in the last week of March showed that about 13,200 square miles—about 15% of the state of Roraima—had been charred by the blaze. From March 15 to March 25. the fire spots increased almost five times. When lbama's technicians flew over the state in mid-March they detected 10 hot spots. Ten days later they were able to count 28 different blaze locations, without counting the southeast region of the state where controlled burning is also done by farmers. Since each spot represents a minimum of five focuses they concluded that there were a minimum of 250 different fires ravaging Roraima's forests. According to INPA, the fires consumed 31,000 square km (12,000 square miles) of cerrado (savanna), 4,200 sq. km (1,600 square miles) of areas in which the forest had been cut and 1,800 of virgin forest inside the Yanomami reservation, representing more than 15% of Roraima's territory. BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
Ah!Mazon Despite all the uproar in the last two decades and a half, the Amazon is still an impressive and mostly intact forest with a size two thirds of the continental U.S.. For centuries the Amazon has been a source of inspiration and awe for all kinds of dre ers and lunatics. Explorers and adventurers have entered it in search of riches or some more intangible goods like the warrior women Amazons or the fountain of youth. Two Amerk car pioneer Henry Ford with rubber trees in the '30s and eccentric billionaire Daniel Ludwi , who poured $3 billion in paper pulp, cattle raising and rice planting projects during the '70 were just some of the many people who tried to conquer the region and were defeated by what h been often called as the Green Hell. The so-called Amazonia Legal (Legal Amazon) which extends for nine Brazilian States covers 5.2 million square km (2 million sq. miles) two thirds of which are in Brazilian te dory. If it were a country, it would be the world's sixth largest one. The region contains a wider v iety of fauna and flora than any other place on earth. More than 1,500 bird species live there, well as 3,000 fish species (that's 15 times more than in all European rivers). It is also believe that the number of insects that make the Amazon home surpasses 30 million. The number of plant species is unknown. Estimates vary from 5 million to 30 million. hirty thousand of them have been classified, representing 10% of all plants in the world. One ingle acre in the Amazon contains close to 200 tree species. The forest has several distinct layer'. The biggest trees can reach 40 meters (130 feet). The upper canopy grows generally 25 to 30 eters high (80 to 100 feet). Since 1970 Brazil has created 124 environment parks and reservations which occupy ore than 45,000 square km (17,400 square miles), an area larger than Switzerland. In all, Braz 1 has 1.8% of its total territory put aside as protected land. That's too little, though. By comps ison, Colombia has 8% and Venezuela, 15%. To complicate matters, in less than 30 years, 601,000 square km (231,700 square miles) of forest—an area larger than France—were destroye Despite occupying roughly half of the country's territory, the Amazon is residence fo only 12% of Brazil's 160-million strong population and contributes a miser 5% to the GDP ( ross Domestic Product). Illiteracy reaches 25%, while the country's average is 19%. Annu percapita income is 2,059, less than half the national average. Life expectation is also lower i the area: 63 years compared to 67 years for the population in general. Living in reservations that take close to 1 million square km (386,000 square miles 20% of the Amazon—there are 280,000 Indians belonging to 210 different ethnic groups and speaking 170 languages. If you also count natives living in cities there are more than 30l,0 ii of them. In 1500, when Brazil was discovered by Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral, ere were an estimated 6 million Indians. In the '50s this number had fallen to less than 100,0 0. It is believed that at least 50 tribes have never had any contact with anybody elsethan their f-ilow Indians. In one of the few good news in the ecological battle, the Indian population in Br il is growing at a rate of 3.5% a year, almost triple the 1.3% for the population in general. The Amazon river, which cuts the Amazon from west to east, together with its 1 100 tributaries carry 20% of all potable water in the planet. Seventeen of its tributaries are over 1 000 miles long. The river drains an area as big as the continental United States. The Amazon stre hes itself for 6,868 km (4,268 km miles). More than 2,000 species of fish live in its waters. The military regime dream of occupying the Amazon—one of its favorite slogans was tntegrarparanao entregar (to integrate so not to give it way)—created among other public w rks the Rodovia TransamazOnica, a 5,000 km-long (3,100 miles) road cutting inside the ju gle between Joao Pessoa, in the state of Paraiba, and the border of Brazil with Peru. The jungl has retaken the precarious path and today only 1,000 km (621 miles) are passable part of the t me. But it is a road only for the adventurous. The government is spending $1.4 billion in a controversial, corruption-marred radar-b ed system to monitor air traffic in the Amazon, as well as fires and all kinds of invasions, inclu ing those of Indian lands by garimpeiros (wildcat gold prospectors)—they are believed to thro 20 tons of mercury illegally used for gold panning on the water streams each year— and the emterra (those without land). It is the Sivam (Sistema de Vigilancia da Amazonia—Amazon W tch System), which should start operating in 2002. The twenty-radar system will also use data om eight weather and environmental satellites as well as five planes specially built, which will be ble to look through the thick jungle vegetation. Today, Ibama has 275 inspectors to oversee the w ole of the Amazon, or 18,500 square km (7,142 square miles) for each one of them, an area al ost as big the state of New Jersey. The Brazilian official position on the Amazon has changed dramatically (at least on pai er) since 1972, when the military regime informed the world during the Stockholm Environ ent Conference that Brazil considered its own development much more important than concerns ith pollution and deforestation. Today there are plans to explore the enormous potential of the area for ecological touri m. Amazonas Governor Amazonino Mendes, who oscillates between defender of the enviro ent and very good friend of the lets-cut-down-the-forest lobby, has some Amazonian plans suc as building a monorail inside the jungle together with a floating hotel large enough to receiv up to 30,000 visitors. "Until now the premise to economically explore the Amazon was to cut the forest," ys ecology professor and WWF (World Wild Fund for Nature) executive director Garo Batman an. "There are smart alternatives to that and they need to be tested." The world spent $260 billion in eco-tourism last year. Costa Rica, with a forest 100 ti es smaller than the Brazilian one got $600 million. Only $40 million was spent on Brazilian's ost famous jungle. A ridiculously low 0,01% of the total eco-tourism bill. And nobody else h an Amazon so rich and so vast. BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
At the peak of the fires a cloud of white smoke was covering Boa Vista and visibility was reduced to a mere 100 feet. Breathing became difficult for the 180,000 residents. All around cars were using their lights during the day as a precautionary measure. And some cautious people were walking with masks and damp cloths covering their faces. • People with respiratory problems, mostly children and the elderly, filled up hospital beds. Besides human suffering, Roraima paid a hefty price in many other areas. Homes have been burned down, several crops were wiped out. Mal-nutrition increased among the caboclos and their families, who often grow some oftheir food—rice and corn are common cultures—despite an emergency food program started by the state government. In Boa Vista hospitals were overflowing. Most of the people were being treated for respiratory diseases, but there were also cases of anemia and dysentery. For lack of beds, many had to go back home and wait there for the doctor. Every doctor available was being pressed into service. Even a group of Cuban physicians who were in town for conferences were giving assistance to the population. "I never imagined that I would be one day in the middle of such a tragedy," declared Osmel Rodriguez, one of the Cuban doctors. Indians have also lost their cabins and crops. Reporter Alexandre Medeiros from Jornal do Brasil told the story of 60-year-old Wapixana Indian, Augusto Gomes da Silva, with a wife and two children. He had no food and there was little water left. After losing everything he had planted, Silva stood guard at his house to prevent it from being consumed by the flames. "I am not going to eat, I am not going to sleep," he said. "I'll just stay here waiting for the fire to come so I can wrestle with it." This was not an isolated case. Most of the plantations were burned around Boa Vista. The cattle were also suffering from lack of pasture and water. After saving human lives, the priority of the fight against the fire was to preserve the few pasture areas left untouched by the flames. On both sides of BR-174, a road linking Boa Vista to the Venezuelan city of Santa Elena de Uiaren, there cattle grazing on torched grass. beside igarapes (river arms) that dried out. 15
Some were skeletal and could barely walk. Some fell down Fernando Cardoso found time to visit Roraima for a close-up look at the and needed help to get up. ecological tragedy. Krause was the big absent not participating in any The government started to distribute food baskets among discussion to end the fires, not even at the end when the federal the small farmers. Reaching the Indians, however, was a government under international pressure was forced to take a position. bigger problem, since many Indian areas can only be reached Krause, who wants to be reelected to the House ofRepresentatives, was by plane, and flight in the region was hampered by the out of Brasilia on the campaign trail, denied that the government was smoke. negligent: "What we had was an unexpected disaster," he said as an THANKS BUT NO THANKS explanation. The blaze began in January. However, only on March 26 Brazil and Brazilian military in particular have always been wary the Environment Minister, Gustavo Krause, sent his request of foreign presence in the Amazon on grounds of national security. for help to the World Bank and only after that bank offered Trying to dispel the notion that this nationalistic pride had contributed $5 million to help fight the flames. The to the extension of the disaster, presirequest was preceded by a three-hour dential spokesman Sergio Amaral meeting between President Cardoso, his declared that "There is no resistance close aides and the military ministers. to international help as long as it After having offered help since Noconforms to Brazilian needs." Pressed vember, by the end of March United Located in the northwest of Brazil, Roraima, by the military, Cardoso decided to which was upgraded from territory to state in Nations officials were very frustrated create taskforces to analyze every 1988, is the least populated of the 26 Brazilian and getting edgy. They even placed a foreign offer of help. states, with a mere 1.16 inhabitant by square km team of seven experts on alert while After much international pressure, (0.39 square mile). Brazil's extreme northern point, waiting for an OK from the Brazilian Brasilia let it to be known that it was the Roraima mount at the Pacaraima mountain government. "I hope the green light will ready to receive help in the form of range, is in Roraima, right on the border with arrive before the weekend because I cantechnicians, firefighters, and equipVenezuela and Guyana. not maintain my team on alert waiting ment. It was against the idea, howAccording to the 1995 census, the state has for too long," said an impatient Gerard ever, of letting a military multina262,201 residents, 40,000 of whom are Indians, Putman-Crame, chief of the UN agency tional force, informally known as constituting the third largest Indian population in in charge of fires. green helmets, enter the country. the country. The reservations take up half of the Sarah Tyac, spokeswoman for NGO The whole world was offering state 225,116 square km (86,900 square miles) Friends of the Earth, seem to have spohelp. Russia made available two waterritory, roughly the size of Utah. The native ken in the name of environmentalists the ter-carrying airplanes, the U.S. had presence, especially of the Yanomami, whose world over, including in Brazil, when reservation occupies 9.4 million hectares, has some forest fire specialists ready to she said : "We are all nonplussed with created several conflicts. Many see it as an imgo to Brazil to help assess the situathe Brazilian government's refusal to pediment to the growth of the state. tion. Brazilian neighbors, though, had accept help. The Brazilian authorities Roraimenses contribute a diminutive 0.11% an easier time to have their offer for to the Gross Domestic Product. The main crops in should wake up to the fact that these fires help accepted. Argentinean and Venthe area are manioc, orange and corn. They also are causing regional and global damage. ezuelan firefighters were the first to raise cattle and swine. Logging, diamond and gold This problem needs to be solved immearrive even before Brazilians from mining, and ceramics are some of the other ecodiately. If Brazil is not prepared to solve other states. The men from Venezunomic activities. them alone, it needs to accept aid from ela, with a personal stake on the dithe rest of the world." I. saster, remained in Pacaraima, a city Carlos Pereira Monteiro, chief of the where the flames were threatening to UN mission, called the blaze "an environmental disaster cross the frontier into Venezuelan territory. without precedent on this planet." He and his team didn't Argentina's willingness to help and the efficiency of its aid gave arrive to the scene before the rains had extinguished most of Brasilia's officials cause for pause. Some of the President's aides, with the fire. They were impressed though by the total lack of apparent jealousy, confided they were mortified at their own inability information about the effects of the fires and the way land is to deal with the international public opinion, while president Carlos distributed in the area. Menem used the episode to his own electoral benThey were expected to make some recommenda- DINAYA: CI-EGA A I-ICRA efit. Brazilian officials also contended that the fire CA CASSACAO tions, even more necessary since new fires similar to was raging even stronger in Guyana and Venezuthose in Roraima are expected in other areas of the jornal da tarde ela: "This a problem of three countries," comAmazon. Walter Franco, the UN representative in plained a diplomat, "but all you hear about is LEI AMBIENTAL ATACA INVASOMEE E POLABC.A0 Brazil said that the south of the Amazon might suffer Brazil." a blaze even worse than that in Roraima around the SPREADING BLAME PAJES AGRADECEM month of June. The dry season in the area starts at the A CHU VA Roraima's governor, Neudo Campos, from PPB AVIV PEDIRAM end of April. At the beginning of April, no Brazilian (Partido Progressista Brasileiro—Brazilian Proagency had data about losses caused by the fires gressive Party) blamed the federal government for including the number of cattle killed, houses burned, delaying sending resources and helping to fight the bridges destroyed, and plantation fields razed. fire. "We still didn't get a cent until now," he told On March 30, a congressional commission went reporters on March 26, two months after having to the Boa Vista Area to start an investigation on who declared a state of emergency. "In the meantime, was responsible for the delay on fighting the fires. the fire continues to spread," he added. Campos M. PESQUISA: DESEMPRESO Former President and now House Representative -41I POOR& ATE ANO 2000 also criticized the Cardoso administration for takJose Sarney, one of the members of the investigative ing so long before accepting foreign help. "When group, criticized the situation: "It is sad to know that Argentina offered its help, I accepted immediately only after the international community called attention to the he said. "And the next day they were here." problem, the government took measures." Campos wasn't that trustworthy himself. After saying that the blaze It also didn't work in the government's favor that neither had consumed 1/4 of his state, he dramatically lowered this number to the Environment Minister, Gustavo Krause, nor President 3% (1.5 million acres). And while reporters in the area could hardly find
Forlorn Land
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BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
any animal carcass, the governor blamed the fire for the death of 20,000 cattle, a figure that later was lowered to 12,000. The Government also estimated that 15,000 families were severely affected. Wilson Precoma, Funai's (Fundacao Nacional do Indio—Indian National Foundation) attorney in Boa Vista, accuses Roraima's governor of having kept secret the gravity of the blaze in order to get federal help. Precoma says that the state authorities waited until the fires had become an unmanageable catastrophe. He adds that the farmers also contributed to make things worse: "They are using the fire to remove the Indians from their lands. After the forest is burned they intend to convert the whole area into pasture." Governor Neudo Campos denies any wrongdoing, however, saying that he had alerted the federal government back in January when he declared estado de calamidade ptiblica (state of emer gency) due to the drought. Campos adds that until February the fires burning in the state were those normally used to prepare the land for planting. On March 9, the governor asked $15 million from Brasilia. Ageu Florencio da Silva, Federal Prosecutor based in Roraima is also looking into the case. "I suspect that state authorities delayed taking any measure for political reason," the prosecutor told reporters. Information and numbers on the fires coming from several sources, unreliable and often contradictory. How much of Roraima's territory was consumed by the flames? Twenty eight percent some experts were saying, 12% contended others, while there were more conservative approaches that were placing the devastation at 3% of the state land. Flooded with media from all over the world, the Campos administration was having a hard time getting the facts straight. An official handout during a press conference in the last week of March listed three different numbers as the size of Roraima. Instead of giving subsidies to the press, Kleber Cerquinho, Roraima's Civil Defense Chief, was using reports made by journalists to monitor the fires, since he wasn't able to communicate with his people on the field. The Governor has plans to use the international aid to implement a $6-million program of environmental education for the population in general and the children in particular, build 6,000 barrages along the igarapes that proliferate in the state, and create a brigade specialized in forest fire. While some authorities said that only St. Peter would be able to solve the problem, sending rain to the area, Gilberto Mendes, a firefighting expert from Rio de Janeiro estimated at first that 1,000 firefighters would be enough to put out the fire. At a closer look, however, he changed this figure to 10,000. The burning forest has become the central theme of the political campaign for governor. Elections will be held in October. While Campos, who wants to be reelected, accused the opposition of painting a rosier scenario of the situation in order to delay federal help, the governor's foes blamed him for not being able to take a more prompt and decisive action against the ecological tragedy. Opposition presidential candidate leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores—Workers' Party) has also used the incident to point to the shortcomings of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. UNEQUAL FIGHT Apia(' is a diminutive village with 328 residents. The area ravaged by fire is also Roraima's main agricultural zone. The presence of Brazilians and Argentineans side by side, in Apiaii—the center of operations against the fire, 80 miles from Boa Vista—has served as a sobering lesson in contrast. While Argentina's team was formed by 127 experienced firefighters—some of them doctors—carrying state-ofthe art equipment and personal gear, Brazil's initial contingent was composed by a group of brave inexperienced volunteers. BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
Even th military personnel who arrived early in the scene gave heart-breaking, pathetic demonstration of incompetence and lack of resources: without any special gear •these heroic and unprepared men got inside the jungle armed with big knles and small water pumps in their bare hands. To smother the fire they used fallen palm branches. The Brazilian ar y assumed control of the firefighting operation only on Ma ch 19. The Argentinean team, on the other hand, brought four helicopters equipped with the Bambi Bucket, a pail-like device capable of carrying 1,000 liters (260 gallons) of water. Their method of using helicopter to drop water over the fire w initially criticized and then copied by the Brazilians hen it was proven effective. Gerardo Elst, 39, one of the rgentineans, who works as a firefighter for 17 years, said t at nothing he had done before prepared him for the Roraima inferno. The fires grew so much that Brazilians and Ar entinean firefighting teams seemed sometimes a band of rowdy toddlers throwing the content of their beach pails against the flames. At times the helicopters had to be grounded due to the excessive smoke. Inside the jungle the combat against the fire brings additional risks to the already extremely risky job of fighting blazes. Brazilians firefighters were having close encounters—too close for comfort sometimes—with snakes and jaguars. They were also taking special precaution not to getting lost or being choked by the smoke that doesn't dissipate easily under the jungle's canopy. They were walking in line inside the forest not more than seven feet apart. Each man got a number according to his position in the line and every once in while everyone was called to make sure nobody got lost. They might walk up to two hours before finding a hot spot. When one was found they would try to clear the area around and smother the blaze. The firefighters' effort seemed successful when the flames disappeared. he next day, however, some hot spots reignited and the ight started all over again. Apiait ne er saw so much agitation. Beer sold out in the local bar wh e Antonio Altevir, the owner, was beaming with his boo ing business: "Before, I used to sell $100 a day, but now am selling $500," he told a reporter of daily Folha de Sao aulo. The foreign presence has also raised the excitement a ong the women in town. Said Nadia David dos Santos, the town administrator's wife: "These Argentinean ave brought us a lot of joy. The girls are way excited, but have to rein in, because with teenagers you never know." NATIONAL SOLIDARITY Firefighte s from Distrito Federal, Amazonas, and Minas Gerais joined n the effort in the last week of March raising from 500 to 8 10 the number of men fighting the blaze. But the amount of smoke that covered almost all the state—due in part to ma y fires that extinguished—made it almost impossible for the helicopters to be used. At the height ofthe effort to fight he flames there were 1,700 firefighters from all over the c ntry, including some elite firefighters from Brasilia, Rio e Janeiro, and Rio Grande do Sul. The bigge t problem, said the operation commander, general of bri ade Luiz Edmundo Maia de Carvalho, commander of th first Brigade of Forest Infantry, was the resurgence of ire after they had been put out. 17
Carvalho was the same man who, when asked by reporters, on March 26, if he was going to accept help offered by the United Nations, answered: "If they are offering men and equipment, I don't need them. We are already arranging to get the necessary resources and I don't believe Brazil is going to accept this help." Confronted with the news that Sergio Amaral, the presidential spokesman, had announced that help had been accepted, the general commented: "This is probably a misinformation." By declaring that international help was dispensable, general Carvalho didn't help the image Brazil wanted to create as a nation responsible and respectful of its natural treasure. Through the humanitarian group Caritas, the Catholic Church started a national campaign to collect money, food and clothes for the people, Indians and caboclos, dislodged by the fires. SOS Roraima, the campaign launched by CNBB (Conferencia Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil—National Conference of Bishops of Brazil), intended to collect money to buy food in all 7,000 Catholic parishes in the country. The Catholic Church calculated that 2.400 families were made homeless by the fires in Roraima. Their goal is to buy 150 tons of food. The contribution can also be sent to a special banking account established in a Brasilia branch of Banco do Brasil. The account number: 222.000-8. The bank's branch number: 3475-4. The check should made to Caritas Brasileira.
