We should probably just be saying ‘modern civilization is bad.”
A tribe in the Amazon, which no one even knew existed this time last year has now disappeared without a trace. All 200 members of it. And drug dealers are behind it.
The evidence is chilling. A guard post erected to protect the tribe and its land was “ransacked and destroyed” by men carrying sub-machine and rifles, according to a guard who survived the ambush. Those heavily armed drug traffickers now occupy the base and patrol the forest around the missing tribe’s former village.
Workers from the Brazilian government’s National Indian Foundation report finding a drug-runner’s “rucksack with a broken arrow inside” and a 20-kilogram package of cocaine lying nearby. Officials think the smugglers want to use the territory as a route to move product between Brazil and bordering Peru.
From the Survival International press release:
Carlos Travassos, the head of the Brazilian government’s isolated Indians department, said today, ‘Arrows are like the identity card of uncontacted Indians. We think the Peruvians made the Indians flee. Now we have good proof. We are more worried than ever. This situation could be one of the biggest blows we have ever seen in the protection of uncontacted Indians in recent decades. It’s a catastrophe.’
And if all this wasn’t bad enough: remember what happened to the Native population when Christopher Columbus and all his germ-y European buddies landed in the Caribbean? No? How bout the tale of the small pox blankets?
