The Slow Death of the Yanomami

From The New York Times Rain Forest Tribe’s Charge of Neglect Is Shrouded by Religion and Politics By SIMON ROMERO Published: October 6, 2008 PUERTO AYACUCHO, Venezuela — Three years after President Hugo Chávez expelled American missionaries from the Venezuelan Amazon, accusing them of using proselytism of remote tribes as a cover for espionage, resentment is festering here over what some tribal leaders say was official negligence that led to the deaths of dozens of indigenous children and adults. Some leaders of the Yanomami, one of South America’s largest forest-dwelling tribes, say that 50 people in their communities in the southern rain forest have died since the expulsion of the missionaries in 2005 because of recurring shortages of medicine and fuel, and unreliable transportation out of the jungle to medical facilities. Mr. Chávez’s government disputes the claims and points to more spending than ever on social welfare programs for the Yanomami. The spending is part of a broader plan to assert greater military and social control over expanses of rain forest that are viewed as essential for Venezuela’s sovereignty. The Yanomami leaders are wading into a politicized debate about how officials react to health care challenges faced by the Yanomami and other Amazonian tribes. In recent interviews here, government officials contended that the Yanomami could be exaggerating their claims to win more resources from the government and undercut its authority in the Amazon. Meanwhile, the Yanomami claims come amid growing concern in Venezuela over indigenous health care after a scandal erupted in August over a tepid official response to a mystery disease that killed 38 Warao Indians in the country’s northeast. “This government makes a big show of helping the Yanomami, but rhetoric is one thing and reality another,” said Ramón González, 49, a Yanomami leader from the village of Yajanamateli who traveled recently to Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas State, to ask military officials and civilian doctors for improved health care. “The truth is that Yanomami lives are still considered worthless,” said Mr. González, who was converted to Christianity by New Tribes Mission, a Florida group expelled in 2005. “The boats, the planes, the money, it’s all for the criollos, not for us,” he said, using a term for nonindigenous Venezuelans. The Yanomami leaders offer a far different image of the tribe than those found in anthropology books, which often depict it in Rousseaulike settings with painted faces and clad in loincloths. There are about 26,000 Yanomami in the Amazon rain forest, in Venezuela and Brazil, where they subsist as seminomadic hunters and cultivators of crops like manioc and bananas. They remain susceptible to ailments for which they have weak defenses, including respiratory diseases and drug-resistant strains of malaria. In Puerto Ayacucho, they can be seen wandering through the traffic-clogged streets, clad in the modern uniform of T-shirts and baggy pants, toting cellphones. Earlier this decade, the anthropology world was consumed by claims by the writer Patrick Tierney that American scholars may have started and exacerbated a measles epidemic in the late 1960s that killed hundreds of Yanomami. And claims of medical neglect emerged before Mr. Chávez expelled the American missionaries, who numbered about 200. They administered care to the Yanomami with donated medicine from the United States and transported them to clinics on small propeller planes using dozens of airstrips carved out of the jungle. New Tribes, the most prominent of the expelled groups, has denied Mr. Chávez’s charges of espionage but declined to comment for this article, citing the tense relations between Venezuela and the United States. Mr. González and other Yanomami leaders provided the names of 50 people, including 22 children, who they said died from ailments like malaria and pneumonia after the military limited civilian and missionary flights to their villages in 2005. The military replaced the missionaries’ operations with its own fleet of small planes and helicopters, but critics say the missions were infrequent or unresponsive. The Yanomami leaders said they made the list public after showing it to health and military officials and receiving a cold response. “They told us we should be grateful for the help we’re already being given,” said Eduardo Mejía, 24, a Yanomami leader from the village of El Cejal. The official in charge of transportation in Amazonas’s interior, Gen. Yomar José Rubio of the 52nd Infantry Brigade in Puerto Ayacucho, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But other officials here questioned the claims. “The missionaries were in Amazonas for 50 years, creating dependent indigenous populations in some places, so their withdrawal was bound to have positive and negative effects,” said Carlos Botto, a senior official with Caicet, a government research institute that focuses on tropical diseases. “But one cannot forget that the Yanomami and other indigenous groups have learned how to exert pressure on the government in order to receive food or other benefits,” he said. “This does not mean there aren’t challenges in providing them with health care, but caution is necessary with claims like these.” The dispute has also focused attention on an innovative government project created in late 2005, the Yanomami Health Plan. With a staff of 46, it trains some Yanomami to be health workers in their villages while sending doctors into the jungle to provide health care to remote communities. “We have 14 doctors in our team, with 11 trained in Cuba for work in jungle areas,” said Meydell Simancas, 32, a tropical disease specialist who directs the project from a compound here once owned by New Tribes Mission. Dr. Simancas said that more than 20 Yanomami had been trained as paramedics, and that statistics showed that doctors had increased immunizations and programs to control malaria and river blindness across Amazonas. The Yanomami leaders complaining of negligence acknowledged Dr. Simancas’s good intentions. But they said serious problems persisted in coordinating access to doctors and medicine with the military, which the Yanomami and government doctors both rely on for travel in and out of the rain forest. Dr. Simancas suggested the claims of the dozens of deaths originated in the village of Coshilowateli, where a holdout American evangelist group, Padamo Mission, has fought expulsion by arguing that its leaders cannot be expelled because they hold Venezuelan citizenship. “There is subjective data that could be worth investigating,” Dr. Simancas said, referring to Coshilowateli, “but it comes from a community in a situation of political tension.” Michael Dawson, a leader of Padamo Mission, denied the claims of negligence were exaggerated or politically motivated. He also said they originated not in Coshilowateli, but in villages where the Yanomami were converted to Christianity by missionaries Mr. Chávez had expelled. “It is easier for them to just blame us rather than admit they have really not helped the Indians much,” said Mr. Dawson, 53, who was born and raised among the Yanomami. “Every name on the list is a verified case of an emergency where repeated requests for help went out over public airwaves via ham radio.” For their part, Yanomami leaders point to what they consider to be a broad pattern of neglect and condescension from public officials. “They put pictures of Yanomami everywhere, on tourist brochures, in airport lobbies, even on ambulances here in Puerto Ayacucho,” said Andrés González, 38, a Yanomami leader. “That’s where they want us, in pictures, not positions of power,” he said. Meanwhile, the Yanomami who do make it here for medical care stay at a squalid compound once owned by foreign missionaries who were expelled in 2005. In the property’s trash-strewn yard, women cook manioc in steel pots over a fire, under the shade of a mango tree. The men lounge in hammocks slung in an open-air shed. Pedro Camico, 36, said he traveled here from El Cejal after one of his children died of malaria; she was not on the Yanomami leaders’ list of 50 dead. He stood by his son, Misael, 4, also sick with malaria but with the hope of recovery through medicine here. “I have one child dead and another alive, but I am here with my son,” Mr. Camico said. “I am one of the lucky ones.”