local ecosystem. They believe it could take decades before the forest area hit by the flames goes back to its old self. "Some species will not stage a comeback in many, many years," said INPE' s forest science expert Joao Roberto dos Santos. In the thicker areas of vegetation the fire might cause irreversible damage since 30% of the 106 species catalogued by the INPE in the area will never grow back. The INPE uses images sent by the Yankee Landsat satellite that flies over Roraima every 16 days at an altitude of 400 miles. The thick smoke, which prevents satellites from taking pictures of the area, has made difficult a precise assessment of the situation. Any picture would be useless anyway before they fix the Cuiaba—capital of Mato Grosso, 1,300 miles southwest of Boa Vista—satellite ground station that is broken. For Joao Roberto dos Santos, an expert in forest science, the Roraima fires were a catastrophe forewarned. He reminds that satellites had detected the first hot spots last August, but the warnings were not taken seriously. For him, small farmers and bio-diversity were the worst hit by the blaze. Flora and fauna have suffered incalculable losses, he says. Some species like the tamanduci bandeira, who is slow and incapable of fleeing from the fire will be dramatically reduced in the area hit by the flames. Santos says the extension of the damages will not be known before May, when the skies should again be clear enough for the American satellite NOAA to take pictures of the area. Ibama's forest engineer, Giovanni Cornacchia, who was sent to Boa Vista to monitor the fire, believes that the press has exaggerated the gravity of the blaze in Roraima and he is worried with the image of the STATE OF THE ART destruction being portrayed around the world. "People think that the TECHNOLOGY blaze is like a fire-thrower hitting the forest, but it is not happening like The Brazilian participation wasn't always improvised that," he says. The damage being caused by the fire is many times and amateurish. Among the Brazilian high-tech agencies smaller than it would be in a classic blaze, which normally reaches the helping to fight the blaze there was the Environment Moni- top of the forest." toring Nucleus from Embrapa (Empresa Brasileira de According to Cornacchia, the fire is burning under the big trees, but Pesquisa Agropecuaria—Brazilian Agency for Agricultural sparing the trunk and the top and the animals being killed are only those and Cattle Research) from Campinas, in the state of Sao that that are too slow to escape. He says that there is no immediate Paulo. They already have installations in Boa Vista and were danger to the green coverage of the Amazon even though the areas ready to take a new team with computers, antennas and a burned will more susceptible to new fires. system for capturing satellite images. For Reinaldo Barbosa, a researcher from INPA, the causes of the According to Evaristo de Miranda, research manager of fires ultimately go back to the military dictatorship that started in 1964 the unit, his group receives images from 40 satellites and and lasted until 1985, a time in which small farmers were encouraged since the beginning of the decade they have being following to occupy and cultivate the Amazon region without getting any official the deforestation of Roraima at a rate back up, in a tacit promotion of the slash-and-burn policy. of 250 square km (97 square miles) a Said Barbosa: "This blaze started more than 20 years ago year. when the Medici administration started to disorderly settle Miranda said the efforts to extinthis region". guish the fires were futile and agreed But Barbosa does not spare today's authorities, who with the government policy of conaccording to him should know better: "At the end of 1995 PROVAO REVELA BAIXO centrating its efforts in saving lives NASA had announced that El Nizio might cause problems 1'6t MYR- RC! °RAU by attacking fires that threatened populike this and in the middle of last year our Institute warned lated areas. "The fire is uncontrolagain about this possibility." nriik WM. • OOPS lable. Saint Peter is the only one caREPORTS FROM SOLOS pable of extinguishing it," resignedly THE FRONT LINE ••••It he told 0 Estado de S. Paulo. He also 0 SPUS The international press flocked to the area. In a disCOOS expressed his belief that Brazil can do patch from Boa Vista, Washington Post correspondent, 11 cow without any international help. Anthony Faiola, described his encounter with the raging onnusron. The biggest problem in the soe I.. rant flames: "Amid choking smoke and the crackle of flame, MOO MOM SWOP PO Roraima fire was the forest, which Geraldo Elst gave the signal for the helicopter overhead to makes up 72% of the state's territory. empty its water tanks. The pilot missed his target, and Elst, ' wing* While the flames advanced much eyes tearing from the searing heat, just shrugged helpSOO Menem quicker in the savanna areas with lessly. "This is an impossible mission," said Elst, part of a PI Awns ntroaps shorter and thinner vegetation—they multinational team of 500 firefighters recently brought in CLASSWICADOS: PUMAS DE OFERVIS represent 18% of the territory— reto battle what Brazilians are calling the largest conflagrageneration in these areas, which use tion since 1925 in the Amazon rain forest, home to more the ashes as fertilizer, might take a little as six months. By the than half of the world's known plant and animal species." end of March 70% ofthe savannas had already been charred. Correio Braziliense's staff writer Vannildo Mendes talked to Technicians at INPE (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas residents from Boa Vista who lost all to the fire. One of them was Jose Espaciais—National Institute of Space Research) have been Wilson Ferreira, who with his wife Erisbete and two little daughters poring over data in order to analyze the fire's impact on the talked about restarting his life, after losing his house and plantation.
jornat da tarde .r
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BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
They were left with 15 cattle and 60 deer, which were taken to a The dan e ceremony drew criticism from all quarters. neighbor's pasture. "We have to start from scratch" complained Erisbete. The Yanom mi themselves contended that they had their "God only knows if we are gonna make it." own rainma er xaboris (shamans) and did not need other There is also the story of Leide Dayane (an apparent homage do tribes help, The press has accused Funai of taking too Lady Diane), a girl of 13, whose parents are small farmers at Apiaa's seriously an giving a scientific aura to a folkloric costume. Colonia Agricola. She suffers from asthma and had to be taken to the "It mak s no sense spending taxpayer's money with a hospital due to the excess of smoke. Leide started a campaign in her s'oniewhat a surd thing, when the drought and the fire are school to encourage other fanners to stop using fire to clear their land. leaving the dians without having what they need to eat," "I would like the adults to understand that fire destroys nature and complained dalberto Silva, vice-president ofCIR (Conselho themselves," she said. Indigena de orairna —Roraima' s Ind igenist Council). Silva INDIAN TERRITORY believes tha the money would have been better spent on Early April, at least two Indian settlements—the Ajarani and the medicine or ood Mucajai, both from the nomadic Yanomami ethnicity—were encircled "We can ot understand Kayapo xabori," said Joao Davi, by fire. The Yanomami are the world's largest Stone Age tribe. With 36, chief fro the Pa* Novo aldeia. "Kayapo is a different their plantations burned; without game, which was scared off by the nation. Funa 's is using our suffering to promote itself." blaze; and with little fish since the waterways dried out in many places, Walter B os, Funai's administrator told reporters that he the natives there were suffering of malnutrition. They don't stock their didn't under tand all the fuss about the rainmaking cerfood, only taking the necessary for a day or two. emony, whic for him is the "natural thing to do." As a kind The Yanomami accused the government of trying to deceive them. of poetic just ce—and a fast one for that matter— for those While the Yanomami Park Creation Commission warned that hundreds who defend the ritual, just a few hours after the night of Yanomamis were surrounded by the fires in neighboring Amazonas ceremony th rain started to pour on the morning of March state, federal authorities guaranteed that the flames were at least 60 31. This was the first strong rain in the area in the last six miles away. Most ofthe Yanomami aldeias are in an area known as Baixo Mucajai. They were not getting new stocks of medicine either because due to the thick smoke, government planes that periodically visit the aldeias were not able to fly there. Davi Yanomami, arguably the best-known Yanomami leader, talked about being approached by Indian mothers worried with their children's survival. Davi said to believe that the authorities could save them from this predicament if they wanted: "Government has money, government has helicopter, government puts out fire," he commented. Ninety-one riflemen from the Army's Forest Battalion backed by helicopters and Brasilia's very effective firefighters' force, were sent to the area to try to keep the fires at bay. Several of the Indians from these aldeias, however, have fled into the deeper jungle. dies celebrate the rain they brought. There are 7,000 Yanomami in Roraima occupying a huge area of 9.5 million hectares, which is the siie of their reservation in the state. months and th meteorology services were expecting heavy Among the animals that were not fast enough to escape the fire were rains only by id April. The rain lasted four hours. Thepajes pacas, snakes, turtles, and capybaras, all of them part of the Yanornami went to the str et to celebrate for the delight of the cameras diet. As pointed by Yanomami cacique (chief) Peni Xerixana the very from all over e world. appreciated fruits like apatoci, abacaba, and abiu also disappeared in "If it is ac."ncidence or not, I don't know, but it certainly the fire. "We have a little water left," said Avelino Loyola, another seems to have • one the trick," said Alan Suassuna, spokesIndian chief, "but very little manioc flour or rice, corn, and roots." man for Funai n Boa Vista. According to Suassuna, 80 to 90 The fires hit the Yanomami also in other ways. With the sanitary percent of the ires had been quenched by that rain. teams unable to reach the Indians, the number of Yanomami attacked The Army Iso had plans for making rain, even though by malaria increased. In a group of 888 Indians 515 had the disease. The in a slightly di erent way. Funceme (Fundacao Cearense de government was also preparing food baskets to distribute among the Meteorologia Ceara's Meteorology Foundation) was conIndians. One of the problems, however, was what to include in the tacted to study he possibility of bombard ing the clouds over package since most ofthe natives, among other items, do not eat frozen the burning re ion with silver iodide flares, just before the chicken or beef. rains started. Other Indian tribes also had to fight for their survival and some A LITTLE IRONY indigenous peoples from areas not threatened by the fire showed their The fires w re still raging uncontrollably in the north of solidarity by offering their help. Two Kayapopajes (shamans) from the the country on arch 30 when premiered the new Environstate of Mato Grosso do Sul, were taken by Funai (Fundacao Nacional mental Crimes aw. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso do Indio—National Indian Foundation) to the Yanomami reservation had signed the egislation on February 13. You can't ignore to execute the rain dance ritual. the irony, thou h, that penalties against those who provoke The rain ceremony was done secretly by the two pajes Kukrit e blazes for burni g their fields to clear the land, were taken off Mantii, on the banks of the Curupira river. The invocation to the god, the bill at the- I. st minute by Cardoso, under pressure from Kororoti, could not be seen by non-Indians. The rite includes a heart- the ruralist cau us, a group of congressmen backed by big to-heart talk with the spirits of the Indians forefather, the shamans farmers or far ers themselVes. The law intends to punish explained to reporters. These spirits are the ones responsible to address those who com it "aggressions against the environment". their requests to the rain and thunder spirits. "The rain is going to start The penalties g from $50 to $50 million and might include and then it will never stop," they guaranteed. jail term. BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
19
drawing an international task-force, made up with military from other countries, who more sensitive than the Brazilians 4 had already mobilized themselves. 4 "Facing the "foreign invasion" the Army decided to budge ' k and end the idleness for at least a portion of thousands of - soldiers it maintains throughout the country without a thins to , - do. Better late than never? Maybe. At least this is a good time for us to question, once again, why do we need Armed Forces in times of peace. All Yet to Be Done Rio's moderate daily Jornal do Brasil has also expressed its The Brazilian press was unanimous on outrage in an editorial entitled "Jungle's Agony": condemning the way government L "The recipe for this destruction combines the traditional managed the Roraima disaster, i primitivism of indiscriminate burning with a drought proespecially the refusal on receiving longed by the El Nifio effect and strong winds that spread the foreign help. However, few media flames through the dry vegetation. The official want of foreoutlets, if any, noticed that the fires sight towards ecological scourges in remote spots and the delay in mobilizing national and international means complete the only became front page news in Brazil , 1 tragedy'stableau. after the international press started •, In lieu of fast, decisive, massive, coordinated actions we reporting the blaze. I were offered scattered efforts, absence of preventive policies, , disdain for the international know-how and aid. In a March 29 commentary on Correio Braziliense, the "Powerless, the local authorities can't agree either on the most traditional and respected daily of B ras ilia, Brazil's capital, gravity of the fire or on how long it will take to put it out. While special editor Kido Guerra wrote in a commentary entitled "The Governor Neudo Campos says the situation is out of control, Amazonia is ours!": the federal government's civil defense coordinator, colonel "More alarming than the blaze in Roraima it was the Jose Wilson Pereira, swears that the fire is limited. But the, disregard with which the tragedy was treated until last week by Amazon's commander, general Luiz Gonzaga Schroeder Lessa, the federal government. Once again it was necessary that 5 believes that the combat against the fire will be long and environmental NG0s, habitually considered by serious people , unpredictable. (...) in the press and the government as "alarmist and catastrophist" "The Roraima tragedy is an alert that made a big scene. Only then Brasilia rec• everything is yet to be done in the Amazon ognized the extent of the tragedy and environmental defense chapter and that the decided to act to extinguish the fire. national mobilization is indispensable to avoid "Besides doing nothing to avoid the the amplification of a devastation of unpreblaze, the federal authorities took a long „di ctable proportions.” time to take action even after the fire Pure Incompetence started to consume the state. Even the , Liberal Folha de Silo Paulo, the largest Argentinean and Venezuelan firefighters razilian daily also lambasted the federal arrived earlier. government's total lack of initiative. The criti"Any moderately informed neophyte cism appeared in a March 30th editorial enecologist or a sympathizer of the ecologititled "The Fire Is Ours": cal cause knows that behind this apparent "After three months and at least 9,000 ecological concern big economic intersquare km (3,500 square miles). destroyed by ests are hidden: the Amazon is an invalufire, there is more information on how negliable source of vegetable species, with a gence and irresponsibility contribute to still unknown bio-diversity. Without mea, Roraima's environmental catastrophe. At this point in time, the tioning its subsoil, apparently too rich to stliyin LatintAmeric international aid under Brazilian command is not only welhands.(...) come but necessary. "What remains of this monumental b aze that devastates "It is correct the concern about not accepting precedents Roraima is the impression that the Amazon really seems not to What might serve to future external interventions made without be in good hands. In delaying to take action to put out the fire, the national state's consent. But the deplorable performance of Brazil gave proof of its incompetence and offered ammunition the Brazilian authorities in combating the fire must be conto those who want to internationalize the Amazon. demned also for reinforcing the image that less-developed "This way it is hard to convince the world that we know ho If countries irresponsibly allow the destruction of its natural to take care of our share of the Amazon. Besides the environ;reserves. mental disaster of Amazonian proportions, the image itself o "In fact, two months ago the local Ibama (Instituto Brasileiro Brazil comes out—no pun intended—charred from this epi do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaveis— sode." Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Who Needs the Army? ;"Resources) sounded the alert about the risks of the land burnThe military lack of action followed by its initial refusal Ong. The National Institute of Space Research also has the accept any foreign help has irked many journalists. Writing in, ,capacity to monitor fires. Ibama's information, however, circuthe newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, the daily with the largest, lated in Brasilia to no avail. Only now the pictures received by circulation in the country (850,000 copies on Sundays), writec„, the INPE—which began to be sent faster by satellite—are Luiz Carvesan panned the Army for its role in the disaster and • orienting the work. even wondered if there still is a place for an Army: "It is "The federal administration started to really act only last incredible that the Armed Forces would take so long before week after the tragedy had made big news in the international finally deciding to do something to try to contain the monstrous' media. So, it is not surprising at all that the main fire spot is out fire that decimates forests in the North of the country. ofcontrol according to an evaluation taken to President Fernando "After weeks of flames consuming ecological sanctuaries Henrique Cardoso by the Foreign Relations Chamber and the and laying to waste a natural patrimony formed during thou- t National Defense. sands of years and that represents one of the most admirable "Some personalities, especially military, gave the imprestreasures of the planet, the Army now says that they are going sion that nationalism in fighting the fire is more important than to lead the combat against the fire. This is something that should protecting the patrimony that the fire destroys. But it would be have been done in the minute they became aware of the true an exaggeration to lay the blame for the environmental disaster extension of the ecological accident that the criminal burning of to this attitude. Several national institutions, the press inthe Roraima has become. cluded, were unprepared to perceive the problem's extension. "But the Army didn't go there because of the fire itself or It was pure incompetence. Foreign aid is compatible with the because the protection of the country's territorial patrimony is respect to national sovereignty. " one of its obligations. No, they sent their troops because the Military Paranoia military felt hurt in their nationalistic pride, since the fires were Veja, Brazil's main weekly magazine, more editorialized
Slow Motion
20
BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
than covered the fire on the issue dated April 1, 1998. Entitled the authorities turn their back without doing their part." "Fire, Omission and Bravado", the article signed by Klester The article traces the origin of this effort to 1987 when Cavalcanti and Vladimir Netto, chastised the government for its INPE 's (Institut° Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais—National omission: Institute of Space Research) researcher Alberto Setzer devel"Due to El Nino, last week people were fighting fires in oped a program to use data from NOAA, the American meteocountries like Australia, Indonesia, and Venezuela, all of them rological satellite, to locate fire spots for now extinct IBDF as large as the one that assaulted Roraima. The difference is that (Institut° Brasileiro de Desenvolvimento Florestal—Brazilian in Brazil to the ecological disaster was added the governmental Institute of Forest Development). disaster. Since last year the government was being alerted to the The next year, the editors of Ag"encia Estado, the news dangers of the burning in Roraima due to the dimension of the agency of 0 EStado, signed a contract by which the paper climatic phenomenon." committed itself to divulge that work, publishing it on the front Veja goes on to say that in November 1997 the Brazilian page of its flagship paper the way some Yankee dailies publish government had received a letter from Vladimir Sakharov, information about the weather on the newspaper's cover. UN's coordinator of humanitarian affairs, offering any help Starting in 1990 Embrapa produced maps showing major Brazil might ask. The offer was repeated in December of last fire concentrations and the number of fire spots. The maps made year and then in March, revealed the magazine. it possible to detect new fronts of deforestation inside the virgin "(Sakharov) only obtained an answer this last Friday when forest and showed that fires follow deforestation within three the fire was already out of control. The government decided that years. it will accept help, as long as it is under Brazilians' coordinaBy 1992 the EstadolINPE partnership had created the sotion. If it had acted earlier it could have saved Roraima from called economic-ecological zoning model, a blueprint for detragedy." veloping economic activities in the Amazon, according to And the article continues on the same tone: principles of sustainability and with minimum impact on the "As it has always happened in disasters dealing with the environment. • Amazon, the government only acted when the international press started to show images of the fire and to denounce the omission of the authorities. Also as it always happens, it tried to minimize the disaster and took from the vest's pocket a trite nationalistic bravado. To admit foreign aid, according to the military and a good portion of the government, would be to admit Brazilian failure in managing the Amazon. Therefore it would be—still accordin this vision—to open the doors to intervention in the region by other countries. This is what the military during years called, paranoiacly as the "Amazon internationalization. TO ANY AIRPORT IN BRAZIL (—) "Few times have we seen such a narrow-minded exhibition of antiquated nationalism. It is as if Brazil had stopped in time, more exactly in the '60s, when the military paranoia towards the Amazon started. There FULL CONTAINER & COE NS X OP LIDAT R IO TNS was talk, already at that time, that TO ANY PORT IN BRAZIL other countries, especially the U.S., had plans to take from Brazil the (EXCELLENT CONTAINER RATES) sovereignty over the Amazon forest." All, But Unpredictable For the traditional newspaper 0 Estado de S. Paulo, which for years has been leading a preservationist SHIPPER'S DOOR PICK-UP "1* AIR/OCEAN FREIGHT campaip in the country, the authorities omission in Roraima is incomprehensible and unforgivable. In an CUSTOMS CLEARANCE (INCL. ALL DUTIES) II* article showing all the cutting edge technology the Union has at its disDOOR DELIVERY TO BUYER IN BRAZIL posal and the bad use the government made of it, journalist Liana John wrote: "The environmental disaster that befalls Roraima, with the spread of fires and out-of-control burning, ad12833 mits several adjectives: uncontrollable, impressive, unacceptable, inaccessible, implacable, and even unforgivable. Everything, but unpredictable. Especially for the only government in the world that has a decade of operational monitoring of fires by satellite in its history, with the best technology of planning and forecast there is. There are ten years of inestimable services rendered by the environmental research to which
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and I have some knowledge of photos and photo cleanup. Your images are often muddy, and I think that their line screen is too high.
up-to-date information. Keep up the good work.
Oseas Wichert Silver Spring, Maryland TODAY AND TOMORROW I enjoyed reading Brazzil for the irst
MagnusRogers Atlanta, Georgia
THE FACTS AND A.PICTURE I am a p otograp er an over o Brazi and Brazilians. I've gone to Rio for Carnaval every year since 1991, except this year when I went to Bahia. I just found out about Brazzil and I love the fact that your magazine seems to be very honest and frank regarding some of Brazil's more serious issues. Brazil is a beautiful country with beautiful people, and talking about Brazil's problems isn t going to lessen the love that No* feel for Brazil-. As lopg as your magazine is honest and up front about the issues, it is going to grow, and into something big.
Jonathan Brewer Laguna Niguel, California THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES It was very interesting reading your article "The Godfather" in the February issue about Coronel Limoeiro. Padrinho Chico (Godfather), was the way I used to hear friends and many other people call him. I lived near Limoeiro and attended high school there and I could see that people had faith in his words, and feared his actions. It sure did bring me old memories. Thank you. You guys are excellent. As you know, for most Brasileiros who live here in the USA and in other parts of the world, your Brazzil magazine plays a very important role which is keeping us close together month after month. Que beleza! Once again, muito obrigado.
Marcos Mello Barros Portland, Oregon AN EXPERT IN BRAZIL I would like to renew my subscription for the next three years. I am a great fan of your magazine and find it a w.ond.erfulsource of pol itical, social and historical information about Brazil. I have learned so much from reading Brazzil and always seem to amaze my Brazilian friends with the knowledge I've picked up from your magazine. Keep up the good work and you will continue to find my name on your subscription list.
Steven Miller, Esq. Canoga Park, California PROSPECTING BRAZIL I recently received my irst copy of Brazil. I like it so much I am enclosing my subscription fee for two years. I am a business owner who is interested in acquiring more knowledge about the Brazilian culture. I intend someday to expand my business to Brazil. I would appreciate it if you could assist me in ideal ing_persons in the Washington DC Maryland,-Pennsylvania, or New Jersey areas who would be interested in providing me information of the Brazilian language and culture.
Larry Winter - law114Aaol.corn Wilmington, Delaware FUZZY FACES I have enjoyed your magazine on and off for a few years, and I'd like to say that it's a well done publica tion. Often I've read that you're looking for volunteers for things like proofreading, and I'd like to know specifically what kind of assistance you need. I am not a publishing expert, but I ye been working at a publishing company for about a year You are invited to participate in this dialogue. Write to: Letters to the Publisher P.O.Box 42536 Los Angeles, CA 90050-0536 or send E-mail to: brazaiVü brazzil.com Please. include a phone number in the event ‘ve need to reach you. Thanks! 22
• lam a real fanatic of Brazil. I speak Portuguese and am a true lover of MPB (Brazilian Popular Music). I am Turkish and lam here in the United States as a prospective graduate student. lam so happy that I discoveredBra=il. I would really like to keep in touch with you.
Besitn Amado Palm Beach Gardens, Florida THE CONNECTION Enjoy your magazine. I spent t ree months in Brazil, with Rotary International. North and South Brazil. It changed my life and I look forward to returning. Met several women and continue to correspond. Your mag keeps me in touch.
Kevin Rumsey Alberta, Canada DOUBLING IT I discovered your magazine today and I was glad because I am Brazilian and I was missing something like that. I've already ordered the magazine on line, but I would like another subscription to be sent to a friend of mine.
time today and I look forward to reading more in the future. Do you also publish it in Portuguese as my wife is Brazilian. If I can be of assistance with information about the Amazon Jungle feel free to contact me.
Don Jewell Panama City, Florida SEARCHING FOR A FACE In t e next issue o the German Greenpeace Magazine, we're publishing a story about the British company The Body Shop. I've seen in your really interesting magazine the article your Promises'; by Sau-lo Petean, published in December 1996. We would very much like to print the photo from the Brighton UK Body Shop.
Sabine Vielmo Hamburg, Germany BITTER-SWEET LONGING I al ore your magazine. It is very in ormative and reading it makes me happy and always brings me heavy saudades of my Brazil, a country that is magnificent and way too pretty. Thanks you all?
Gisele Moraes Philadelphia, Pennsylvania MADLY MISSING BRAZIL Please, lind enclosed my check for my subscription. I am anxious to be more in touch with Brazil, my second home. I lived in Rio and surrounding for 17 years. I got married there, and my three children were all born there. Estou corn urna saudade louca! And the magazine would help me to "motor a saudade."
