VICTIMS OF CAPITAL

The Indians of the Amazon are being sys. tematically destroyed by the rapacious expansion of Brazilian capitalism.

At the beginning of the century they were estimated to number around 6 million. Disease, demoralization and genocide have reduced this figure to a maximum 100,000. The Indians have been gunned down by greedy landowners, driven into virtual slavery by mineral exploiters, ravaged by drink and brutalized by speculators of all kinds.

Brazilian experts estimate that at the rate of decimation over the past 50 years, the last Indian will be destroyed by 1980. The military government is speeding up the process by driving road through the Indians' jungle areas.

The Transamazonian highway will not only open up the deep interior land-grabbing and mining interests, but is certain to accelerate the killing of the Indians.

One of the most active agencies in this process has been the government's own 'Indian Protection Service'.

This body was dissolved in 1968 after Gen Albuquerque Lima, the Minister of the Interior, had himself reported that the Service had become an instrument for the Indians' oppression.

The Ministry aiscovered, for example, that 'crimes committed by certain ex-functionaires of IPS amounted to more than 1,000, ranging from tearing out Indian fingernails to allowing them to die without assistance.

At Aripuana, on the western border of Brazil, the Cintas Largas Indians were attacked from the air with sticks of dynamite.

The Maxacali Indians were given cheap alcohol by the landowners, who employed gunmen to shoot them down when they were drunk. Another group of landowners hired a well-known bandit to exterminate the Canelas Indians, while the Nhambiquera tribe were mown down by machinegun fire.

Woven more horrible was the fate of the Patachos tribe, who were given injections of smallpox to kill them off.

The photographs on this page show the rapid demoralization and destruction of the Indians at the hands of Brazilian capitalism. They are taken from an exhibition currently at the Institute of Contemporary Arts of the work of Hungarian photographer Ata Kando.

She has documented the onslaught against the tribes — Indian mother with her child. Left: the Communal House of the Makiritare tribe.

how they are reduced from proud, free-ranging tribes to the lowest rank of humanity, sometimes in a space of only two A considerable role in this process is played by the missionmissionaries in some jungle areas American non-conformist have been accused of setting up virtual slave camps for the Indians.

At some of these camps the missionaires protect themselves behind barbed wire. They have a deliberate R policy of destroying the Indians' subsistence economy -driving them to work at low wages and selling them food at the current inflated prices.

This leaves the Indians with no surplus for other items like cooking pots, and they are forced to accept the mission's hand-outs of clothing and the missionaries' religion. opening the way for the introduction of straightforward capitalist relationships and the conversion of the Indians into a source of cheap wage-labour.

Various liberal protest groups have recently begun an agitation against the genocide of the Indians in Brazil. Such campaigns are wasted on the military regime, which continues its secret war against the Indians while periodically denouncing its own corrupt agents.

In reality the fate of the Amazon tribes is a direct result of the introduction of capitalist property relations into these previously unexplored regions. Rosa Luxemburg graphically described the break up of 'natural economy' under the impact of capitalism in her book 'The Accumulation of Capital'.

She wrote that: 'Capital in its struggle against societies with a natural economy pursues the following ends: "(1) To gain immediate possession of important sources of productive forces such as land, game *(4) To separate trade and agriculture' She added: 'Any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital exclusively to "peaceful competition" i.e. to regular commodity exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer countries, rests on the pious belief that capital can accumulate without mediation of the productive forces and without the demand of more primitive organizations, and that it can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating natural economy ... 'Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day.

primitive spines fivel of the is a matter of life or death; for them there can be no other attitude than opposition and fight to the finish-complete exhaustion and extinction...

PAGE Workers Press, Thursday