Kim Stephens Austin, Texas CALLING WRITERS lam looking for some freelance joumalist contacts in -South America and I was hoping Brazzil could help me. I want to travel to Brazil to film. The journalist needs to speak English/Portuguese and have experience in covering football (soccer).
Nick Pedley Sydney, Australia npedley(&,s054.aone.net.au NO BRAZZIL, IN RIO
Elizabeth Kurrels-Kast Atascadero, California WILLING TO TALK Con ratu ationstoBruzzi .1 trave e the world and noticed that people in general have very little information on Brazil. I am Brazilian and live in Sao Paulo and I am available to exchange ideas with people from other countries about Brazilian behavior, culture, politics, humor, family and social life. etc. Just send an e-mail to: mitordsp@hotmail.com
I am moving to Rio e Janeiro t is month. Canyou please advise me as to where I may find Brazzil (newsstand). in Rio. I am very interested in your magazine. I do not know what my permanent address will be in Rio and therefore, Tam unable to provide an address to send the magazine
Jack DeGrand Dallas, Texas
Milord Silo Paulo, Brazil It is always with great sans action t at my wife and I receive and read you succulent magazine always filled with indispensable and
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It is 8:30 a.m. on an overcast Monday morning in the Boqueirdo neighborhood of Curitiba, Brazil. A line of job seekers snakes out the door of the city employment office and into the street. There is no danger of anyone being hit by commuters rushing downtown or getting wet if it rains because the job seekers are waiting on Boqueirao's "CitizenWhen Curitiba, a city on the ship Street," a covered, two southern state of Parana, does story, two block long pedessomething the world pays trian mall. attention. Citizenship Street is a This open-ended, rustrecent urban innovation in this city of 1.6 million people that is orange stucco tube of a buildgenerally viewed as a model of ing, capped with a bright yelorderly urban development in Latin low metal roof and bisected America. As a meeting place, by a bus depot, was built in Boqueirao's Citizenship Street is an 1995 at a cost of approximately unqualified success. The place also $2.5 million. It was designed succeeds as an architectural to serve as the outpost of City statement and as an effective Hall in this lower-middle class means of delivering city services. neighborhood; a convenient Can the world learn something from this experience? We believe so. place where neighborhood residents could access a wide CHARLES W LEVESQUE range of city services. Today, nearly all of Curitiba's municipal departments have an office on Boqueirdo's Citizenship Street. Municipal services are complemented by a smatdope !Mt, tering of small shops and the large bus terminal with its •• a frequent service to down• • 4:64py • town and other neighbor11.1 4# It* 44P hoods. Former Mayor Rafael Greca de Macedo has stated that Boqueirdo's Citizenship Street was designed to serve as "an open space and meeting place for citizens." Citizenship Street is also one of the most recent urban innovations in this city of 1.6 million people that is generally viewed as a model of • orderly urban development in Latin America. What happens in Curitiba is often copied throughout the developing world as urban planners struggle with rapid urbanization. Is Boqueirdo's Citizenship Street a model worth copying? As a meeting place. Boqueirdo's Citizenship Street is an unqualified success. Even at this relatively 4. a early hour, the Street stirs with activity. Across from the 24
job seekers, middle aged women stiffly mimic a gym teacher as she bounces and catches a plump, red rubber ball while strutting the length of the open air gymnasium. Next to the gymnasium there is a CD shop, a lottery outlet and a video game parlor. The shops are still shuttered. Ironically, while commerce sleeps, the Street's bureaucrats are already at work. At the Municipal Department of Children's Services, social workers confer over programs they are designing for 30 local day care centers. At the Department of Urban Affairs, technicians review blueprints for new buildings and work with local residents to issue business permits. Upstairs, teachers are meeting in a community room that usually serves as a small claims court and are struggling over strategies to reduce drop-out rates in Boqueirdo's schools. Further down the Street, past the small storefront library, Maria do Amparo, 43, a teacher, is entering Curitiba' s Cultural Foundation to take a drawing class. JUlia Taniguchi, City Coordinator for Boqueirdo' s Citizenship Street, estimates that approximately 90,000 people call and/or visit the Street each month. Leaning against a balustrade outside her second floor office, Taniguchi notes that the high volume of pedestrian traffic has led state and federal government agencies to open offices on the Street. Asked about problems on the Street, Taniguchi laments the lack of available space for other interested offices and businesses and the limited on-site parking. If a random survey this morning is any indication, the Street has won the approval of neighborhood residents, largely because of its convenience. At the employment office, Marcelo, 19, is waiting to sign up for BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
unemployment insurance. He visited the street before to register for military service. Marcelo likes the Street because it facilitates errands like this. "You don't have to go all the way downtown," where, he notes, the line would certainly be longer. Simone, also looking for work, likes the Street's recreational offerings. She has taken classes at the gymnasium and borrowed books from the library. The only negative comment comes from DiIce, 44, who complains that the city spent too much money building the Street and promoting it to other cities in Brazil, the latter criticism a reference to the marketing-savvy City Hall technocrats who regularly produce high-quality publications and exhibits touting Curitiba's urban innovations. The Street also succeeds as an architectural statement. The building's bold and colorful design adds needed spark to a nondescript neighborhood and hints that it is a special place. Seamlessly weaving
transportation, shopping and government ervices into one structure, the City has created a vibrant streetscape; a place that draws all types o people pursuing different activities. Visitors to the S eet this morning allude to this vitality when asked hy the Street is called Citizenship Street. Simone r sponds that it is called Citizenship Street because it" s really a small city." Marcelo ventures that the ame is derived from the fact that the Street "is a s eet for citizens." The Street is also an effective means of de ivering city services. By making municipal services s accessible, Curitiba has not only made governme t more user-friendly but has also increased the lik lihood that citizens will avail themselves of such pr. grams. This is a significant achievement in a large cit where a high quality of life depends on citizen corn liance with municipal laws such as zoning ordinan es and building codes, but where traditionally such compliance has been low. However, in an age where public inves ents increasingly are designed to leverage additio al private investment, it is unclear whether the Stroet has acted as a catalyst for neighborhood develofment. While Citizenship Street hums with activity, t e surrounding streets are notable only for the steady 4tream of cars and buses headed downtown. Side stre ts are pocked with vacant lots between the simple on4 story houses with their drab concrete walls. An official at the Department of Urban ffairs cannot point to any local commercial develop ents that stem from the construction of Citizenship treet. In fact, it seems entirely plausible that the Stree may
THE EASIEST
have drained some of the vitality of the surrounding community. Whether other cities will be interested in Curitiba's Citizenship Street seems likely to depend on their fiscal resources and the strength of their downtowns. Curitiba is an affluent city by Brazilian standards and has sufficient financial resources to construct and operate these neighborhood centers. It also features a robust downtown with strong retail and residential sectors. In cities where commerce and residents are increasingly deserting downtown, it may not make sense to relocate government services which often anchor downtown businesses and support the local property market. Regardless of whether Curitiba succeeds in exporting its Citizenship Street, the city believes that it has found a model that works for its citizens. Since 1995, Curitiba has built Citizenship Streets in seven other city neighborhoods. •
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Amado in Portuguese means loved one, beloved. Jorge Amado, Brazil's best-known novelist, whose books have been translated in more than 30 languages, has had his share of worldwide love and appreciation. Since 1984, for example, he is a member of France's Legion of Honor. In this article, Brazilian literature professor Janer Cristaldo looks at a less than flattering side of the prolific author and accuses him of selling his own soul for literary fame and petty personal gains.
Bahia's Dr. Faustus JANER CRISTALDO The word "bordel" (brothel), for those who don't know, was born in Paris. During the time in which the "maisons closes" were at the bank of the Seine, when someone went in search of women, they would euphemistically say: "J'vais au bord'elle" (I am going to its bank). The Seine is not "un fleuve," but "une riviere." In other words, it is a feminine word, la Seine. Therefore, when someone said "au bord' elle" he meant "au bord de la Seine". From there, bordel (brothel). It is not surprising then that the capital that invented this word decided to pay homage during the recent 18th Salon du Livre de Paris (Paris Book Fair) to the greatest prostitute of contemporary literature. Brazil was honored in the Salon and had as honoring guest and representative of our literature, Jorge Amado. Brazil's best selling author, Amado began his career as a messenger ofNazism and continued as an agent of Stalinism and today is Roberto Marinho's (TV Globo network all-powerful owner) officious scriptwriter. Amado also received the title of Dr. Honoris Causa by Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III. Nothing to be surprised about. The Parisians, long known for their collaborationism and Stalinist tradition, wouldn't miss the opportunity to honor, in this end of century, the colleague who since his youth fought on the same side. From Nazism to Stalinism Amado was born on a cocoa plantation farm on August 10, 1912 at the then recently founded town named Itabuna, in Bahia. His father was from the state of Sergipe and his mother had been born in Bahia of indigenous descent. This author, who is the most divulged Brazilian writer throughout the world and who has been translated in more than 40 languages, was also a collaborator of Nazi publications, a militant of the Communist Party, constituent Congressman in 1946, Oba Otum Arolu of Axe Opo Afonja candomble a dignitary on African-Brazilian religion—in Bahia and member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was arrested in 1936 in Rio as a consequence of the '35 Intentona, a failed coup ordered by the Kremlin and lead in Brazil by Luis Carlos Prestes, the leader ofthe Brazilian Communist Party. In 1940, during the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia signed by Stalin and Joachim von Ribbentrop, he became the editor of the cultural page in the pro-nazi newspaper Meio-Dia. During a meeting of the Communist Party, he was accused of being a "cheap spy ofNazism" by writer Oswald de Andrade who urged him to move out of Sao Paulo. When asked about the dirty work during this period, Amado naively says: "I don't remember." But Oswald de Andrade remembers. In an old interview, republished more recently in Os Dentes do Dragdo, he said: "I withdrew from the Party when I was confronted with so many mistakes and mystifications. In a writer's committee meeting, in front of 15 people from the Party, I appealed to Mr. Jorge Amado to leave Sao Paulo and I accused him of being a cheap spy for the Nazis, as former 26
BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
eminent editor of Melo Dia. I told them—and Amado didn't dare to defend himself—since everything is absolutely accurate—that in 1940 Jorge invited me in Rio to have lunch at Brahma with a high-ranking German man at the Embassy and in the Transocean agency, so that this German could offer me to write a book defending Germany. Jorge informed me later that this book would pay me $30 cont Os. I refused and Jorge was surprised because he had accepted various orders from this very same German." In 1945, Amado was elected federal deputy by the Communist Party and published Vida de Luis Carlos Prestes, o Cavaleiro da Esperanca (Life of Luis Carlos Prestes, the Horseman of Hope) an eulogy of this southern communist leader and member of the Comintern. The pamphlet, ordered by the Kremlin, was translated and published in Occidental democracies and communist dictatorships as part of a campaign to free Prestes from prison after his bloody attempt in 1935 to impose in Brazil a tyranny in the best style of his guru, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (1879-1953), better known as Stalin. For Amado, Prestes is the "Hero, he who never sold himself, who never bent and upon whom the mud, dirt, rottenness and repulsive drivel of calumny never left a trace." Prestes in prison, according to the writer, meant the own people oppressed: "Like him are the people, arrested and persecuted, outraged and wounded. But like him people will stand up, one, two, one thousand times and one day the chains will be broken and freedom will come out stronger through the prison bars. 'Dawn comes after every night,' said the people's Poet. Even during the most somber nights, a star shines announcing dawn, like a friend guiding men to the morning light. In the same way, this black Brazilian night has its star shining over men—that is Luis Carlos Prestes. One day, we will see him in the morning of freedom and when the moment comes to build in this free and beautiful day, we will see that he was the star that is the sun: light in the night, hope; warmth in the day, certainty." In 1946, as a constituent, Amado signs the 4th Brazilian Constitution. Two years later, his mandate is revoked due to cancellation of the Communist Party's registration. In that same year, 1948, he moves to Paris where he meets Sartre, Aragon and Picasso, among others. In 1950, he moves to the Castle of the Writer's Union in Dobris, in the former Czechoslovakia where he writes 0 Mundo e a Paz (The World and Peace) an ode to Lenin, Stalin and to the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. The following year, when the book is published he receives the Stalin International Peace Prize in Moscow, for the totality of his work, a detail often omitted from his biographies. This decade is marked by long trips, among others, to Continental China, Mongolia, Western and Central Europe, to the former Soviet Union and to the Far East. "You all know, friends, the hatred that the men of money, the owners of life, the people's oppressors, the exploiters of human work have against Stalin. This name makes them shiver, it disturbs them, fills their nights with ghosts, prevent them from sleeping and transforms their dreams in nightmares. Upon this name laid the most vile calumnies, the greatest infamies, the most sordid lies. The 'Red Tzar,' I read on the headline of a newspaper. And I smile because I think that in the Kremlin he works incessantly for the soviet people and for all of us, for the whole mankind, for the happiness of all people. Master, father and guide, the greatest scientist of today's world, the greatest state man, the greatest general, the best of all that humanity has produced. There are those who calumniate, insult and grate their teeth. But to Stalin elevates the love of mill ions, oftens and hundreds ofmillions of human beings. It hasn't been long since he turned 70. It was a worldwide Party, his name was saluted in China and Lebanon, in Rumania and Ecuador, in Nicaragua and South Africa. In BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
this day of 12icember, the eyes and hopes of hundreds of millions of people turned to the East. And the Brazilian workers wrote on the mountain his luminous name." Because of his militancy in the Communist Party, in the beginning of his career he was translated in China, Korea Vietnam and f rmer Soviet Union. Only later he is drawn to the Western ountries taken by the hand of his German translator. In unich, in 1978, I interviewed Curt MeyerClason, who wil s responsible for the introduction of Amado in Western Euro . The Bahian invaded with his literature the free world so alumniated by him, through the now dead German Demo ratic Republic. "Because of the Communist Party protectio , the GDR took the responsibility for the publication of 11 his books as early as the '50s," said MeyerClason. "After ards, because of me, he passed directly to the Federal Republ c of Germany." Not merely by chance, Meyer Clason has jus been charged by German magazine Der Spiegel as a sp of the Third Reich in fIrazil. In the same way he denies his Nazi involvement, Amado makes no com ent about his Stalinist past. On his last book, Navegacdo de abotagem, he declares: "During my journey as a writer and citizen I got to know facts, causes and consequences that I promised to keep secret. I knew ofthem bOcause I was a militant for a political party that proposed to change society's face, acting in illegality and developing subVersive actions. Many years after I left the militancy of th Communist Party, even today when the Marxist-Leninis ideology that determined the activity of the Communist Part is getting empty and dying out, when the socialist univers arrives at a dead end, even today I don't feel totally free of th commitment I assumed. Even if the disloyalty does not ha e any importance and does not bring any consequences no , even in that case, I don't feel I have the right to spread o t what was revealed to me in confidence. If I remember the sometimes, I didn't keep notes of such memories. They ill die with me." Socialist Realism In 1954, may .e thinking his defense of Stalinism in 0 Cavaleiro da Esp ranca and 0 Mundo da Paz (The World of Peace) was insufficient, Amado publishes the three volumes of Subterroineos Liberdade (The Undergrounds of Freedom) where he n rrates the saga of the Communist Party in Brazil. Only in 19.8, with the publication of Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (Gabriel, Clove and Cinnamon) he leaves aside his political militanc and begins the practice of a literature rich of Bahian folklor that later would become the theme of national movies ad soap operas of TV Globo network. The Bahian n velist introduced the socialist realism in Brazilian literatur, , also known as Zdanovism, formula of literary confection to preach the communist ideal, conceived by the Russian wri ers Maksim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Aleksandr Aleksa drovich Fadeyev, and systematized by the General Colonel ndrei Zdanov. In the countries where he was translated, A ado is seen as a writer who does Brazilian literature, but in re lity he was obeying an awkward formula, more propagandistic than aesthetic, produced by theorists from Moscow. In A Historia is Inteligencia Brasileira (History of the Brazilian Intellige ce) Wilson Martins clearly translates the characteristics oft e new genre: .on one side he good, or those who can be included in the mystical 'key' o the 'worker,' the 'laborer'; on the other, the bad, or all other., but the 'police' and the 'proprietor' in particular, the two manichaeistic entities of this singular universe. The first a e honest, generous, unselfish, friends of instruction and pro ress, patriots, good fathers, sober, deli27
cate artisans, conscientious technicians, efficient employees (even if rebellious), imaginative and untiring, subjects of a powerful personal magnetism, filled with an innate sense of, leadership and at the same time of the most irreprehensible sense of discipline, courageous, sentimental, instinctive poets, characters of violent passions (only in the good sense), models of group solidarity, invincible debaters, full of a nobility that shines like a halo. The 'worker' is a hero typical of the chivalry novels: fearless and faultless. He is just as realistic as Amadis de Gaula. On the other hand, the "proprietor" is loathsome and nasty, subject of all vices, rude, barbaric, corrupt, implacable when collecting his interests, lascivious when in presence of young widows and a ferocious persecutor of old ladies, fat, always smoking huge cigars, belching with no shame, man of many ' lovers and probably also of unconfessable diseases, member, of the secret association called 'capitalism', where, as everyone knows, is invulnerable to the existent solidarity among its members; individual that favors all types of mockeries, including from his own children; coward, dishonest, selfish, ignorant, sold to the American dollar, lecherous, brutal husband and mean father, annoying and obnoxious, a man of routine, cold as ice, incapable of sincerity, who has no better argument that brutal force, true contemporary incarnation of demoniacal figures that were used by the Medieval society to scare itself."
k
Wilson Martins continues in detail a listing of other stereotypes used in this kind of novel, among them the police, the notary public, the leaseholder, the governor, the plantation owner, the peasant. It would be too tedious to continue the description of this polarized universe, as it would make little sense to follow the repetition—ad nauseam—of a primitive formula of book fabrication. Let's then put our hands further down this garbage. The book Os Subterrrdneos was also written in Dobris, in the same Castle of the Union of Czechoslovakian Writers where Amado had produced 0 Mundo da Paz, from Mardi 1952 to November 1953, in the period immediately following his obtaining the Stalin Prize. In its historical background there is of course the 1917 revolution. Other dates and posterior facts will powerfully determine the construction of char-V acters. In 1935, there is the Communist Intentona in Brazil. In 1936, Prestes is arrested and his wife, Olga Benario, a German Jew, who was an official of the Red Army is deported to Hitler's Germany. Getulio Vargas manages to persuade Congress to create a National Security Tribunal to punish the insurgents. Still in the same year, the Civil War erupts in Spain. That confrontation involved all the European nations and constituted a sort of general rehearsal for the Second World War, detonated in 1939, a circumstance extensively exploited by Amado. In 1937, the "integralistas" (Brazilian-style fascists) launched Plinio Salgado as a candidate to the presidential elections of January of the coming year, but they were aborted in November 10 by the coup that consolidated the Estado Novo (New State) of Getalio Vargas in Brazil. To develop his history;Amado will concentrate in one of the most turbulent periods of this century that up to this day continues to generate extensive bibliographies. The action of Os Subterreineos is situated 28
precisely between Octhber of 1937 (right before the Estado Novo and during the Spanish Civil War) and it finishes November 7 of 1939, on the 23rdanniversary of the proclamation of the Soviet regime in Russia. • Amado, writer and militant, was responsible for various missions. The first consisted of defending the ideals of 1917, incarnated in the figures of Lenin and Stalin, powers invoked many times in the course of the three volumes. Secondly, defending the Messiah that would save Brazil, Luis Carlos Prestes. Not by chance, the trilogy ended with his trial. They were secondary missions, but not less vital: denouncing the Yankee imperialism, condemning the Trotskyist dissidence and portraying Franco as a demon, and fustigating Vargas for having crushed the communist activity since 1935. His characters are implausible puppets who lack self will, soaked in alcohol if they are bourgeois or filled with absolute truth and mineral water ifthey are workers or militants, always obedient to the orders emitted from the banks of the Volga river. The book, composed of three volumes—Os Asperos Tempos (The Rough Times), Agonia da Noite (Night Agony) and A Luz no Turret (The Tunnel Light)—constituted only the first part of a more vast trilogy with pretensions of being the Brazilian War and Peace. They were published in May of 1954, a year after Stalin's death and two years before the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, which forced the •author to interrupt his work. For the second time, in Amado's ,literary journey his fiction will be determined not by an analysis of the Brazilian reality but by decisions taken in Moscow. Omnipresence of the New God The quintessential character ofthe novel is the Communist Party, ubiquitous as the old Christian God and incarnated in the figure of Stalin. The struggle of the Communist Party is the struggle—in the auifiar's view—ofthe Brazilian people against the tyranny of Vargas. The external enemies are the United States, Germany, Franco and Salazar. Without mentioning, of course, the IV International and the Trotskyists. The Communist Party is infiltrated in the dominant class, dispersed in the middle class, and massivelj, present among the workers. It invades the cities and the backcountry, the pampas and the forest, the bourgeois parties, the factories and ports, hearts and minds. "How many others, from Amazonas to Rio Grande do Sul," reflects militant Goncalo, "didn't find themselves in the same situation as him, facing difficult problems, having to solve them without being able to discuss with the leaders and unable to discuss it with the comrades? Goncalo knows that the Party leadership is not that big, one thousand or so all over the country, a few thousand militants to attend to an incommensurable multitude of problems, to keep the struggle in the four corners of the nation—separated by colossal distances— to win endless obstacles, persecuted and chased as beasts by the specialized police, tortured, arrested, murdered. A handful of men, his Communist Party, but this few men were the nation's own heart, its source of vital force, its powerful brain, its powerful arm." This omnipresence extrapolates the country and it is manifested wherever the characters might be, in Uruguay, France, Spain, all over the planet. Inevitable are their references to the hammer and sickle and to Stalin, naturally, guide, master and father. The litany directed towards the great murderer has sometimes the characteristics of black humor: "The more we are," sayimilitant Mariana "more work the leaders will have. Think about Stalin. Who in the world works more than he does? He is responsible for the life of tens of millions of men. Just the other day I read a poem about him: the poet said that when all sleep late at night, a window is still BFtAZZIL -APRIL 1998
lit in the Kremlin, its Stalin's. The destiny of his nation and of his own people always worries him. It was more or less what the poet said, but in prettier words, of course..." The poet is Pablo Neruda, already mentioned in 0 Mundo da Paz: "The light in his cabinet is turned off late. The world and his nation do not allow him to rest." It is part of an ode to Stalin, taken from the Complete Works from the Chilean poet, where one can still find and "Ode to Lenin." Today we know what Stalin was planning late at night in his office. When Apolinario Rodrigues, for example (character inspired by Apolonio de Carvalho, Brazilian official exiled who had participated in the 1935 Intentona) arrives in Madrid, he feels at home because wherever he looks, there is the Party. The only local color of the Spanish capital seems to be the fight for Prestes liberation: "When he arrives in Spain from Montevideo he lives days of intense emotion when he sees all around in a country that is at war, on the bombarded streets of cities and villages, on the walls of the indomitable Madrid, the inscriptions asking for Prestes's liberation. He was surrounded by the color of an intense solidarity developed by the Spanish workers and combatants towards the arrested Brazilian antifascists and Prestes in particular. (...) It was a single fight all over the world, Apolinario thought in face of those inscriptions. The Spanish knew that, and among its hard tasks and multiple sufferings, they extended their solidary hand to the Brazilian people." The coincidence of the establishment ofEstado Novo with the explosion of the Spanish Civil War makes an unique opportunity for Amado to insert his characters in the international conflict that would lead to World War II, exposing at the same time the Party's orientation. So unique is this opportunity and the author wishes to use it so much that he even moves the 1946 Santos (a port city in Sao Paulo) longshoremen's strike to 1938, though lighting a debate. Was he really being loyal to the method that "demands from the artist a concrete and truthful representation of the reality in its revolutionary development?" as the Soviet Writers' Union statutes proclaimed? To him that did not matter too much. By dislocating the strike to 1938, he can create a German ship that comes to Brazil to pick up coffee for Spain. Amado is able to fustigate Hitler, Getnlio and Franco, all at the same time: "In few words (the old Greg6rio) told the reason why the union's leadership had planned that session: the government had offered General Franco, commandant of the Spanish rebels (" a traitor" yelled a voice in the room), a great amount of coffee. There was a German ship at the port ("Nazi" yelled a voice in the room) to take the coffee." In the Spanish Civil War, according to Amado, there are only "Nazi Germans and Fascist Italians." So prodigal in his praise of Stalin and of the Soviet Union, he silences in his trilogy the Russian presence in Spain, constituted by war pilots, military technicians, sailors, interpreters and police. The first foreign presence in Spain was the Soviet, that sent war material and highly qualified military personnel in exchange for three-fourths-7800 boxes, each weighing 65 kg (143 lbs.) of the gold reserves available at the Spanish bank, paid in advance. Amado silences: the truthful concrete representation of rsality in his revolutionary development can wait a little longer. The Party's presence will permeate the trilogy from the first pages of Os Asperos Tempos to the last ones of A Luz no Titnel. The militant Mariana, before she is arrested, watches Prestes trial. The communist leader's voice is the "victorious voice of the Party against terror and reaction:"
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"I want to use this moment that they offer me to speak to the Brazilian people and pay homage today te one of the greatest dates of all history, to the 23 anniversary of the g eat Russian Revoluti n that freed a nation f om tyranny..." It would be re undant and monotonou to follow this ubiquit of the Party in Amado' trilogy. In this universe r igns the absolute good an evil. The good, obviously is represented by the new God, the • roletariat. Evil is the bourgeoisie that holds capital. Chamele sn-like beings, also known as "class traitors" or Party traitors, eventually transit from one universe to the other. Dividing the niverse in two folds, one good and the other bad, doesn't mea anything new and original. This principle comes from the t ird century, through the persian doctrine of Mani (also known as Manes). The scary part is that it is still in practice today, 20th century, and more: imposing tastes, behavior and even party affiliation to the characters of a novel. Those who repres nt the good side are able to love. Those who represent the bad iave mistresses. The good ones drink mineral water. The bad ones drink rum or whiskey. The good are thin and idealists. The bad ones are fat and greedy. The good ones have health teeth, the bad have rotten ones. The good have no possessio s. The bad ones are proprietors. The good are poor, the bad rich. The good belong to the Party or collaborate with it. The others are bad. The good, by the way, are imprisoned in an ideological straitjacket where they can't even be allowed to appreciate a surrealist or naïve painting. Up until 1954, Amado translated in his literature the determinations of he Russian Communist Party. In an interview with Isto E ovember 18, 1981), Amado admits to his Stalinism: "I don't know i the term "socialist realism" is applicable to all my books fro that period. They faced socialist realism but the truth is that ubiaba, Mar Morto and Capitties de Areia from the period yo have referred could only be published in Russian after Stali 's death. I believe this classification is right for Terras do m Fun, Seara Vermelha and Subterra" neos da Liberdade. If there is a book I wrote that is completely influenced by the Stalinism that is Subterreineos da Liberdade that reflects a manichaeistic position." After Khrushchev denounces the crimes of the Stalin regime in 1956, Amado wets his little finger on his tongue and raises it up, to see the direction the wind is now blowing: the direction ofHistory vas then one of a more popular tone, to the style of Rede Globp network. He then starts producing a literature of evasioi around Bahian motifs, but not before doing a timid and dis reet mea culpa, published on October 10 of the same year by he Imprensa Popular: "We are approac ing, my dear, the nine months left to the 20th Congress of the oviet Union Communist Party, the time ofa gestation. This p egnancy of silence is too long and all are asking what could it e hiding or if the mountain isn't giving birth to a mouse. "I believe that w must discuss, freely and deeply, all that moves and agitates e democratic and communist inteniational movement, bu that above all we have to discuss the 29
huge reflexes of the personality cult among us, our huge mistakes, the absurds of all sizes, the dehumanization that, like the most detrimental and poisonous tree, flourished in the manure of this cult elevated to its lowest and rudest forms, and are now suffocating our thoughts and actions. (...) I feel the mud and the blood all around me, but above them I see the light of the new humanism that we want to keep lit, but that was almost drowned by the wave of crimes and mistakes." As if the simple fact he could feel the mud and the blood around himself could redeem him of his past complicities. But the denunciation of the crimes of the Stalin regime did not generate any Nuremberg tribunal and Jorge Amado felt as [ someone naïve, deceived by the winds of the century. However, he did not allow the reissuing of 0 Mundo da Paz. As for his fiction based on the socialist realism continues to be reedited and translated. But the Bahian agitprop feels obliged to change his course and publishes in 1958, Gabriela, Cravo e Canela. In 1961, he releases Os Velhos Marinheiros (The Old Sailors, published as Home Is the Sailor in 1964 in the U.S.), considered as one of his best moments in literature. In this same year he is elected a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, an institution he had stoned and insulted during his youth. In his inauguration speech, with the same naiveté of an urchin recalling past tricks, he reiterates his opposition to the House that receives him:
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"I get to your illustrious companionship with the quiet satisfaction of having been an intransigent adversary of this institution during that period in one's life when one must necessarily be against what is settled and definite. Woe is that young man, that young writer's apprentice, who at the start of his career does not come, sincere and quixotic, assailing the walls and the glory of this House. For me, fortunately, I cast many stones on your windows, many rude adjectives I wasted against your indifference, too much I booed against your composure, many battles I fought against your strength." In response to those who condemned him, he said: "All in life obeys formalities, and if I am a socialist that doesn't mean that I ignore the formal world that surrounds me." From Moscow he receives the support of Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg: "We love Jorge Amado and we trust him. I just saw him in a photograph a little fatter, wearing an academic's gown. I looked at it and smiled. They give a luxurious gown to Brazilian academics. Besides, they use the swords like the French. There is nothing wrong in a simple man of yesterday appearing once a year in an immortal's costume." An Affair With the Yankee Imperialism With the transposition of his novels to TV soap operas, this retired revolutionary becomes a sort of scriptwriter for Rede Globo network. Up to this day he prides himself of his past as a man of the left. But he was the first Brazilian author to personally congratulate Fernando Collor de Mello for his victory. Of course he didn't offer his support when he was being impeached. With this new turn, his books begin to be published in the U.S.. In a 1985 interview with the French translator Alice Raillard in his Bahia mansion we see that from an unconditional enemy of capitalism he becomes a member: "Yes, this house... This house, I always say that it was the American capitalism that allowed me to build it! It was an old dream to have a house in Bahia. (...) To build one? I wished but I didn't have the money. It was then that I sold the rights for Metro Goldwin Mayer to make a movie based on Gabriela." In an interview with the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo in 30
December of 1994 he shows the reporter the mansion bought with the MGM's dollars: "This is the master's bedroom. I spent my life calling Americans all sort of names, but all we have is thanks to the imperialist Yankees' money. We bought this house in 1963 with the money we got from selling the rights of Gabrie/a, filmed only 21 years later. I didn't charge them too much, only $100,000." The partnership with the capitalist enemy turned out to be a lucrative one and allowed Amado to realize the dream of living in the same Paris he had insulted so much when a Marxist: "In 1986, the Americans paid me a big sum in advance for the rights of translation of Tocaia Grande, $250,000. We put our savings together, Zelia and I, and we bought our little place in Marais, Paris." This gentleman, who held up with enthusiasm the worst and most murderous flags of the century and who at the end of his life confesses without any modesty his venality is who represented Brazil in the Book Fair of Paris. But there is nothing to be surprised about. Amado sells to Europe an image Europe accepts as being Brazilian. Once again according to Wilson Martins: "The truth is that our literature has always been seen as something exotic, tropical. That's why Amado is extremely popular in other countries. He offers this stereotype of violence, of conquest of the land, of class struggle and of racial oppression. This exotic idea, this sort of island of the south seas where everyone wears a tanga (loincloth) on the streets, holds a bow and arrow and chases jaguars on Rio Branco avenue (in downtown Rio). When a white Brazilian appears showing a great international culture, he causes an extraordinary surprise. We feed this prejudice with all our might. We want to pass this image of tropicalistas, that this is a tropical country, that we are a mixed race, that whites here don't have a chance. The ones who defend this are these group of `Bahians' and 'new Bahians', the people of the trios eletricos (wired-for-sound trucks used in the Northeast during Carnaval); it is even a prejudice against the culture, in the ecumenical sense of the word." When recently asked how he would like to be remembered in an Encyclopedia 50 years from now, Amado answered with the naïveté ofthe innocent: "As a sensual and romantic Bahian man. I am like my characters—sometimes even the female ones." And maybe it is one of his female characters that better represents the ambivalence of the "sensual and romantic Bahian:" Dona Flor, the one who calmly managed two husbands. By paying homage to Amado, Paris was in reality distinguishing with a medal a venal writer, who rendered the worst disservice to Brazil when fighting to transform it in one more little Soviet republic, all for a rapid literary ascension and personal gain. Translated by Rosemary Gund, freelance translator, rgundAsfsu.edu Janer Cristaldo is a writer, translator and journalist. He got a Ph.D. in French and Compared Literature from Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) with the thesis La Revolte Chez Albert Camus et Ernesto Stibato (The Revolt in Albert Camus and Ernesto Sabato). He published among other books: 0 Paraiso Sexual Democrata (The pemocrat Sex Paradise) (essay), Assim Escrevem os Gafichos (Thus Write the Gauchos) (anthology), A Forca dos Mitos (The Power of Myths) (cronicas), Ponche Verde (Green Poncho) (novel), Mensageiros das Furias (Messengers of the Furies) (essay). You can get in touch with him via his e-mail: cristalAibm.net BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
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BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
Jorge didn't know that those fragile years were his apogee. He didn't even know what an apogee was. Jorge levantou-se da cama num salto. Sentia o espirito leve e o corpo mais ainda. Tudo era muito leve, iluminado, solto, como se urn grande peso que ele carregava ha muitos meses, de tal modo que nem mais o sentia, tivesse subitamente sido retirado de seus ombros. Parecia flutuar, e todas as suas faculdades e sentidos funcionavam bem acima do normal. Olhou o relogio. Duas horas da madrugada. Havia se deitado depois dameia-noite, exausto. Como poderia ter despertado logo em seguida naquele estado de euforia e excitacao? Para onde fora o cansaco? 0 que teria acontecido, dentro ou fora dele, que o puxara do leito corn tamanha energia? Jorge perambulou pe la casa, regou as plantas, fez cafe, tomou banho, observou o mar tranquil° e as ruas desertaspelajanela, guardou as roupas usadas no cesto, agitou-se de varias formas, esperando o tempo passar e o dia amanhecer para tomar o caminho do hospital onde sua me havia sido internada na Unidade de Terapia Intensiva na manha anterior. Jorge era um homem atraente de vinte e seis anos, filho unico, tinha uma namorada bonita e inteligente, e tinha tambem uma amante muito sensual corn quem se encontrava uma vez por semana. Ele nao havia ainda definido a sua futura carreira e sonhava em ser diretor-de-cinema apesar do cinema brasileiro nao existir mais aquela altura. Ou talvez estudasse Ciencia Politica, ou video-arte... Jorge nao sabia que aqueles anos frdgeis eram o seu apogeu. Ele nao sabia sequer o que era um apogeu. Lucia, a me de Jorge, tambem era uma mulher bela e inteligente, de quarenta e nove anos. Divorciada desde muito jovem, professora na universidade local, dinamica e sagaz para a micanica do mundo, ela havia se tornado, desde a infancia do filho, a base financeira e moral daquela pequena familia, a sua inspiracao e o motor que a mantinha em movimento. Alguns meses antes da sua internacao ela havia percebido urn pequeno caroco no seu seio, um tumor maligno como os exames mostraram. Mesmo depois de ter sido mutilada por uma cirurgia radical, o tumor acabou desencadeando em seu corpo um BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
UNPUBLISHED Three by JON) Cesar Monteiro Martins
The Fragile Years
distiirbio imunolOgico que culminaria num edema pulmonar, num quadro irrever lye!. Expelindo sangue pelo nariz e pela boc , ela fora levada para a U.T.I. de urn hospit das proximidades. No momento em que a ma a foi empurrada para dentro da ambulancia ela inda encontrou forcas para levantar o bravo e a enar para ofliho, que respondeu ao aceno da po aria do edificio. Mae e filho haviam conversado pouco obre aquele elemento estranho, o tumor, já ue a cada tentativa de avaliacao racional dos tos, urn novo agravamento, corn novos e inespe ados sintomas, vinha assombra-los. Tudo avia acontecido tao rapid° que era impos ivel assimilar as informacOes e fazer qualque tipo de previsao. A perplexidade de ambo era tamanha que o sofrimento nao chegava at mar forma, e a reacao da familia mais pare la a
excitacao de quern faz urn turismo forcado em terrastotalmente exoticas. Alem disso, Jorge nao conseguia concentrar-se muito naquele panorama tragic°. Quando nao estava mergulhado nos jogos amorosos ou fazendo amor propriamente, estava divagando sobre os setts projetos politicos ou cinematogrdficos, uma fantasia constante corn a qual ele afavva o proprio e incerto ego. As seis e meia, Jorge estacionou o carro no patio do hospital. Encontrou a sua av6 e a sua tia, que haviam passado a noite ern vigilia, sentadas num quarto vazio, ainda a espera de noticias. Elas lembravam, em suas conversas, alguns episodios de infancia e da juventude de sua mae. Jorge achou aquele assunto esquisito e saiu do quarto, atravessou o longo corredor e resolveu postar-se diante da porta da U.T.I., corn as mdos nos bolsos, assistindo aos medicos e enfermeiras entrarem e sairem apressados, ignorando totalmente a sua presenca. Pensou em perguntar alguma coisa sobre a sua mae, mas desistiu ao ver que ninguem responderia a urn homem de pe num corredor. Voltou para o quarto. Ap6s alguns minutos chegou a sua namorada, perguntando pelo estado de sua mae. Ninguem tinha nada a dizer. Jorge pegou na sua mao e levou a garota para o patio. Sentaram-se num banco de cimento proximo a mureta de onde se podia ver grande parte da cidade. Era urn dia nublado. A moca tinha os olhos vermelhos e cansados, o que de certa forma humanizava a sua beleza loura e cldssica. Jorge estava completamente Hid& e descansado, corn o rosto radiante como uma crianca em ferias. —Voce' tambem passou a noite aqui? —Nao, eu fui acordado as duas da manha e nao consegui dormir mais. —Acordado por quern? —Eu nao sei. Fui acordado, s6 isso... —Estranho... —E, estranho... Sai de casa logo que o dia clareou. Nem o jornal tinha chegado ainda. Passei na banca, mas ainda estava fechada... —Pra que voce quer o jornal? —Ue, eu leio jornal todos os dias... —Mas hoje... —0 que é que tern hoje?... Eu estou curioso para saber qual foi a sentenca do Supremo Tribunal sobre o processo do Ministro que aceitou 33
aquela propina de trinta mil Mares de uma empresa de Brasilia. Já é o terceiro Ministro que cai por corrupcao em menos de dois meses. Uma loucura... Esse Govern° é urn circo... Nos saimos de uma ditadura para cairmos na democracia hipocrita de uma oligarquia. Eu nao sei o que é pior, sinceramente... E ninguem reage, ninguern faz nada, como se esses escandalos fossem completamente naturais. Fico pensando se essa indiferenca, essa apatia, nao seriam parte do carater acomodado e covarde do povo... Mas o povo nao é covarde. Ele enfrenta os piores desafios no dia-a-dia. Cheguei a conclusao de que o povo brasileiro esta aturdido. E tanto absurdo, urn apos o outro, que as pessoas nao tem tempo de processar mentalmente as coisas. Ficam totalmente aturdidas... —Voce esta preocupado corn o que vai acontecer corn o Ministro, Jorge?... —Eu estou preocupado corn a situacao do povo brasileiro. Corn o destino deste pais. —Voce e muito estranho. —Eu? Por que? Essas coisas afetam a vida de todo mundo...1.1 —Afetam mesmo? E corn o conflito entre a Armenia e o Azerbaijao, voce nao esta preocupado? — Bern, claro... Mas isso ja é um problema mais distante; que so nos afeta in diretam ente... — Voce esta bem? Esta se sentindo bem? —Claro! Eu estou otimo. Por que essas perguntas todas? Voce nao entende... Se esse Ministro realmente for processado e condenado, o Govern° vai ter que... —Eu nao estou interessada no Governo! Eu you la dentro ver se eles já tern alguma noticia... Se voce quiser, pode ficar me esperando aqui... —Nao, eu you la corn voc 'e. Nao quer° ficar sozinho aqui... No quarto, apenas a aye:, estava sentada em silencio numa poltrona. Os dois entraram, Jorge sentou-se num sofanete e a sua namoradaperguntou se tinham alguma noticia. A avO sacudiu a cabeca. Os tres ficaram em silencio por alguns minutos. De repente a porta se abriu num golpe e a tia entrou esbaforida, suada, corn uma voz esganicada: —Ela morreu! Eles disseram que a Lucia morreu! —Que é isso? —levantou-se a avO. —Como? —0 medico s6 disse que eta morreu faz alguns minutos. —Ai, meu Deus! —gritou a avO, e desabou sobre a poltrona, corn o corpo todo tremendo. —Al, meu Deus, que horror! Minha ftlhinha! A tia tambem comecou a gritar e a chorar, num principio de ataque histerico, e logo uma enfermeira entrou no quarto e a levou para fora, para aplicar-lhe urn tranqui I izante. Behind, there was a line of —A senhora esta bem? —perguntou a namorada A avO de Jorge. black limousines with tinted —Estou, minha filha. Estou... windows hiding politicians and Jorge, ate aquele momento, nao havia se movido ou emitido qualquer som. businessmen. The Military Police screamed: "We wifl Apenas olhava fixo para as praprias maos, corn a cabeca baixa e o rosto crush all those implicated in apagado. the murder, one by one, until —E voce, esta bem, meu amor? the last one." —E mentira... A grande praca defronte ao Palacio daJustica —0 que é mentira, Jorge? estava lotada de cameras, operarios em transit°, —Ela no morreu ha alguns minutos. Ela morreu As duas da madrugada... militantes politicos que distribuiam panfletos e Foi eta quem me acordou. 0 que eu senti foi o alivio que ela me passou. bandos de criancas de rua. Era uma tarde de —Voce quer tomar alguma coisa? mormaco, e eu acabara de enfrentar uma fila de —Nao. duas horas numa agencia bancaria para —Quer caminhar urn pouco la fora? descontar um cheque de pequeno valor, corn o —Nao. qual eu pretendia atravessar a semana. Comprei E entao ele levantou os olhos das maos cruzadas, os olhos grandes, urn cachorro-quente numa barraquinha da praca assustados, as pupilas inquietas, fixou-os nos olhos cansados da namorada, e e, enquant o comia, observava o fluxo continuo pediu, corn voz baixa e calma, corno urn menino bem comportado: de desespero, ladroagem, sexualidade e revolta. —Eu quero a minha Um pandemanio de sustos previsiveis e trauUrn menino perdido no meio de uma multidao que acompanhava as mas coletivos. Uma mulher negra e mil:Ida, de corpo bem atracOes do circo. Ele olhava em volta e nao conseguia encontrar a sua mae entre todos aqueles rostos. E a moca que estava a sua frente, aquela moca loura torneado, mas vestida como uma mendiga, subiu num banco da praca e comecou a tirar a roupa. que segurava a sua mao, so repetia que nao poderia ajuda-lo. Respondendo aos assobios dos pivetes, eta —Eu quer° a minha mae. A minha mae. gritaya, num torn propositalmente vulgar, quase
he State Prima Donna
34 BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
teatral, que "tinha o direito de vender o que era dela", enquanto a sua calcinha de elastic° frouxo caia sozinha na altura dos joelhos. Ela rebolava e passava a mao entre as coxas, entre os pelos, rindo e cantando uma cancao que eu jamais escutara antes, que dizia: "é corn isto aqui que eu you colar no grandao". A cena me despertou nojo, horror, e uma incontrolavel excitacao sexual, que fazia tremer as minhas pernas e as minhas maos. Fiquei preocupado que alguem percebesse o meu tesao pela figura s6rdida e pensei em me afastar dali quando notei que as mars dos outros homens a minha volta tambem tremiam pelas mesmas Logo em seguida urn grande tumulto tomou conta da praca. A multidao estava sendo rasgada por uma tropa de elite do Exercito de Ocupacao, corn o Coronet Maddox a frente, de pe num carro de combate, corn o uniforme de camuflagem, o rosto lambuzado de negro e o capacete ornado por farrapos que imitavam galhos e folhas. A tropa abria passagem para urn cortejo ffinebre. Alguma autoridade nomeada pelos invasores havia sido assassinada por uma bomba da resistencia organizada. 0 Estado, ferido, investia contra as massas, e nos ordenava que sentassemos no chao corn as maos na cabeca, sob a mira das metralhadoras. Enquanto isso, o Estado desfilava pela avenida nos seus melhores paramentos, afirmando de pUblico a sua solidez e a sua vitalidade diante do povo submetido, como uma escola-de-samba as avessas. 0 Cardeal vinha logo atras das tropas, com urn sequito de bispos corn as suas mitras. Eram seguidos pelos comandantes das tres Forcas Armadas, indicados pelo Coronel Maddox, corn seus uniformes verde, branco e azul cobertos de medalhas e gal'Oes. Atras deles, uma fila de limusines pretas corn os vidros escuros guardavam os politicos e os empresarios. A Policia Militar, usando carros corn alto-falantes, gritava ameacadoramente para a massa, corn promessas de vinganca do tipo: "n6s vamos esmagar todos os implicados no atentado, urn por urn, ate o Ultimo, para restabelecer a paz e a ordem no Pais". Todos queriam abandonar aquela praca e sumir dali, mas quern tentasse se le antar seria imediatamente fuzilado. Os carros de combate distribuiram-se em pontos estrat 'gicos e o Coronet Maddox esperava que alguem lhe desse um pretexto para justific r urn massacre exemplar. Ninguem poderia prever quanto tempo demoraria uela demonstracao do aparato do Estado. Eu estava exausto, e as costas me doiam nuito naquela posicao. Foi quando ouvi atras de mim a voz da mulher negra e virei a cabeca. Ela ainda estava de pe no banco, corn a calcinha arriada, passando a mao nos per4elhos e cantando: "d corn isto aqui que eu you colar no grandao". Ela era a imica pessoa de pe em toda a multidao, e rebolava sensualmente como se nada estivesse acontecendo "Vai ser fuzilada agora", pensei. Mas os soldados apenas a observavam, e nem ao menos ord'enaram que descesse do banco ou que parasse de cantar. 0 caixao da autoridade vitimada passou sobre urn carro-de-combate, coberto pela bandeira nacional e pela bandeira do pais invasor. 0 Coronet Maddox perfilou-e em continencia e todos os outros militares o imitaram. A negra apertava os seios, conic, que para tirar leite, rebolava e apontava para os soldados estrangeiros quando cantava o trecho que dizia: "eu you colar no grandao". Alguns soldados riam e zombayam dos colegas de tropa, como que insinuando "é a voce que eta vai agarrar depois". Aos poucos percebi que o Estado nao apenas tolerava a exibicao da mulher louca, mas na verdade nos oferecia aquele espetaculo como urn complemento a exibicao ostensiva de forca das instituicties. Ela era a nossa porta-voz, a nossa Unica voz. Ela nos representava, e era nela que nOs deveriamos nos mirar para compreender que haviamos nos tornado. 0 Coronet Maddox já a havia percebido, e na tambe . Os policiais locais apenas sorriam constrangidos. Eu virei a cabeca para tras novarn4ite, e a mulher estava de quatro, passando os dedos entre as nadegas, cantando cada ve mais alto o seu refrao. Eu me controlei para nao chorar de raiva. Ninguem au i poderia f e-la calar-se. Ela estava sendo sagrada a nossa rainha. A rainha daqueles homens sent dos, imobilizados. Ela estava sendo coroada pelo nosso silencio e pelas risadas dos estrang A noite descia sobre a praca. 0 cortejo parecia interminavel. 0 Coronet Maddox saltou do carro e caminhou entre a multidao inerte, passando em revista os ven idos, batendo corn um rebenque de couro na calca do uniforme. Ele andava em dire ao a mulher, que continuava a sua danca pornografiea e demente. Os bispos a olhavan corn reprovacao, mas ninguem ousaria manifestar-se. 0 Coronet parou diante dela, ri do, e entregou-the o seu rebenque. Ela passou o rebenque por entre as coxas e o esfrego no pelos pubianos para frente e para tras, excitadissima, enquanto repetia: "é corn ist aqui que eu you colar no grandao". 0 Coronet Maddox deu uma gargalhada e bateu pa as, gritando: "Bravo! Bravo!" E toda a tropa repetiu o seu gesto. Eles nos olhavam smo que tentando adivinhar quem seria o pr6ximo a subir no banco. Eu fiquei vermel Lo de &Elio e de vergonha. Mas nao poderia prever entao que corn o tempo a resistencia eria completamente aniquilada e que todos nOs subiriamos naquele banco e cantari mos mais ou menos a mesma musica. BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
and Poor Uteri Darcilia read the note several times and only understood the message when she saw the two bills. She had never received money from a man, but she didn't feel offended, not even sad. She thought she deserved it. 1 —Darcilia Darcilia casou-se corn um mecanico alcoolatra chamado Misael e logo depois teve urn filho de urn homem branco e gordo, de quarenta e cinco anos, dono da oficina mecanica, chamado Gaucho. 0 filho era magrinho, de pele escura e cabelos lisos, e foi registrado corn o sobrenome de Misael e o estranho primeiro nome de Wayrrington. Logo apos o nascimento de 35
Wayrrington, Dare ilia abandonou Misael para sempre, e nem chegou a informar Gaucho de que ele tivera urn filho novo. Darcilia amamentou Wayrrington em demasia, e seus peitos cairam e murcharam como bexigas vazias. As chances de sucesso de Darcilia ficaram bastante reduzidas, apesar de seus dezessete anos de idade, mas eta no desanimou. Encontrou um figura() coosertando o seu carronuma outraoficina mecanica (Darcilia sentia-se em casa em qualquer oficina mecanica) e ofereceu-se ao figura°, chamado Mauricio Ricardo, que a aceitou para as sete horas daquela mesma noite. Darcilia deixou o seu Wayrrington corn sua mae Ercilia e esperou o figura° aparecer de carro em frente ao supermercado Rainha. Mauricio Ricardo (que na verdade se chamava Sergio Luis, mas sempre enganava o nome neste tipo de encontros) levou Darcilia para o seu luxuoso apartamento na praia e s6 usou cam isinha na primeira vez, porque s6 tinha uma em casa. Serviu-lhe um vinho vagabundo e perguntou-lhe: "Voce nunca bebeu vinho frances na vida, ndo que tat, hein?" Darcilia estava encantada corn o figura°, e achou-se a mulher de mais sorte no mundo. Para agradecer-lhe todo aquele luxo do jeito que ele gostaria, destrinchou-se em posicOes estrambolicas, ficou de quatro, frango-assado, espetinho e varias outras, aproveitando-se de seu corpo mulct° e flexivel. Quando pediu que Mauricio Ricardo lhe chupasse os peitos, ele recusou dizendo: "Que isso?! Ve se te enxerga..." E eta murmurou baixinho: "Voce é maravilhoso, mas nao me completou..." Na manila seguinte, Darcilia acordou num pubo e percebeu que o apartamento estava vazio. Do seu lado, sobre a cama, um bilhete dizia: "Moca, tive que sair cedo. Deixei urn presentinho na mesinha de cabeceira. Quando sair é s6 bater a porta. Ate a prOxima. M.R." Darcilia leu varias vezes o bilhete e sa o compreendeu inteiramente quando viu as duas notas, nem grandes nem pequenas, dobradas ao lado do abajur giratorio. Ela nunca tinha recebido dinheiro de homem, mas ndo ficou ofendida, nem mesmo triste. Na verdade, achava que merecia. Darcilia comprou uma sandalia de plastic° transparente para sua mae Ercilia e uma mola de plastic° para Wayrrington, que ele arrebentou em poucos minutos. De sua mac, vaidosa corn a sandalia nova, Darcilia ouviu 36
urn conselho definitivo: "Da proxima vez que sair corn um figurdo, fique de camiseta, esconda os peitinhos. SO tiro tudo corn a luz apagada e se ele ja estiver bastite bebado, ouviu bem9".
elissa Maria Auxiliar s Santos ndo era nome de candidata a MisSum Burn 92. Foi o maquiador, Pinky, quoin a batizou de Melissa Jackson na ante-vespera do desfile. A nide de Melissa, Dona Zelia, costureira a domicilio, ex-Miss Paracambi, havia examinado discretamente as bundas das outras concorrentes e garantiu a filhinha que nenhuma tinha a bunda igual a dela, e que eta sO ndo ganharia o Concurso se tivesse marmelada da grossa. Naquela noite, Melissa quase quebrou o pescoco de tanto virado para olhar a prOpria bunda no espelho do armario do quarto. Melissa estava super-conflante rto,triunfo da sua bunda e nem desconfiava (le title as suas concorrentes disputavam a inarmelada aos tapas e que a perfeicdo parabolica da sua musculatitra glittea era o que menos contava para o resultado final do Concurso. Foi a sua nova amiga, Vanessa Bustamante, uma gordinha de nadegas fartas, que cobria o rosto espinhento corn longos cabelos encaracolados e que ndo tinha a menor chance de sucesso na competicao, quem the explicou que Melissa terlaLqUefarranjar urn jeito de dar pro Billy naqu te ainda, se ndo quisesse "morrer de corn° urn peru". Billy, ou Severino RI tda Costa, era o organizad do Concurs pon !2, alem do Garo Cidade Maravilhosa, 4o fiatitera do Rio e Garota Meyer Tenis Clubb.t3illy era moren magrinho, careca, de costeletas longas e usava cam isas corn grandes estampas de flores, sempre abertas no peito. Todas as candidates precisavam con*Bly para entrar na disputa, e de tanto precisateki da sua aprovacao ja comecavam a deseja-io fortemente. Todas ja haviam passado pela sua cama pelo menos uma vez, e para Melissa aquela era a sua Ultima chance de igualar-se as outras: "Gracas a Deus a Vanessa abriu o jogo a tempo..." Para chegar ao Billy, Melissa pediu a ajuda de Pinkyl que por sua vez pediu a ajuda de Nestor, o argentino secretario de Billy, corn quem Melissa jamais tinha falado antes. Nestor mostrou-se muito solicit° e disse que compreendia a urgencia da gatinha,knas que o Billy so chegaria as duas horas da ranha, e ainda ndo eram nove horas: "Tudo vtafdepender de voce, mi querida. Vanros arta* o meu studio. Se voce merecer, a las darisjp infio voce na cama do Billy. Pero so se voce in‘recer..." Melissa Jicksori perdeu a virgindade mordendo o ded° indicador sobre uma esteira de palha no chao do studio do ex-guardador de carros e pequeno vendedor de maconha Nestor Artigas Munoz, criado pela mae solteira, tambem costureira a dornicilio, num cortico da cidade de Rosario. Uma e meia da madrugada e Melissa ja
estava aflita. Tinha merecido ou nao? Nestor cumpriria a promessa de tentar fazer com que Billy ainda transasse corn ela naquela noite? "Gatinha, no fiques nerviosa, tá? Voce ja esta quase merecendo. Para merecer cien por ciento jo necessito penetrar nessa tua bundinha de competiciOn..." Melissa apavorou-se, mas cedeu. Pensou na fama, nos des-files, nos autografos, na buate Hippopotamus, no patrocinio da Company, na capa da Playboy, numa ponta na novela da Globo e jura que nao sentiu nada. Olhou o relOgio, duas e cinco, e implorou ao argentino que a levasse ate o quarto do Billy, antes que fosse tarde demais. Nestor pediu-lhe que esperasse urn minuto, saiu do studio e voltou algum tempo depois dizendo que sentia muito mas que naquela noite nao seria possivel porque a Nadja Valeria e a Patricia Evelyn já estavam na cama corn o Billy, onde ficariam ate a manha seguinte. Melissa vestiu a roupa, desesperada, correu para a rua e tomou um taxi para casa. Deitou na cama ao lado de Dona Zelia e chorou tao forte que acordou a mae. "Amanha é o seu dia. Sua bunda é linda, minha filha. Voce nao precisa ficar tao nervosa. Voce vai ganhar, o resto é tudo bunda-mole. Eu vi corn esses olhos que a terra ha de corner..." "Nao, mamae, nao! Eu nao you desfilar amanha.:." "Como nao vai, minha filha?" "Eu nao estou preparada, mamae. Nao flea tristinha, nab. Olha, daqui a urn mes tern o Concurso Garota Babilonia, que tarnbem é concurso de bum-bum, e al eu prometo que eu you comecar a me preparar corn bastante antecedencia, pra nao acontecer de novo o azar que aconteceu agora..."
3 —Rosilene Era o dia da colheita nos restaurantes. Rosilene conferiu a sua lista. S6 no Picanha de Ouro eta tinha uma pequena fortuna para recolher, por conta dos dez por cento das despesas daquele grupo de jovens turistas da Sicilia que comeram ate lagosta e so pediram vinhos caros. Mas era raro conseguir urn grupo assim, e em geral Rosilene aparecia nos restaurantes acompanhada de apenas urn turista, sempre urn italiano. Que s6 tinha fome por ela mas que nao poderia ficar em paz corn a sua consciencia europeia comendo a noite toda uma brasiieira desnutrida. Entao Rosilene aproveitava e o conduzia a um dos restaurantes corn os quais ela tinha BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
"convenio" e sugeria os pratos mais caros, fazia o italiano beber bastante e o beijava na boca e no pescoco ardentemente na hora de conferir a conta. Rosilene tinha dezenove anos, e hates, junto corn todas as suas colegas mais bonitas do bairro de Maria daGraca, entrara no negOcio de "turismo". No primeiro ano elas jam dancar todas em bando na discoteca Help e cobravam cem Mares pela transada de uma hora num motel ou duzentos &Hares para passar a noite inteira. Somente no segundo ano de atividades turisticas Rosilene aprendeu que uma transada poderia the render bem mais que duzentos (Wares se ela participasse dos "convenios" corn os restaurantes. Rosilene dividia o apartamento de Copacabana corn Fatima Regina, uma mulata alta, de boca enorme e sensual, corn quern nunca conversava por mais do que cinco minutos porque a companheira dormia e roncava o tempo todo que estava no apartamento. Fatima era desorganizada e, ao contrario de Rosilene, ndo cuidava muito da sua higiene corporal. Sua gaveta vivia aberta, e dentro dela mil papeis coin telefones e nomes de homens: Massimo, Stefano, Roberto, Giovanni, Cesare, Enrico, Enzo, Paolo... Urn dos motivos que levava Rosilene diariamente ao periplo de restaurantes e de mot& era juntar dinheiro para morar sozinhae livrar-se dos roncos de Fatima Regina. Mas o motivo principal era comprar roupas. Rosilene adorava comprar roupas novas. Gostava muito mais de comprd-las do que de usd-las depois, e muitas de suas roupas mais caras ela s6 vestira uma vez, na cabine fechada da butique. Carlo Greco, seu namorado daquela noite, convidara Rosilene para ir ao ensaio de uma escola-de-samba que ele fazia questa() de conhecer antes de voltar para a sua Milk). Era urn grupo animado de italianos, e neste grupo havia Gino Restelli, urn homem alto, louro, corn urn sorriso largo muito branco e os olhos azuis. Rosilene descobriu que Gino era dono de umagrande empresa de pescados congelados de Genova. BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
No tumulto do samba, corn a quadra do Salgueiro lotada, Rosilene arranjou um jeito de "per er-se" de Carlo e fazer de Gino o seu novo par. q rapaz ficou encantado corn a nova namorada, m rena, alta, de olhos negros tdo vivos, tdo lind corn sua camiseta branca quase transparent e sua calca de jeans claro rasgada no joelho como ditava a moda. ApOs algumas cervej as e lguns passos desajeitados de samba, Gino cony dou-a para ir ao seu apartamento. Rosilene dis e que estava corn fome e que precisava comer a guma coisa antes. Gino sorriu de contentam nto e assegurou que ele mesmo prepararia assin que chegasse um "Spaghetti Alla Carb ara" incomparavel ate mesmo na sua Italia. Disse, orgulhoso, que tinha trazido a massa e todos os outros ingredientes consigo, na sua mala. Rosilene torceu o nariz. Teria que abrir nAo do convenio naquela noite se quisesse fica corn Gino. Mas pelo menos salvaria os seus du entos &dares. "Voce vai querer que eu fique a noite toda corn voce ou s6 uma horinha?" 0 apaz pediu que ela repetisse a frase, e depois e tres tentativas ek compreendeu a pergunta. Sorriu de novo, urn sorriso de menino grande, e deu a entender que tido sO queria que ela ficass corn ele aquela noite toda como tambem to as as oito noites ate a sua partida para a Italia. pisse isto e passou a ma° de leve no seu osto, confiante. Ao ouvir isto, o coracdo fina ceiro de Rosilene bateu forte: "Oito noites, carissimo Gino, sdo mil e seicentos &dares, sendo que oitocentos voce me dá hoje e os outros oitocentos na vespera da sua viagem, tá legal, amore." Ele a olhou fixo, em silencio, corn o rosto so brio, durante varios minutos, assimilando a pro osta, e entdo, corn o sangue lhe subindo as ces, levantou o punho fechado, gritando: Una puttana! Porco dio maledetto..." e virou-1 e as costas, caminhando a passos largos para seu carro. Bateu a porta e arrancou, deix: ndo Rosilene sozinha de pe na calcada, assimil ndo a reacdo surpreendente do italiano dece cio-
nado: "Quern ek pensa que eu sou? Um peixe congelado?". Rosilene conseguiu uma carona de volta corn O namorado de uma antiga coleguinha da Help, e chegou a Copacabana amargando o prejuizo. "Mais alguns idiotas como esse e eu you ter que voltar a morar corn mamde no subOrbio..." Abriu a porta e encontrou o apartamento vazio, corn roupas jogadas pelo chdo da sala, a porta da geladeira aberta e a televisao ligada. Xingou Fatima Regina em pensamento e desabou sobre o sofa. Ndo tinha sono aquela hora, mas estava furiosa demais para sair novamente. Já dera aquela noitada como perdida. Tomou urn tranqiiilizante corn uisque e largou-se estirada no sofa. Antes de pegar no sono, ainda viu pela televisdo urn velho poeta de cabelos longos, sentado diante de urn piano negro, dizer num torn de voz rouco e embriagado: "A mulher... Ah, a mulher... E a coisa mais bonita que Deus ja botou no mundo... A mulher divina... 0 ventre da mulher sagrado...". The original titles of these short stories are respectively "Os Anos Frageis", "A Prima-Dona do Estado", and "Mulheres Pobres corn Uteros Profanos." Julio Cesar Monteiro Martins, the author, was born in Niteroi, in the Greater Rio, in 1995. He has published several short-story books: Torpalium, Sabe
Quem Dancou?, A Oeste de Nada, As Forcas Desarmadas, and Muamba. Monteiro Martins is also the author of three novels: Arterias e Becos, Bdrbara, 0 Espaco Imagindrio and a volume of essays: 0 Livro des Diret as. He is one of the founders of the Brazilian Green Party and from 1992 to 1994 has worked as a lawyer for the Brazilian Center in Defense of Children's Rights. He taught literary creation at the Goddard College in the U.S. and is now a professor in Italy, teaching literary creation and Brazilian literature in colleges in Piza, Florence, Lucca and Pistoia. You can get in touch with the author by sending e-mail to monteiro.martinsArom.uninlit 37
Clear Water an Traditions Para state is more than Belem and Santarem. It also includes a major stretch of the Amazon river as well as some huge tributaries as the Trombetas, Tapajos and Xingu. Para is also home of Ifha de Marajo, one of the world's largest fluvial islands. ILHA DO MOSQUEIRO Mosqueiro is the weekend beach for Belenenses (inhabit ants of Belem, in the northeastern state of Para), who attempt to beat the heat by flocking to the island's 19 freshwater beaches on the east side of the Baia de Maraj6. It's close enough to Belem for plenty of weekend beach houses, and some well-to-do Belenenses even commute to the city. The island is particularly crowded between July and October. The beaches are not nearly as nice as those on Ilha de Marajo or the Atlantic coast, but ifyou want to get out of Belem for just a day they're not had. Beaches The best beaches are Praia do Faro!, Praia Chapeu Virado and the more remote Baia do Sol Festivals Mosqueiro's traditional folklore festival, held in June, features the dance and music ofcarimbo and bois-bumbas. In July, during the Festival de Vera°, the island shows off some of its art and music. The Cid() de Nossa Senhora do 0, the principal religious event on the island, is celebrated on the second Sunday of December. Like Belem's Cirio, this event is a very beautiful and joyous event, and well worth seeing if you're in Belem at the time. PRAIA DO ALGODOAL & MARUDA Algodoal attracts younger Belenenses and a handful of foreign travelers. This beautiful spot, with its dune-swept beaches and sometimes turbulent sea, is very remote, with a small fishing village and simple hotels. But all this may change, hopefully not too radically, because Algodoal is in the process of being 'discovered'. The name Algodoal comes from the Portuguese word algodcio which means cotton (the sand dunes when viewed from a distance resemble hills of cotton). Ilha de Maiandeua, the Indian term for mile terra (mother land), is the name of the island. Maruda is a poor fishing village with a couple of cheap hotels and a respectable beach, so it's no problem if you're stuck there overnight. Cars cannot make the journey to Algodoal and will have to be left in Maruda. Things to See & Do Lagoa da Princesa is a freshwater lake about an hour's walk inland from Algodoal. The dark water of the lake is surrounded by white sand and native vegetation. The tropical forest reserve of Rio Centenario, the largest igarape on the island, has a 38
forest of miritizeiros (the Amazonian royal palm) and other native species. Ilha do Marco (Praia da Marieta) is about 10 km by boat from Algodoal, and has a petrified-tree cemetery, interesting rock formations and a natural swimming pool. There are no local tour operators or guides on the island. You could try contacting the Cabanas Hotel's manager, Lula, who enjoys showing the island to tourists. SALINOPOLIS Salinopolis is Para's major Atlantic coastal resort, with good beaches (such as Praia da Atalaia) and some mineral spas. There are plenty of summer homes here, and during the July holiday month, Salinopolis is very crowded. If you want beautiful, deserted Brazilian beaches, this is not really the best place to go. ILHA DE MARAJO Ilha de MarajO, one of the largest fluvial islands in the world, lies at the mouths of the Amazon and Tocantins rivers. The island's 250,000 inhabitants live in 13 municipalities and in the many fazendas spread across the island. Although visiting the island is fairly straightforward for independent travelers, many travel agencies in Belem offer package tours to the main town (Soure) and remote fazendas. History Researchers have discovered that the island was inhabited between 1000 BC and 1300 AD by successive Indian civilizations. The first of these, known as the Ananatuba civilization, was followed by those ofthe Mangueiras, the Formiga Marajoara and, finally, the Arta The ceramics produced by these civilizations were ornamented with intricate designs in black, red and white. The best examples of these ceramics are displayed at the Museu Emilio Goeldi in Belem. The resemblance of these designs to those found in Andean civilizations prompted the theory amongst some researchers that the inhabitants of Ilha de Maraj6 had originally floated down the Amazon from the Andes. In 1991, a team of international archaeologists reported the discovery of pottery fragments near Santarem which were estimated to be between 7000 and 8000 years old. These fragments predate what was previously considered the oldest pottery in the Americas. Geography Ilha de Maraj6, slightly larger in size than Switzerland, has close to 50,000 sq. km of land, which divides into two geographical regions of almost equal size. The eastern half of the island is called the regicio dos campos. This area is characterized by low-lying fields with savanna-type flora, and sectioned by strips of remaining forest. Various palm trees and dense mangrove forests line the coast. The island's western half, the regido da mata, is primarily forest. Climate Marajo has two seasons: the very rainy, from January to June, and the dry (less rainy!), from July to December. During the rainy season, much of the island turns into swamp and the ,regicio dos campos becomes completely submerged under a meter or more of water. The island's few roads are elevated by three meters, but are nonetheless impassable during the rainy season. Fauna The herds of buffalo which wander the fields provide Marajo's sustenance, being well adapted to the swampy terrain. There are many snakes, most notably large boas. The island is filled with birds, especially during the BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
dry season, including the guard, a graceful flamingo with a region comes to Soure for the festival, so accommodation can long, curved beak. The sight of a flock of deep-pink guards be difficult t find. The festival of Sao Pedro, on 29 June; is a flying against Maraje's green backdrop is truly spectacular. very colorful elebration, and includes a maritime procession. Soure If you're int buffalo culture, the Agro-Pecuaria fair is held Soure (pronounced ' sorry '), the island's principal town, is during the thi d week of September. on the Rio Paracauari, a few km from the Baia de Mar*. The Salvaterra tide along the city's shore oscillates a remarkable three meters. Salvaterra is separated from Soure by a short boat ride With regular boat service from Belem and easy access to several across the riv r. Shuttle boats leave every hour during the day of the best beaches and fazendas, Soure is probably the best and cost $0.5 . A 10-minute walk from town, Praia Grande de place to stay on the island, since the introduction of the ferry to Salvaterra is long, picturesque beach on the Baia de Marajo. Camara, Selvaterra is becoming more popular. It's popular o weekends, when the barracas open, but often Like all the island's coastal towns, Soure is primarily a windy. This i a good place to see the beautiful fenced corrals fishing village, but it's also the commercial center for the which dot M ajo's coastline (from the air, they appear as a island's buffalo business, and these animals rule the place like string of he shapes). The corrals are simple fences with kings. The townsfolk work around the buffalo, or sometimes netting that u the falling tide to capture fish. with or on them, but never obstruct their passage: right of way Salvaterra has restaurants and accommodation along the in town belongs indisputably to the buffalo! Praia Grande beach. PousadaAnastácia hâs simple room ($18) Warning and a rustic r staurant, Pousada Tropical, on Avenida Beira Bichos de pe (unpleasant jigger bugs that burrow into Mar, next to tF e inlet Cerrego da Praia Grande, has very basic human feet) are found in and around the towns, and the island rooms for $9/ 2 a single/double. Pousada dos Guarcis (241has many other, nasty parasites. 0891 in Belem for reservations) has Keep your head on your shoulders its own transport and guides to take and shoes on your feet. you around to beaches and tourist Beaches spots. It charges $64/71 for singles/ Marajo Buffalo The bay beaches near Soure doubles. The pousada also has two Legend has it that a French ship was sail ng to are excellent and look more like and three-day packages with tours French Guyana with a load of buffalo that t had ocean beaches. The beach is often included. If you're in a hurry or want picked up in India. However, the boat sank o f the covered with exotic seeds washed someone else to take care of everyshore of Ilha de Maraje and the buffalo swam to 'hore. down from the Amazon forests. thing for you, it's a good deal, but Today, Maraje is the only place in Brazil here Praia Araruna, the most beautiful there is no other reason to take the buffalo roam in great number, and there are thou ds beach, is also the closest, just a packaged option. of them. These are not the furry American bison f the 10-minute taxi ride from town. Around Ilha de Marajo American plains, but a tough skinned, hairless b ffalo Ask the driver to pick you up at a From Salvaterra, a dirt road goes that looks like a macho Indian Brahma bull. set hour...and pay then. You can to Camara (24 km) and then continThere are four different uses for buffalo in M aj6: also walk the five km to the beach; ues to Cachoeira do Arari (51 km), a meat, dairy products, traction and breeding. hree ask for directions in town. The very pretty, rustic town, which requalities make buffalo better suited than ca le to road passes through farmland portedly has a pousada. Maraje's environment. First, day can survive th wet where you might spot a flock of To the north, accessible only by season when much of the land turns into swam • s or guarcis, then follow two pedesplane is the town of Santa Cruz do lagoons, buffalo can walk on the soft ground with their trian bridges across the lagoons to Arari, on the immense Lagoa Arari. wide hooves, and they can swim when the wate gets the beach. The bay here, 30 km This town is completely submerged deep. Second, their tough, three-layered hide is a le to from the ocean, has both fresh and during the rainy season, and is fawithstand the bites of the island's many snake and salt water. At low tide, you can mous for its fishing. parasites, and third, the buffalo can at almost anywalk about five km in either direcThe western half of the island is thing, and will even dive underwater to obtain s od. tion. The beach is deserted during less populated and less interesting the week, and could scarcely be for travelers. There are boat services called crowded on weekends. to the city of Breves, which has a Praia do Pesqueiro is 13 km pousada. Aftia, on the northern from town (a 25-minute drive). shore, is built on water and also has Ask about buses at Soure. There a pousada. Both of these cities are are barracas serving great caranlinked to Belem by air-taxi. guejo (crab) and casquinha de Ilha Caviana, an island lying cccranguejo (stuffed crab), but offthe north coast of Ilha de Maraj6, lousy shrimp. When you're facing is an excellent base from which to the sea, the best beach section lies observe the pororoca (the thunderto your right. Do not swim in the ous collision 'between the Atlantic shallow lagoon between the tide and the Amazon). The best barracas and the sea: it harbors time to see this phenomenon is beprickly plants. tween January and April, at either 0 Curtume full or new moon. Marcello Morelio Ifyou head Upriver about a 10(Tel.: 223-4784) is a local pilot/ minute walk from town, you'll guide who shuttles between Belem come to an old, simple tannery and Ilha de Marajo. He charges which sells sandals, belts and $200 per $1000 per group (a maxisaddles made from buffalo. The merchandise on sale isn't very mum of six peo le) for a flight to Ilha Caviana to see the good, but it's illuminating to see the production line to the pororoca. finished product. The tannery is located next door to the Tours slaughterhouse. Excursions to Ilha de Maraj6 are offered by a number of Festivals agencies in Belem including Murure Turismo (Tel.: 241-0891); On the second Sunday of November, Soure has its own Gran-Para Turismo (Tel.: 224-3233), at Avenida Presidente Cirio de Nazare. The festival features a beautiful procession, Vargas 676; Carimbo Viagens e Turismo (Tel.: 223-6464), at and the town bursts with communal spirit. Everyone in the Travessa Piedade 186; Vianney Turismo (Tel.: 241-5638), at BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
39
Travessa Padre Eutiquio 2296; and Mundial Turismo (Tel.: SANTAREM 223-1981), at Avenida Presidente Vargas 780. Excursions Santarem is a pleasant city with a mild climate (22°C to include transport (by either boat or plane) and full board at a 36°C), Atlantic breezes, calm waters and beautiful forests. The hotel in Soure or at one of the remote fazendas. As a rough rule region around Santarem was originally inhabited by the Tapuicu of thumb, most of these package deals cost around $150 per Indians. In 1661, over three decades after Captain Pedro person per day if the trip is done by plane, or $60 per person per Teixeira's expedition first contacted the Tapuicu, a Jesuit day if the trip is done by boat. mission was established at the meeting of the Tapajos and PROJETO GRANDE CARAJAS Amazon rivers. In 1758 the village that grew around the mission If any project defies superlatives to describe its scale, it is was named Santarem, after the city of that name in Portugal. the Projeto Grande Cara*. The multifocal project centers In 1867, a group of 110 Confederates from the breakaway around the world's largest deposit of iron ore, but only $4.5 Southern states of the USA emigrated to Santarem, where they billion of the project's $60 billion budget will be directed attempted to start new lives as farmers or artisans. Only a towards the extraction of iron ore. The rest of the money is to be handful of these settlers managed to prosper; the rest drifted invested in the extraction of the area's other metals—mangaaway from Santarem, were killed off by disease, or accepted the nese, copper, bauxite, nickel, potassium and gold, all found offer of a free return passage on an American boat to the USA. near the Serra Pelada—and in the development of an industrial Later developments in Santarem's history included the zone whose size (400,000 sq. km) rivals that of California. boom-and-bust cycle of the rubber plantations, and a series of In the tradition of previous Amazonian scale enterprises, gold rushes which started in the 1950s and have continued to such as Henry Ford's Fordlandia and Daniel K Ludwig's _Tani this day. The construction of the Transamazonica highway (in pulpwood project, the Cara.* project 1970) and the Santarem-Cuiaba highstarted with American support. The venway (completed six years later) attracted ture began as a partnership between US hordes of immigrants from the NorthSteel and Companhia Vale do Rio Doce east, few of whom were able to establish The Legend of (CVRD), a Brazilian company funded more than a brief foothold before abanby both private and public capital. When doning the region for the favelas of Praia da Princesa iron prices dropped on the world market, Manaus or Belem. Legend has it that long ago an enchantUS Steel pulled out of the collaboration. The economy is based on rubber, ing green-eyed, blonde-haired princess lived The minerals are transported along hard woods, brazil nuts, black pepper, on Praia da Princesa. Her home was a white the 900-km railroad from Cara.* to the mangoes, soybeans, jute and fish. The sand-dune castle, and she appeared only on Atlantic coast at Sao Luis, Maranhao. past 20 years has seen rapid developthe night of a full moon. There, at the Porto de Ponto da Madeira, ment, with the discovery of gold and At that time, turtles used to lay eggs on large ships are loaded for export to Eubauxite and the construction of the the beaches and dolphins would come to rope and Asia. In 1994, CVRD boasted Curtia-Una hydroelectric dam. With the play with big fish around the island. a record year for iron-ore sales: 100 deterioration ofthe road links to Santarem Wanting to teach men how to take care million tons. Eight million kilowatts of the area is suffering from its isolation of the island, she appeared before a young power for the project are already being from the rest of Para. There is a popular fisherman. The fisherman, afraid of drowngenerated by the Tucurui dam (on the movement to form a new state ofTapajos, ing in the lake of the big snakes which Rio Tocantins), and seven more dams to guarantee that government funding defended the castle, ran away. The princess are planned for the Tocantins and its reaches the area. cried, saying that if men did not stop detributaries. The environmental effects of Orientation stroying the island, she would have to go to clearing this much jungle, burning this Santarem lies 21/2° south of the equaanother beach. Since that time, the turtles much wood and flooding this much land tor, at the junction of the Tapajos and have stopped laying eggs on the beaches, will undoubtedly be stupendous. CVRD Amazon rivers, about halfway between and the dolphins and big fish have all gone maintains that they have a responsible Manaus and Belem, and only 30 meters away. attitude towards preserving flora and above sea level. Although it's the third Several men have drowned at Praia da fauna and limiting the project's impact largest city on the Amazon, Santarem is Princesa It is said they were lured into the on the environment. merely a sleep backwater in comparison water by a green-eyed, blonde-haired SERRA PELADA to Manaus and Belem. woman. At its peak, in 1984, the Serra The city layout is simple: the CuiabaPelada gold mines, near the Cara.* Santarem highway runs directly to the project, west of Mamba, had 400,000 Docas do Para, dividing the city into old miners and hangers-on scraping away at the earth. With the (eastern) and new (western) halves. East from the Docas do digging done by hand, the site resembled a human anthill. It was Para, where the large boats dock, is Avenida TapajOs, which not the whip but the promise of gold that drove prospectors to runs along the waterfront and leads to the marketplace and work like commercial district. slaves. The mine area, a huge pit with crisscrossing claims, Waterfront rivaled the pyramids in scale and epic sweep. Walk along the waterfront of Avenida Tapaj6s from the During the 1980s, the CVRD, which operates the nearby Docas do Para to Rua Adriano Pimentel. This is where drifters, Projeto Grande Cara*, claimed the mineral rights to the area loners and fisherfolk congregate. Include a stop at Mercado de and attempted to wrest control of the mines from the prospecPeixes (Fish Market) and the floating market. tors. The enraged prospectors protested strongly, staging a Centro Cultural JoAo Fona march on Brasilia and threatening to raid the Projeto Grande The Centro Cultural, at Praca Barao de Santarem, features Cara*. In 1984 the government compromised by paying $60 a collection of pre-Columbian pottery. million to CVRD in compensation and then recognizing the River Beaches prospectors' claims. Santarem's natural river beaches are magnificent. As elseIn 1995 there were a mere 3000 or so miners endeavoring to where in the Amazon, the seasonal rise and fall of the waters scrape out a living or save enough money to leave. Without the uncovers lovely white river beaches, and sweeps them clean of resources to maintain and drain the open cut, mining has debris at the end of the beach season. become too dangerous and unworkable to be very productive. Festivals It seems that CVRD is biding its time until the area is abanThe Indian Festa do Saire and the Christian ceremony of doned. Nossa Senhora da Saude have been celebrated on 23 June at Alter do Chao since 1880. The Saire is a standard which is held 40
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aloft to lead a flower-bedecked procession. This is perhaps a re-enactment of the historic meeting between the Tapuicus and the Portuguese, or pos§ibly a ritual which originated when the Jesuits introduced Christianity to the Indians. The patron saint of fisherfolk, SAo Pedro, is honored with a river procession on 29 June, when boats decorated with flags and flowers sail before the city. Fishing enthusiasts should note that October and November are the best months to fish for pirarucu and tucunare in the Rio Itaqui and Lago Grande de Curuai. Things to Buy Artesanato Dica Frazao, a clothing and craft shop, is at Rua Floriano Peixoto 281. The proprietor, Senhora Dica, creates women's clothing from natural fibers, and patchwork decOrated hammocks. Loj a Regional Muiraquitd and Souvenir Artesanatos, both on Rua Senado Lameira Bittencourt, sell local handicrafts. Places to Eat Succulent species of local fish include curimakijaraqui, surubim, tucunare and pirarucu. Local dishes are cassava: manicoba is made from pork and cassava while pato no tucupi is a duck and cassava-root concoction. Restaurante 0 Mascote, at Praca do Pescador 10 (just off Rua Senador Lameira Bittencourt), has music in the evenings. Fish meals start at $7; try the caldeirada de peixe and tucunare recheado. Restaurante Tapaiu, in the lobby of the Hotel Tropical, also has a pleasing menu. Try Peixaria Canta Gabo on Travessa Silva Jard im for good fish dishes. Restaurante Lumi, on Avenida Cuiaba, not far from the Hotel Tropical, has Japanese-style food. Casa da Vinoca, on Travessa Turiano Meira, has goodvalue snacks and ice cream. Mascotinho on Rua Adriano Pimentel, is an outdoor bar where you can enjoy a beer, pizza and snacks overlooking the Rio Tapajos. Boat—Anticipate three days to Manaus, three days to Belem and 12 hours to Itaituba. Cabins are normally already taken in Manaus or Belem. Docas do Para, the deep-water pier, is where most of the boats to Belem and Manaus depart. The various private companies have booths in front of the main gate to the Docas, where you can check schedules and buy tickets. Ticket prices with Agencia Tarcisio Lopes (Tel.: 522-2034) are $61/96 per person in hammock/cabin accommodation to Belem, $45/84 to Manaus. The ENASA office (Tel.: 522-1934) is at the Eletrocenter shop, at Travessa Francisco Correa 34, and is open Monday to Friday from 7.30 to 11.30 am and 2 to 6 pm, and on Saturday from 8 am to noon. The river trip between Santarem and Belem includes an interesting section downstream from Monte Alegre: the Narrows, where the boat passes closer to jungle. It's a breezy ride; the endless view of long, thin, green strips of forest and wider bands of river and sky is OK for the first day, but after a while, you'll start talking to your hammock and chewing on the life belts. There is also a twice-weekly boat service ($21/18 in 1st/2nd class, two days) between Santarem and Porto Santana, the major port, 20 km down the coast from Macapa (Amapa state). AROUND SANTARtM Alter do Chao The village of Alter do Chao, a weekend resort for the people of Santarem, is upstream on the kio Tapajos. Alter do Chao has good fishing, a beautiful turquoise lagoon and white-sand beaches. It was once a sacred site for the Tapajos Indians. Due to improved access, many travelers are now finding it a more attractive option than Santarem. Centro de Preservacao da Arte Indigena Cultura e Ciencias This excellent and comprehensive exhibit of Indian art and artifacts, located on Rua Dom Macedo, far surpasses any such museums in Manaus or Belem. Established by an American expatriate and his Indian wife, the high-quality museum is quite a bizarre find in such a tiny village. Admission costs $3.50. The museum has a shop, with a large variety of items for sale, though the items are generally more expensive than those in FUNAI BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
shops elsewh re. Beaches Green L e and TapajOs River have good beaches for swimming an walks. Places to Stay & Eat The Pous da Alter-do-Chao (Tel.: 522-3410), at Rua Lauro Sodre 74, has imple apartamentos with fan for $24, and a great view of beach from the verandah. The Tia Marilda, at Travessa Ant6nio Ago inho 599, has double rooms with shower and fan that cost $18. he Pousada Tupaiulcindia (Tel.: 523-2157), on Travessa Ped • Teixeira, offers apartamentos for $24 with fan, and $36 with sr-con. Encontro das Aguas The tneeti g of the waters (ciguas barrentas)where the clear Tapajos and t e light-brown Amazon merge, is worth a boat excursion, or at least a glimpse from Praca Mirante, near Restaurante 0 Mascote. The tourist agencies arrange trips from around $25. Floresta Nacional do Tapajes This fores reserve covers an area of 650,000 hectares along the Rio Tapaj a... The entrance to the reserve is about 83 km from Santarem on e Santarem-Cuiaba road. To visit you must first seek pertnissi n from IBAMA in Santarem (Tel,: 522-2964), at Avenida 2267 You can then try to organize a visit with their assistance or ith Santarem-Tur (Tel.: 522-1533), at the Hotel Tropical. Fordlfindia & Belterra Fordlandi and Belterra, Henry Ford's huge rubber plantations, date fr m the 1920s. Ford successfully managed to transplant an i erican town, but his Yankee ingenuity failed to cultivate rubb efficiently in the Amazon. Abandoned by Ford, the rubber gro es are now operated as a research station by the Ministry of A riculture. During the dry season, one bus a day makes the trip from Santarem to B lterra, 67 km south of SantaremrThe bus leaves Santarem at 11.30 am and returns at 2.30 pm. Getting to Fordlandia by oat takes about 16 hours from Santarem. Amazon Tours can range trips to Belterra and to Fordlandia. The cost is $45 per • erson in groups oftwo. $30 per person in groups of three to five Curmi-Una Hydroelectric Dam The Curua Una Hydroelectric Dam is at Cachoeira de Palhao, 72 km om Santarem. It was built to meet the growing energy needs o the region, and is open to visitors. PA QUE NACIONAL DA AMAZONIA This nation:! park lies close to the town of Itaituba on the western bound between the states of Para and Amazonas. Most sources a ree that at least 10% of the park's original one million hectare has been devastated as a result of depredacdo (predatory be avior) by garimpeiros and prospective land-grabbers, ho face an utterly absurd force of four IBAMA employees atte pting to protect the park. Information To arrange visit to the park, you must seek prior permission from Senh r Raimundo Nonato Russo (Tel.: 518-1530) at IBAMA, Post do Fomento Estrada, 53 B is, m02, Itaituba, Excerpts from Brazil 73 km from the park entrance. A Travel Survival Kit Once your visi has been ap3rd edition, proved, you in y be given asby Andrew Draffen, sistance with tr nsport up the Rio Tapaj6s tot e park station. Chris McAsey, The park admi istration operLeonardo Pinheiro, ates on less than shoestring, so and Robyn Jones. don't expect to much. For more information The admini tratiye station call Lonely Planet: inside the park Urua, has ru(800) 275-8555. dimentary facili ies such as a Copyright 1992 Lonely campsite, but n special infraPlanet Publications. structure for tou ists. From this Used by permission. station, there rough trails leading into the orest. 41
Dida Banda Feminina is out. It is the first CD by a band called just that: Dida Banda Feminina. This is another musical wonder from Bahia. The all-female band takes its name from a Yoruba term meaning creation. The new group—the brainchild of Neguinho do Samba, the creator of samba reggae—bursts with creativity and power. KIRSTEN WEINOLDT
The summer season of Salvador, in the state of pahia, fertile soil of Brazilian music, has produced a new yet, some would say, inevitable germination—musical groups made up of women, such as As Meninas (The Girls), Dengo de Mulher (Coyness of Woman), and Dicla Banda Feminina. These groups take advantage of the great selection of talent available in this land rich with musical tradition from Dorival Caymmi to Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and on to Olodum and Carlinhos Brown. Growing up in Bahia must indeed feel like a call to create. This author happened to be in Salvador when a small ad appeared in A Tarde, the Soteropolitano (from Salvador) daily newspaper. It announced the launching of the first CD of Dida Banda Feminina, a group with which I was already familiar from their work with Caetano Veloso's Tieta do Agreste movie score. I had also on another occasion seen them perform outside the restaurant/cultural complex Solar do Unhao. The ad mentioned that there would be a special participation by Veloso and Daniela Mercury. This was scheduled for the evening of Festa de Iemanja, the goddess of the sea, and promised the appearances of 30 new, young goddesses. The party, and I was sure it would be just that, was to take place in the centro historico, Pelourinho. Being someone who doesn't turn down an opportunity to see Caetano Veloso, I headed for the historic; district and found the square in front of So Francisco Church fenced off. I bought my ticket for $15, which included the CD, and headed inside. I gotto talking to a cameraman, Judson, whose enthusiasm for the band was clear. He introduced me to Neguinho do Samba, the leader of the band, and a man of no small reputation. When he went off to his press conference, Judson proceeded to tell me with much emotion that some of the girls in the band are former street children. The name of the group refers to a Yoruba expression that means power of creation or generation. And indeed, the band bursts with creativity as well as power. Many of the young women appear on stage as well as on BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
the CD with masks—muzzles. This makes reference to the legendary slave, Anastacia, a woman who resisted all the impositions of a prejudiced society. The idea of using Anastacia as a symbol emerged during a march that took place on the International Day of the Woman in 1994 in Pelourinho, Salvador. Each of the women in the march represented a great woman of history such as Indira Gandhi and Irma Duke, who are recognized for great feats. Irma Dulce was the beDida de Salvador loved Brazilian nun for whom the Aroldo "Me Trate Bern", process of beatifiNeguinho do Samba) cation is being peA Didd é rainha do sol titioned by many Deusa negra uma forca faithful who can major testify to her miQue encanta esta terra tao racles. The figure linda of Anastdcia atOh! Bahia tdo querida tracted much atPelourinho, Ia ndo tem tention and spardistincdo ked the interest of Branco e negro sao todos participants as irmdos well as spectators E a mistura das ragas defende... as to who she was. ...essa miscigenacAo In her life, Eu vou/Eu you Anastdcia was You dancar ld no Pelo very beautiful and Eu vou/Eu you consequently the Corn a Dida de Salvador object of envy, A Dicta nasceu em um lugar prejudice, and abencoado sexual abuse. She Lugar de urn povo was a peace lovhonrado ing person who Que viveu a escravidao alleviated the sufAli cresceu Corn muita gan-a e fering of others. muita luta She was muzzled Hoje o povo todo escuta for speaking openA Didd que ë tradicito ly of her desires, Vieram os brancos e aos but even after that, negros se juntaram she continued to E se conscientizaram perform miracles. Que todos nOs somos irmaos Her muzzle was Eu vou/Eu you then removed. But Vou dancar Id no Pelt) she was ill and did Eu vou/Eu you not have much Corn a Dia de Salvador Tem Jamaica, America e time for her good Japdo deeds. After deTern Sao Paulo e Rio de veloping gangreJaneiro ne, she died. I perTern gente do mundo sonally wish I had inteiro known about that Eu vou/Eu you beautiful symbolVou dancar IA no Pero ism on February I. 2"d in front of the church. As Neguinho do Samba says: "Bahia is a caulBRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
dron whete everything is created. In every ghetto, every alley you see a musician—a poet. Bahia is a catalyst' for this. The music is a natural result. We have ftere an independent market to a certain point. The people sing everything and easily accept t4 new. After Di& emerged, several other wotnen's musical groups appeared: De Batom, Batom LilAs, Arte de Saia. They do not, like we, Make samba reggae. They play pagode, which is very much in fashion. But they are very Dida frorp Salvador good." Neguinho explains that this is neither a religious nor a femiDidd is queer of the sun nist act. For this Black goddess—a major man, the creator force of samba-regWho enchantS this land so gae, it is the culbeautiful mination of a Oh, Bahia so ear dream of his for Pelourinho, t ere is no the last 10 years distinction th re White and bl ck are all to create a femibrothers nine group. Not And the mix re of races always an easy defends task, he man...that interbr eding aged to keep the I'm going, I'n going idea alive that I'm going to dance in Pero' women, too, can I'm going, I'n going play drums and With Dia froi Salvador that a feminine Dicta was born in a blessed percussion place group would fit A place belo4ng to an honest people like a glove on Which lived through slavery the rhythmic, Grew up there l national scene. With much coarage and Neguinho much struggle made three atToday all the cteople listen tempts in the To Didd whiclt is tradition past decade to The whites came and joined fulfill his dream. with the blacks This current And they were aware project has been That we are all brothers in the works for I'm going, I'm going I'm going to d nce in Pelo four years. "This I'm going, I'm going time it's a go," With Didd of S lvador says Neguinho. There's Jamaic , America, He is betting on and Japan the maturity of There's Sao Paulo and Rio his pupils, most de Janeiro ofthem students There are peoplle from the born in the outwhole world skirts of PelouI'm going, I'm going rinho and grown I'm going to dance in Pert!) .1 up hearing the drums of Olodum. The "gcdparents" of Dida are Baiano artists Caetano Veloso and Daniela Mercury who also 43
participate on the CD. Daniela Mercury interprets "Barrela," a song in which Neguinho pours his heart out in reverence to his own mother. Caetano sings a delightful axe version of his classic "Tigresa." At the Carnaval, just past, the band paid tribute to Caetano, who has been invaluable to the band. On the day of the launching Neguinho was heard saying: "When we honor him, it will be small in comparison to what he has done for us."
Convite Invitation Neguinho do Samba
I.
Venha meu amor Venha pra Di& Corn seu jeito lindo eu sei Que you te amar, te amar, te amar, te amar Garoto! Quando olho nos seus olhos Vejo a felicidade Quando olho pra voce Quero tanto lhe ter Sempre do meu lado Dividindo meus abracos Meus carinhos sO corn voce Venha meu amor Penso a noite inteira em voce Penso a noite inteira em seu calor Quando viajo saudades trago Saudade sinto Se corn voce nao falo 44
Come my love Come to Dida With your winning ways I know I'll love you, love you, love you, love you Boy! When I look into your eyes I see happiness When I look at you I want so much to have you Always at my side Sharing my embraces, My affections only with you Come my love All night I think of you Think all night of your heat On my journeys I take my longing with me Longing is what I feel If I don't speak with you
Neguinho explained that he draws on the temperament and talent of every girl and young woman, some 30 in all, ranging in age from 14 to 17. I was surprised to hear that among the enthusiastic women are two Argentines and one Swiss who bring their own musical tradition with them and help emphasize the strength of togetherness through artistic expression. The majority of the songs come from the heart and soul of Neguinho, and the album is permeated with exaltation at the beauty of Bahia. But even with the climate of Carnaval, there is still room for commitment to racial issues—one of the hallmarks of the group. The song "Odio Vazio" (Empty Hatred) speaks of the struggle in which Zumbi (a slave warrior and hero) and Malcolm X played their leading roles. This first CD of Dicta Banda Feminina is proof that the realm of axe music does not live solely on obvious rhymes and predictable sounds. Dida produce an unorthodox mixture of sounds, thus extending the rhythmic and percussive attributes which characterize the style. The arrangements are a mix of samba de roda, typical of the reed ncavo of Bahia, and incorporate elements of rock, uniting African drums, electric guitars, keyboard, flute, and saxophone. In addition to being the musical leader of Dida, Neguinho is mentor and spiritual guide for the girls. He brings with him his rich experience of the years with Olodum. In fact, many critics have already dubbed Di& the "Feminine Olodum." Dicta Banda Feminina is not Neguinho's only creation. Escola de Musica Dicta is another. In 1988, after participating on an album with Paul Simon, Neguinho do Samba gave up an imported car to swap a large house in Pelourinho. The beginning was difficult, partially because of public attitude. After all, "women cannot devote time to a band, since they have to straighten out the house and care for the family." Currently, the school has some 200 students, men and women, who take classes in string instruments, woodwinds, keyboard, percussion, drums, composition, Afro and flamenco dancing, theater, capoeira, and English. The students pay a monthly fee of $20, sadly insufficient to maintain the school and salary of the teachers. Neguinho completes the budget with the income he receives from his copyrighted songs. So far, he has not succeeded in securing a permanent support, and private sources have not yet discovered his worthwhile efforts. No doubt, the CD will spread the word of the good work coming from Escola de MUsica Dicta as well as the infectious sounds. As I was getting ready to end my trip to Brazil, Dicta Banda Feminina was preparing for its first national tour. Kirsten Weinoldt was born in Denmark and came to the U.S. in 1969. She fell in love with Brazil after
many years ago and has lived immersed in Brazilian culture ever since. E-mail:
seeing Black Orpheus
kwracingAerols.com BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
Palxaoi ,earense wa's Brazilian music during t e irst half of this century writing the lyrics for some of the most enduring national tunes. He became a well-known figure in the recitals that were popping up in all the good homes in Rio. His biographer Carlos Maul wrote: "...when the singer's shadow waned in the room, the last verse escaping for his lips, there was a real explosion of delirium, so spontaneous, so vibrant, so loud, as if an enormous hurricane had burst into the surroundings." ARTHUR DE FARIA
CATULLO DA PAIXAO CEARENSE (Born Oct. 8, 1863 in Sao Luis do Maranhao, died May 10, 1946 in Rio de Janeiro) A Maranhense (someone born in the state of Maranhao) raised in the interior of Ceara, son of a modest gold and silver dealer, lover of the most indecorous romantic Brazilian poets, Catullo arrived in Rio when the family moved to the then Federal Capital in 1880. His father, Amancio Jose da Paixao Cearense was the biggest in his field in sao Luis, but do you have an idea of what it is to be the biggest gold and silver dealer there in 1880? Because of this, he decided to try his luck in Rio, with his wife and three sons. Catullo, the firstborn, was 16 years old. He was short, but strong and stocky. Consequently, he managed to get one of the few jobs that there was at the BRAZZIL -APRIL 199B
time: longshor man in the port of Gamboa. He saved every nickel ir order to buy more and more books written in Port4guese and French, languages that he studied until t e point of exhaustion even when he was still in sap Luis. trom an early age he was arrogant. That arrogance—by the way, his great characteristic—was the probable fruit of his admiration for the highly refined authors that his father read. Catullo—he got his name from Antique Rome's Gaius Valerius Catullus, who is often considered the greatest Latin poet ever—spent his life thinking he wrote like them. On the other hand, he also spent his life remembering his time in the interior of Ceard, still a boy where he not only knew the landscape of the hinterland—including the moonlight—as well as some of the best guitar players then. With them, he learned to strum a guitar. In Rio in as oil time he was hanging around with serenade folks. is father didn't manage to become famous like he was in his hometown, and things, instead of bec ming better, became worse. But, irregardless of n t having money, the boy was more or less adopted y a group of upper middle class and rich young Can cas (Rio resident), that spent their time fooling aro nd—serenading one house after the other in that tran uil Rio of the times of Machado de Assis—they cal ed themselves the "serenateiros", which was to istinguish themselves from the "seresteiros" wh were spoken poorly of. In a short thne, his fame as a good singer and guitar player became known in the homes of the most important families in the Federal Capital. At the beginning of 185, when he was 22, he was lucky enough to sing a a birthday party where the wife of the then powerfi4 consul Gaspar da Silveira Martins 45
could be proud of had to have Catullo singing and playing was present. Dressed in the latest fashion, singing the best or reciting his long poems. His songs and poems had results tunes of the time, and speaking his puffed-up Portuguese, he so startling as this, according to a report from his friend and fell into the graces of the consul's wife. biographer Carlos Maul: He left the party after being hired as Portuguese teacher for the couples' children. Food, board, laundry and a modest "...when the singer's shadow waned in the room, the last salary—compensated by the unrestricted access to the imverse escaping for his lips, there was a real explosion of mense and little used consul's library. It was everything that delirium, so spontaneous, so vibrant, so loud, as if an he wanted. There he learned, alone, Spanish—and so well enormous hurricane had burst into the surroundings. It that he became a translator of the language. Everything was going very well until the terribly womwasn't clapping, it was screams of approval, ecstasy, joy— almost insanity and folly—which was blended in with the anizing professor ran into an unbelievably bad spot of enthusiasm of that possessed audience, surrounding the trouble. It was something that never was very well explained. According to him, it was like this: One beautiful early singer in a clamorous whirlwind, in a roar of moving, impetuous, and passionate tenderness". The Beatles, they September morning of that very year of 1885, he was were nothing next to Catullo. arriving in a good mood in his room at the back of the Consul's house, where he lived. He had spent the night serenading and only God knows his state Slippery and slick as only he when he opened the door. was, Catullo always knew how to The fact is that he came face to face mix in circles of power. He played with a girl dressed only in a nightie. for nothing less than four presidents Discography Before he could thank divine proyidence of Brazil, from Nibo Pecanha to Artur and start to teach her to know the way to Bernardes. Dressed formally in a "Luar do Sertao" was even remake a goal, Catullo felt a hand on his stylish coat and tie, he knew how to corded by Marlene Dietrich, besides shoulder and a disturbance taking place awaken the curiosity of the elite being able to be found on LPs done by around the house. It was the girl's family. Cariocas of his time because of his Canadian orchestras, by the Greek He got married in police headquarters. curious figure. In 1908, in the middle singer Nana Mouskouri, French, EnHis young wife, who he didn't even know, of a wave of interest for Brazilian glish and American versions and so had been passed off through an unorthofolklore induced by the Commemoon. But the greatest record ofCatullo's dox framework: the little girl, whose rative Exposition of the First Cento have is a collection of 78 rpm flower had already been picked by some tennial of the Opening of the Ports, records, edited in the '50s, with works other unscrupulous gardener of love, had Catullo began to pay attention to the of the bald one sung by Vicente worked out everything with her family. subject. Celestino. It's one of those rarities, According to other versions, she herFrom 1912 on, he, who pubbut it's worth the search. self had invited him to the alcove, and lished verses and tunes, "discovbeing there, her family invaded the room ered" his country vein and turned to and made the young sinning couple marry writing more regional lyrics—still against their will. Whatever the true story may have been, the always pompous. From then on, his success grew even fact is that Catullo never had theicourage to return to the more. At the end of the year, he appeared, in a smoking Consul's house. He also didn't see his wife again after the jacket and with a guitar, in the concert hall of the National civil ceremony at police headquarters. Nor did he go to the Institute of Music. He broke all the hall's attendance records church wedding, since the church's register doesn't show his ("the first battle is won", he would have said: "we pensignature for the religious ceremony. The supposed lover etrated the fortress of the classics!"). In fact, it was an would only surface after his death when she started a proimportant step in the ennobling of the guitar, that up until ceeding to retain the rights to his royalties. She didn't win. then was an instrument of common, low-class people—of This time according to Catullo himself, this burden on his castration, to use a term coined by the poet. For serenades shoulders would hinder him from entering in new nuptials it might be used, but in good family homes and theaters it for the rest of his life. Including the daughter of a senator still caused surprise. from Goias—simply nicknamed Coleira—for whom he The truth was that it always wasn't that way. The sixnurtured a sincere, chaste and corresponding love, that string guitar became second class after the entrance of the would continue to the end of his days. Not as bad as the piano en masse in Brazil, in the second halfofthe nineteenth collateral effects of that story of love—begun with a simple century. The guitar player Jo'do Pernambuco—who became look and never more than this—would be the supports that his partner—and Catullo were important pieces in recapturhe had to transport for his entire career of lyricist and poet in ing the instrument's dignity. According to the scholar Luiz the best hyperbolic tradition. Murat, Catullo "Expunged out the guitar from the illegitiWith vengeance against the designs of destiny, Catullo macies and the vaunting of the pool halls and invoked it to became a great anti-marriage advocate, speaking poorly of be the interpreter of Arquiloco, in this way turning it in our the institution whenever he could. This didn't stop him gatherings what was theforminx of the Greek conquerors". from—in spite of being ugly and dangerously similar to a Oh, that's it then. *** frog, as the caricatures of the time dwelled on calling to mind—collecting some female friends. The writer, Agripino With his growing success, Catullo got to publish 10 Grieco, a friend of Catullo's, said that his buddy had the heart songbooks with his lyrics. Many of which for music of of a slave ship: "always full of dark (female) captives". which his almost sick megalomania insisted in "forgetting" the composer. The most famous—"Luar do Sertao" (Coun*** try Moonlight) and "Caboca de Caxanga", both composed At the time in which he was giving his heart to his in 1913—were shamelessly appropriated from the already beloved Coleira, the young man had been transformed into mentioned and highly-gifted guitar playerJoao Pernambuco. a well-known figure in the recitals that were popping up in They create controversy until today. Much paper was spent all the good homes in Rio. A night-time concert that one and much talk was struck up to decide ifJodo was or wasn't 46
BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
the author of both songs. In the end, it appears that it was him. Even because Catullo never wrote a note of music. In the hundreds of songs that he penned, be wrote lyrics for an already existent melody. And; since Joao Pernambuco—in spite of being ,the author of iiiiiilerudite classics like "Sons de CarrilhOes"—was a terribixsimple hick—it was easy for someone with the street Stnarts like Catullo to outsmart him. Catullo himself said in an interview with a Lisbon newspaper in 1935 that "when I was beginning my most important poetic work, Joao Pernambuco came on the scene. He came from north and knew how to play the guitar very well, and brought me a vocabulary that wasn't yet corrupted by civilized speech". Or rather, Pernambuco not only wrote the music, but helped with the lyrics in his associations with Catullo. "Caboca de Caxanga" was a tremendous success in the Carnaval of 1914, a recording by the Grupo de Caxanga, lead by Pernambuco. In putting down the names of the authors for the song, Catullo,forgot for the first time his partner's name:, "Luar do Sertao" was registered only in 1915, and again; • only with Catullo's name as author. Pernambuco was an- noyed with this at times, but he was such a good guy be continued being Catullo's friend until the 40s. Other important partnerships—these recognized—ere Ernesto Nazareth, inventor of the Brazilian tango, and the mulatto Anacleto de Medeiros, leader of the legendary, Banda do Corpo de Bombeiros. Catullo put words to some of Anacleto' s best musical pearls, like the waltz "Por Um. Beijo," where the singer, without fearing the wrath of God, robs stars from the sky, brings a beam of moonlight, descends from the skies to the sea and steals the most beautiful pearl, besides other acts worthy of making Indiana Jones envious, all for the supreme glory of just one kiss from the one he loves. Another "Catullian" marvel, "Talento e Formositra," was written for the grandfather of the xote—the unknown Edmundo Otavio Ferreira. The lyrics, of an unparalleled refinement are a long poem, all in Alexandrine verses, that exemplifies well the "simplicity "of the guy's poetry. Feel the drama: Tu podes bem guardar o dom da formosura, Que o tempo um dia het de, implacdvel, trucidar... Tu podes bem viver ufana da ventura Que a natureza, cegamente, quis te dar... Prossegue embora em jloreas sendas, sempre ovante, De Glorias cheias, e no teu solio triunfante, Que antes que a morte vibre em ti funereo golpe seu A natureza ira roubando o que te deu. You can guard well the gift of beauty, that time one day, unforgiving, will slaughters... You can live well proud of good fortune that nature, blindly, wanted to give you... It continues on in flower filled paths, always jubilant, Full of glory, and on your triumphant throne, that before death quivers in thee funereal blow Nature will go stealing that it gave you. Of course, it was one of romantic singer Vicente Celestino's favorites. *** In 1914, following his rising career, Catullo gave a recital of his songs in the Palacio do Catete (the presidential palace) itself, at the invitation of the wife of the then President, Hermes da Fonseca. The couple themselves were present— Nair de Tare, who besides being first lady was an amateur singer and caricaturist—and the venerable head of the counBRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
try. It was fr m this recital on that Nair discovered Brazilian music, sung in Portuguese. She, until then—and all the Carioca hig -society of which she was a heroine of the vanguard-1 mited themselves to opera arias and Italian 'sPngs. The F rst Lady even learned to play the guitar. in 1918, atullo gamed strength from another important admirer: Assis Chateaubriand, the future all-powerful owner of the media onglomerate Emissoras Associadas, to whom Catullo had j St dedicated "Luar do Sertao." Chato felt that Catullo was as always—in financial difficulties and he used the prest ge of the two to arrange a super-spectacular of homage, the 18th of September, in the old Teatro Sao Pedro— today Joao C tano. Just to have an idea of whatthat prestige was, the Ho age to Catullo Central Commission had a handful of m nisters, various high court judges, consuls, lawyers, pro ssors, and a half dozen businessmen. The show had the ream of poets, opera singers and actors of the time, besides, of course, Catullo. With the money, they published his ew book: Meu Sertao. A sales success. ' This was sne of the rare opportunities in which Catullo attepted som money to play or sing. He thought that his art didn't have a"ice, and he didn't care that he lived in almost ,shanty—tha , of course, was called Palacio Choupanal 'the Cabin Pal ce)—carpeted with books, in a suburb of Rio. After, all, in th s shanty there was never a lack of illustrious visitors, from • owerful people to legendary opera singers like the Italian enor Gigli, and even foreign poets, who went to check out th t curious mixture of Parnassian Poet apres la lettre with sty ized country. And he wrote poetry almost yurely13razilia , free from the complex of sickening French that overran ou literary ranks. And everyone kept absolutely silent to hear hi play or recite poetry. Especially because if he heard even peep, he stopped everything and sulked. *** In spite of b ing recorded and re-recorded constantly by his biggest sinker and admirer, Vicente Celestino, Catullo the singer and soet was becoming forgotten, together with the Brazilian B lle-Epoque, which were indissoluble. The times were othe s, probably initiated with the trip of the Oito Batutas de Pix guinha to Europe, where our Black artists made such a big success that brazil was obligated to recognize that this ne Black music—melodically elaborate, but with a lot of r ythm and simple lyrics—might have its charm. It wasn'i for no reason at all that Catullo was of the most indignant ith the fact the eight blacks that played chorinhos and axixes went to represent Brazil in Paris. After all, when, i the20s, renowned writer Monteiro Lobato dedicated an enti e chapter to him in his book Na Antevespera and began to vi for a place for Catullo in the Academia Brasileira de Let as, the old man was singing in a cinema pn Avenida Rio Br nco, dressed in country attire and with a fake beard. But ithout losing his haughtiness. He died on other's Day morning in 1946, thinking.he was almost forgo en. That night he was going to participate in a recital in ho age to the national forefathers, promoted by his friend 0 iz Tirado, doctor and internationally renowned Mexican tenor. Only that, contrary to expectations, his funeral was as ccess for the public and for the critics, full of important peop e and swelled by thousands of anonymous admirers. He wo Id have liked to have seen it Translated by Barbara Maglio who can be reached at bimagliocompuserve.com Arthur de aria, the author, a journalist, writer, and musician fro Rio Grande do Sul, may be contacted at 107.1Aulbra.tche.br 47
Movies RIO A Dona da Historia (History's Owner)— Comedy by Joao FaIca° with Marieta Severo and Andrea Beltrao. The actresses live the same character at 50 and 20 years of age respectively. Teatro do Leblon. Dracula e Danca dos Vampiros (Dracula and the Dance of the Vampires)— Comedy macabre. A vampire researcher goes to Pennsylvania with the intention of getting rid of the bucktoothed. Written and directed by Joao Luiz Fiani. With Marino Jr. and Jota Eme. Teatro da Praia. 0 Julgamento (The Trial)—The residents of a village can get an inheritance only if they admit to the murder of a man. Written by Daniel Herz. Directed by Susanna Kruger and Daniel Herz. With Cia. de Teatro Atores de Laura. Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim. 0 Submarino (The Submarine)—By Miguel Falabella, who directs and interprets the husband in this story about a couple who split, but cannot stop loving each other. Zeze Polessa is the wife. Teatro Miguel Falabella.
SAO PAULO Antes do Fim (Before the End)—Drama by Samir Yazbek, who also directs. A man tells in a cemetery how he murdered his wife and talks about this obsession with another woman. With Marcelo Reis and Claudia Cavalheiro. Teatro Mars. Catarse Conta Zumbi (Catarse Tells Zumbi)—Catarse (Catharsis) is the name of the ensemble group who play this adaptation of a play by Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and Augusto Boal. Historical drama telling the story of Zumbi, the rebel slave, who became the king of Palmares. With Adriana Cristiana and Flavio Guarnieri. Directed by Jeferson Gomes and Cidinha Peppe. Teatro Paulo Autran.
Confidencias de um Espermatoz6ide Careca (Confidences of a Bald Spermatozoid)—"Memories" before birth, repression, and discovery of sex are some of the themes. By Carlos Eduardo Novaes. Comic monologue. Actor Vicentini Gomes plays 26 characters. Directed by Antonio do Valle. Divinas Palavras (Divine Words)—Drama by Ram6n del Valle-Incldn. It tells the story of handicapped boy exploited by his own mother and forced to beg. With Ana Paula Bouzas and Cibele de Sá. Directed by Nehle Franke. Teatro Sesc Consolacao. Hilda Furacao (Hilda Hurricane)—Musical by Roberto Drummond with music by Fldvio Venturini e Marcus Vianna. Hilda is a pretty middle-class woman who becomes a famous prostitute. With Mariane Vicentini, Leonardo Vieira, Mateus Rocha and Duse Naccarati. Marcelo Andrade directs. Teatro Procopio Ferreira. 48
American films just released: Alien res-
urrection (Alien, a Ressurreictio), The Boxer (0 Lutador), Sphere (Esfera), In the Company of Men (Na Companhia de Homens), The Long Kiss Goodnight (Despertar de urn Pesadelo), Mouse hunt (Urn Ratinho Encrenqueiro), Mrs. Brown (Sua Majestade, Mrs. Brown), The Rain Maker (0 Homem Que Fazia Chover), Turbo Power Rangers Movie (Turbo: Power Rangers 2) Bocage, o Triunfo Do Amor (Bocage, the Triumph of Love)--Brazil-Portugal/ 1996—By Djalma Limongi Batista. With Victor Wagner, Francisco Farinelli, and Vietia Rocha. Sonnets and erotic poems of Portuguese author Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage (1765-1805) are set to film with images from Brazil and Portugal. Central do Brasil (Central Station)—Brazil/1998—By Walter Salles. Drama with Fernanda Montenegro, Vinicius de Oliveira and Marilia Pera. Unscrupulous Dora changes her life when she decides to go looking for the father of a boy who loses his mother. Como Ser Solteiro (How to Be a Single Man)—Brazil/1997—By Rosane Svartman. With Rosana Garcia, Ernesto Piccolo, Heitor Martinez Mello, and Marcos Palmeira. Comedy. Four interconnected stories happening in Rio de Janeiro. For Ever Mozart (Para Sempre Mozart)— France-Switzerland/l996—By Jean-Luc Godard. With Madeleine Assas, Ghalia Lacroix and Berangere Allaux. Four films in one. A director has a problem with the actors when he starts the shooting. Shooting Fish (Atirando em Peixes)— England/1997—Comedy by Stefan Schwartz. Dylan and Jez have no modest dream. They want to save more than one million dollars to buy themselves a mansion. With Kathe Beckinsale, Dan Futteman and Stuart Townsend. The Full Monty (Ou Tudo ou Nada)— England/1996— by Peter Cattaneo with Robert Carlyle, William Snape, and Steve Hudson. Comedy. Out of work, a group of men start a strip-tease joint. Genealogies d'un Crime (Genealogias de urn Crime)—France/1996—By Raoul Ruiz. With Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, and Melvil Poupaud. Drama. A youngster is on trial for having killed his aunt who was a child psychoanalyst.
Junk Mail (Junk mail)—Norway/1996— By Pal Sletaune. With Robert Skjilrstad, Andrine Sther and Per Egil Aske. Sex, robbery, and murder in a story between a postman and a woman who forgets the house keys in her P.O. Box.
Books
best-sellers FICTION 1 0 Plano Perfeito, Sidney Sheldon.
Record, 300 p. R$25. 2 A Senhora de Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley. Rocco, 504 p. R$28. 3 0 Mundo de Sofia, Jostein Gaarder. Comp,anhia das Letras, 555 p. R$ 26,50. 4 A Aguia e a Galinha, Leonardo Boff. Vozes, 206 p. R$16. 5 Cada um Por Si - Titanic, Beryl Bainbridge. Companhia das Letras, 226 p. R$19. 6 0 Homem Que Calculava, Malba Tahan. Record, 218 p. R$19. 7 0 Feitico da Ilha do Pavao, Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro. Nova Fronteira 324 p. R$24. 8 0 S5cio, John Grisham. Rocco, 416 p. R$25. 9 0 Pequeno Principe, Antoine de SaintExupery. Agir, 92 p. R$13. 10 Detetive, Arthur Haley. Record, 576 p R$28.
NONFICTION 1 No Ar Rarefeito, Jon Krakauer. Companhia das Letras, 280 p. R$23 2 Feliz 1958, o Ano Que Nab Devia Terminar, Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos. Record, 192 p. R$20. 3 As Melh ores Piadas do Planeta e da Casseta, Casseta E Planeta. Objetiva, 128 p. R$10. 4 Inteligencia Emocional, Daniel Goleman. Objetiva, 376 p. R$34,50. 5 Dossie Brasil, Geneton Moraes Neto. Objetiva, 250 p. R$19. 6 0 Sucesso E Ser Feliz, Roberto Shinyashiki. Gente, 198 p. R$20.
7 Depois Daquela Viagem, Valeria Piassa Polizzi. Atica, 280 p. R$14,90. 8 Violetas na Janela, Vera Lucia M. de Carvalho. Petit, 139 p. R$9,50. 9 Sanduiches de Realidade, Arnaldo Jabor. Objetiva, 280 p. 1$22. 10 Nova York E Aqui, Nelson Motta. Objetiva, 218 p. R$21,80.
BUSINESS 1 0 Segredo do Cofre, Ana Paula Padrao and Valderez Caetano. Globo, 136 p. R$17,50. 2 Mercado Financeiro, Eduardo Fortuna.
Qualitymark, 399 p. R$38 3 0 Horror Economico, Viviane Forrester. •UNESP. 154 p. R$15. 4 Forbes -As Maiores Historias do Mundo dos Negticios, Daniel Gross. Companhia das Letras, 387 p. R$28. 5 A Armadilha da Globalizacao, HansPeter Martin and Harald Schumann. Globo, 352 p. R$30. According to Jornal do Brasil BRA7_ZIL - APRIL 1998
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than as in possession of inherent and ahistorical meanings, inspiring us to think about them, instead of simply admiring them (Potter n.d.). An anthropological approach to one's own cultural heritage contributes to unmasking the manipulation of the past (Haas 1996). The Brazilian experience in this respect is crystal-clear: the official fabrication ofthe past, including by means
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age or brazinan sociery-worna not tie the historical buildings in Rio de Janeiro, but a most modern city and even the most humble rural dwellers in the backlands should overlook their own local material heritage in favor of a city with no past (Funari forthcoming). Perhaps the clearest example of this fight against material remembrance is the huge megalopolis, Sao Paulo City,
nial towns, it medieval building in Europe can be completely refurbished without damaging the buildings themselves, there should be no problem in doing the same in a Third World context. Another common menace to the historical heritage of these colonial towns is the thievery, as thieves are very active against the protected artistic heritage scattered around more than five hundred church buildings and lo-
cal museums (Rocha 1997). A more prosaic problem is the deterioration of monuments due to lack of basic maintenance and shelter, even inside buildings (Lira 1997). These three menaces to the preservation of cultural properties, apparently unrelated, reveal a common underlying cause: the alienation of the population, the divorce of people and authorities, the distance separating common concerns and official elite ethos and policies. There has been a "heritage policy which preserved the Big-Houses, Baroque Churches, Military Forts, the Town Council Houses and Jails as the reference to the building of our historical and cultural identity and it has relegated to oblivion the slave-quarters, the slums and the workers cabins" (Fernandes 1993: 275). For ordinary people, there is then a sense of alienation, as if their own culture were not at all relevant and worth of attention. Traditionally, there were two kinds ofhouses in Brazil: the houses of two or more stores, called sobrados, where lived thp elite, and all other forms of dwellings, such as the casas ("houses", but with the same meaning as in Latin, "any simple or poorly built house, abut", recreating the opposition domus/casa, now as sobrado/casa), mocambos ("from kimbundu, mukambu, "ridge", used to refer to ordinary poor dwellings), senzalas (collective slave-quarters),fave/as (slums or shanties) (Reis Filho 1978: 28). The result of a society grounded on slave labor, from the inception there are two groups of people in the country, the people in power, the powerful with their material culture and their splendor, whose memory and monuments are worth of reverence and preservation, and the squalid remains of the subaltern, worth of disdain and disregard. As the senior sociologist Octavio Ianni (1988: 83) emphasized, what is considered heritage is the architecture, music, pictures, paintings, and everything else associated to elite families and to the upper crust in general. The Cathedral, used by the "good people" is to be preserved, whilst the Saint Benedict Church building, used by the "poor people", the so-called "Native Blacks" (pretos da terra), is not protected and is often left to decay. The monuments considered as heritage by the official institutions, according to another leading anthropologist, Eunice Durham (1984: 33) are those related to the "history of the ruling classes, the monuments preserved are those associated with the deeds and cultural production of these ruling
56
classes. The history of the ruled are seldom preserved". We must agree with Byrne (1991: 275) when he contends that it is usual for the dominant groups to use its power to push its own heritage to the fore, minimizing or even denying the significance of subordinate groups as it crafts a national identity in its own image, but the degree of alienation of upper and lower echelons of society is usually not as accentuated as in Brazil. In this context, it is not surprising that ordinary people do not pay too much attention in protecting cultural property felt as foreign, not directly related to themselves. There is a saying in Brazilian Portuguese which explains a lot about this sense of alienation: "they are white, so they must solve problems among themselves". It is interesting to notice that this sentence is used by white people too to refer to authorities in general. The same alienation affects heritage, as colonial buildings, for instance, are considered as "their problem, not ours". We could say that the search for a modern life, irrespective of the destruction of cultural properties, could well be interpreted as a kind of struggle not only for better living conditions but against the material remembrance of secular suffering by sub altern people. Archaeological heritage stricto sensu should not be affected by this lack of interest in preserving elite material culture, as archaeology produce evidence of Natives, slaves, ordinary people in general. However, there are several factors inhibiting an active engagement ofordinary people in archaeological heritage protection. First and foremost, there is a lack of information and formal education about the subject. Natives, Africans and the poor are seldom mentioned in history syllabuses and often the few references to them are detrimental, as they are portrayed as a lazy and backward mass of serfs who have always been unable to reach civilization. Indians were considered as fierce enemies, rightfully decimated over the centuries. In a famous debate, in the beginning of this century, Von Ihering, director ofthe Paulista Museum, in Sao Paulo, proposed the extermination of
the Kaigang Indians who, according to him, were hindering the development ofthe country (Schwarcz 1989: 59) and even though he was challenged by other intellectuals, mainly from the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, his stance was and still is very symptomatic of the low esteem for Native peoples, even within the academia. It is enough to say that Native material from the West of Sao Paulo State, found eighty years ago are only now being exhibited in the area, thanks to an innovative and critical museological project by the University of Sao Paulo (Cruz 1997): better late than never! Blacks, for their part, were considered as menacing barbarians, or, as put it recently a most renowned Brazilian historian, Evaldo Cabral de Mello (Leite 1996): "It is not possible to deny what— the seventeenth century maroon— Palmares was: it was Black republic, it was destroyed and I prefer, let me say frankly, that it was so. For a simple reason. If Palmares were to have survived, we would have in Brazil a Bantustan, an independent and impractical state". So a leading historian still feels he s menaced by Blacks and mimics Cato's words: delenda Palmares! To be able to profess such ideas ex cathedra says a lot about the indoctrination of prejudices which, one way or another, reaches ordinary people (Funari 1996a: 150.et passim). And last but not least, there is a lack of communication between the academic world, particularly the archaeological community, and the people. Archaeologists should work with the community, not to it (ROssio 1984: 60), giving people a better understanding of the past and of the world around them, to enlighten them (Hudson 1994: 55). To achieve this, long-term research should lead not to quick-fix entertainment (Durrans 1992: 13), but to an integration of processes, such as rescuing historic buildings and excavating archaeological sites, and products, such as publicizing the scientific work through different media (Merriman 1996: 382). A good example of this is the fate of a particularly important archaeological site in Brazil: the seventeenth century maroon, known as Palmares. Since the 1970s, people suspected that the
BRAZZIL -APRIL 1998
famous runaway settlement, which survived fighting against slavocracy for almost the whole seventeenth century, was to be located in the backlands of the Northeastern State of Alagoas, at the Serra da Barriga or Potbelly Hill. Black rights activists found surface remains at the hill and were able, after an unprecedented campaign, to force the authorities to declare the area a National Heritage site in 1985. However, due to complete lack of interest on the part of the archaeological establishment, controlled by a bunch of conservative practitioners linked to the military dictatorship (Funari 1995b: 238-245), the site was left to the discretion of local authorities. The result was the use of bulldozers to level an important part of the site, enabling the authorities to promote festivals and, naturally, to cajole people into supporting them to local offices. In the early 1990s, when archaeological fieldwork began at the hill, one ofthe main aims was to work with local communities and with Black activists, so that the people could understand the site and its importance and could thus oppose the mere entertainment use of the archaeological area. The empowerment of those traditionally excluded from decision-making (Jones 1993: 203) would only be possible through a massive scientific and media publicization of the archaeological work. In the last six years (1992-1998), the archaeologists in charge of the site, Charles E. Orser, Jr. (1992; 1993; 1994; 1996), and the author (Funari 1991; 1994a; 1995a; 1995c; 1996a; 1996b; 1996c; 1996e; 1996f; Orser & Funari 1992) published three books totally or partially on Palmares, eleven papers in scholarly journals (four abroad and seven in Brazil), as well as two more papers by a Ph.D. student, Scott Allen (1997a; 1997b), and another one by Michael Rowlands (1988). Furthermore, several newspaper and magazine articles, both in Brazil and elsewhere, were published or broadcast on the site. It is probable that this is not enough to change radically the subjective attitude of ordinary Brazilians towards the humble evidence coming from the maroon, as the overall context in Brazil would not be completely altered by an isolated scholarly activity, but still a lot more people are now aware of the existence of the site and of its possible significance. Indeed, fifteen years ago, in the last phase of military rule, Olympio Serra (1984: 108) offered a strong interpretation of Palmares, as a possible model for a non-authoritarian society: "There
BRAZZIL - APRIL 1998
should be an opportunity to recr ate the experience of a pluralistic soci ty, as was the Palmares Republic. An if you look at this most attracting ph se of Brazilian history, you will see tha at Palmares there were not only Blac s, but also Indians. Jews, in other wor s, all the people discriminated by the 0lonial society, all those who were d ferent". Some years later, the fieldwork the Hill produced archaeological e dence, which now substantiate this h manist approach. Palmares owed i growth and survival and final destru tion to the role it played in coast inland trade, as mercantile interests a Palmares opposed those of the nobili and plantation slave owners, which we able to triumph in the end, due to t strength ofpre-capitalist groups in bot Portugal and in the colony (Rowland forthcoming). The crushing of a ten dency towards pluralism in the earl history of Brazil explains the persis tence of racist and upper-class dis course, as mentioned above, and th archaeological work in rescuing th material culture of the maroon, as wel as its preservation as cultural property, plays thus a non negligible role in fostering a critical awareness inside and outside the academic world. Restoration or conservation? In the case of Brazil, the right to decide has always been in the hands of the elite, whose priorities have been both narrow-minded and ineffective. High-style monuments, protected officially by law, are by and large left in the hand of freemarket agents, and the illegal trade on antiquities is largely tolerated. Upperclass archaeologists do not bother to hide their ties to antique shops and elite exhibitions. Ordinary people feel alienated both from the elite heritage and from archaeological humble evidences, as they are continuously taught to despise Indians, Blacks, mixed people, the poor, in other words, themselves and their ancestors. In this context, the scholarly tasks confronting archaeologists and heritage officials in the country are particularly complex and contradictory. We must struggle for the preservation of both high-style and humble cultural properties, for the democratization of information and education, in general. Above all, we must pledge for the empowerment of ordinary people, for their right to knowledge, for our right as both scholars and citizens, to work with the people in their own interests. As scholars, first and foremost, we should foster the search for critical knowledge about our common heritage.
And this is no easy task. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe thanks to Professors Peter Ucko and Robert Layton for the incentive to write this paper and to the following colleagues who helped me in different ways: Scott Allen, Josep Ballart, Brian Durrans, Juan Manuel Garcia, Sian Jones, Charles E. Orser, Jr., Parker Potter, Michael Rowlands. I received a grant from the World Archaeological Congress to attend the meeting in Brac, Croatia, and the preparation ofthe text was made possible too thanks to stays in London, at the Institute of Archaeology in February 1997, with a grant from the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) and in the University of Barcelona, as visiting scholar, in January 1998, with grants from the Universities of Barcelona and Campinas. The ideas presented here are my own, for which I am therefore solely responsible. REFERENCES Allen, S.J. 1997a. Africanism, mosaics, and creativity: the historical archaeology of Palmares. Ideias 4, forthcoming. Allen, S.J. 1997b. The ethnogenesis of the Palmarino: preliminary directions in the historical archaeology of a seventeenth-century Brazilian quilombo. Revista de Historia da Arte e Arqueologia 3, forthcoming. Arantes, A.A. 1990. La Preservacion del Patrimonio como Practica Social. Campinas: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas da UNICAMP. Ballart, Josep. 1997. El Patrimonio HistOrico y Arqueologico: valor y uso. Barcelona: Ariel. Byrne, D. 1991. Western hegemony in archaeological heritage management. History and Anthropology 5: 269-276. Carandini, A. 1979. Archeologia e Cultura Materiale. Dai lavori senza gloria' nell 'antichita a una politica dei beni culturali. Bari: De Donato. Cruz, M. 1997. Apos 80 anos, achado compord acervo de museu; uardados por acacias em armario, ragmentos arqueologicos ficarao xpostos em Chavantes. 0 Estado de S. aulo, November the 11th, A, p. 22. Durham, E. 1984. Texto II. In roduzindo o Passado, Estrategias de onstruclio do patrimonio cultural, .A. Arantes (Ed.), 23-58. Sao Paulo: rasiliense. Durrans, B. 1992. Behind the enes. Museums and selective criti•sm. Anthropology Today, 8, 4, 11-15.
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Fernandes, J. R. 0. 1993. Educacao patrimonial e cidadania: uma proposta alternativa para o efisino de Historia. Revista Brasileira de Historia 13 (25/ 26), 265-276. Funari, P.P.A. 1991. A Arqueologia e a cultura africana nas Americas. Estudos lbero-Americanos 17, 61-71. Funari, P.P.A. 1994a. La cultura material y la Arqueologia en el estudio de la cultura africana en las Americas. America Negra 8: 33-47. Funari, P.P.A. 1994b. Rescuing ordinary people's culture: museums, material culture and education in Bra-
zil. In The Presented Past, Heritage, museums and education, P.G. Stone & B.L. Molineaux (eds), 120-136. London: Routledge. Funari, P.P.A. 1995a. A cultura material de Palmares: o estudo das relacOes sociais de um quilombo pela Arqueologia. Ideias 27, 37-42. Funari, P.P.A. 19956. Mixed features of archaeological theory in Brazil. In Theory in Archaeology, A world perspective, P. Ucko (ed.), 236-250. London: Routledge. Funari, P.P.A. 1995c. The archaeology of Palmares and its contribution to the understanding of the history of African-American culture. Historical Archaeology in Latin America 7, 1-41. Funari, P.P.A. 1996a. Novas perspectivas abertas pela Arqueologia na Serra da Barriga. In Negras Imagens, L.M. Schwarcz and L.V.S. Reis (eds), 139-152. Sao Paulo: Edusp. Funari, P.P.A. 1996b. A `RepUblica de Palmares' e a Arqueologia da Serra da Barriga. Revista USP 28, 6-13. Funari, P.P.A. 1996c. A Arqueo-
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University. Orser, C.E. 1993. In Search of Zumbi. The 1993 Season. Normal: Illinois State University. Orser, C.E. 1994. Toward a global historical archaeology: an example from Brazil. Historical Archaeology 28, 5-22. Orser, C.E. 1996. A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. New York: Plenum. Orser, C.E. & Funari, P.P.A. 1992. ,Pesquisa arqueologica inicial em Palmares. Estudos lbero-Arnericanos 18, 53-69. Potter, Jr. P. B. n.d. Appropriating
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primeros templos cristianos en el area maya: 1545-1585. Barcelona, unpublished typescript. Haas, J. 1996. Power, objects, and a voice for anthropology. Current Anthropology 37, supplement, SI-S22. Hermann, J. 1989. World Archaeology - The world's cultural heritage. In Archaeological Heritage Management in the Modern World, H.F. Cleere (ed.), 30-37. London: Unwin Hyman. Hudson, K. 1994. The Great European Museum: the museum one cannot avoid and does not need to enter. Institute ofArchaeology Bulletin 31, 53-60. Ianni, O. 1988. Uma Cidade Antiga. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp. Jones, A.L. 1993. Exploding canons: the anthropology of Museum. Annual Review of Anthropology 22, 201220. Leite, P.M. 1996. No time' da Historia. Vela, January 31st, 102-104. Lira, A. 1997. Museu tern cara nova e acervo comprometido. Estado de Minas, June the 22nd, p. 42.
the victor by addressing the second person. Unpublished typescript. Reis Filho, N.G. 1978. Quadro da Arquitetura no Brasil. Sao Paulo:
Historia das Ciencias Sociais no Brasil, volume 1, S. Miceli (ed.), 20-71. Sao Paulo: Ideps. Serra, 0. 1984. Questoes de identidade cultural. In Produzindo o Passado, A.A. Arantes (ed.), 97-123. Sao Paulo: Brasil iense. The original title of this paper is "Destruction and Conservation of Cultural Property in Brazil: Academic and Practical Challenges." Pedro Paulo A. Funari, BA, MA, Ph.D., is an archaeologist, University of Campinas professor, author of several books and papers; e-mail address: pedrofunariAsti.com.br.
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