A Really LONG Post...

...containing Some Random Thoughts on the State of the Universe. The Universe: "Dark energy" – a mystery – scientists can’t figure out this "force" that makes up 70 to 75% of the known universe. Sounds rather like something from "Star Wars" – may the Force be with you… Hmmm….is this Goddess/God, maybe??? Venezuela: Is Goddess/God looking out for Venezuela? I suppose it depends what Gods you believe in. I am absolutely happy that Chavez’s blatant attempt to become a for-life "Putin of the Left" has been defeated by the electorate. I had no idea which way the vote would go. Maybe I’m not reading the right news sources. In the usual western news sources there seems to be so much focus on the people who support Chavez – who are inevitably described as poor and ignorant. the real picture is much more complicated than that. My outsider views on Chavez are, I’m sure, quite a bit different than those held by people who actually live in Venezuela and function under his government’s policies in their day to day lives. One thing I thought hurt Chavez – his continual insistence on using the USA as a big bug-a-boo, like Iran still calls the USA the Great Satan (been there, done that, boring!), attempting to whip the population up into a nationalistic frenzy. Oooooohhhhhhh, yes, the big bad USA was going to influence the outcome of voting on the referendum. Chavez said he’d cut off all oil imports to the USA if "we" tried in any way, shape or form to influence the outcome of the voting. Just how the USA was going to do this, however, has not been explained. Do we have hundreds of undercover agents in the country who would foment riots? Would we send out paid assassins to kill off 100,000 voters? Would we raid voting stations and steal millions of ballots? Would we drop a neutron bomb on Caracas? Would - gasp - The Washington Post or The New York Times (or both!) publish stories about Chavez's government? Proof - where is the proof? Oh yes, Mr. Chavez, cutting off your oil supplies to the USA would really hurt us. NOT. Oh, there would be some temporary dislocations and some bitching and moaning about increased gasoline prices, etc. but in the end, we’d adjust. We always have. We always will. That’s what is so great about the USA. You may be able to knock us down, but you’ll never knock us out permanently, no matter what you throw at us. We are a people created out of a great conglomeration of mixed bloods and mixed cultures (despite some folks’ continual insistence that we are WASPs, ha ha ha!). We have taken the best from all of the cultures we left behind to become Americans, and we left behind the weaknesses of those other cultures. Hell, that’s why we came here to begin with. My father’s French Catholic family came over in the early 1700’s and ever so slowly worked their way up the Mississippi River as loggers and lumbermen, going all the way north to Wisconsin, where they finally settled in large numbers "up north," as we southern county folks (Milwaukee and Racine) call it. Farmers and lumbermen – who intermarried all along the way with other French settlers, Creoles in New Orleans, English settlers, and one or two Native Americans. On my father’s side of the family, I’m a real "mixture." The National Geographic Society would probably love to get hold of my DNA! According to family folklore, one of the ancestral male Newtons (who were not called Newtons then), married an English woman named Newton and took her name, because it was easier for the locals to pronounce than the convoluted French name we had – something that roughly translated to "new town" in English. That's something like "nouveaux" for "new" and "ville" for "town" or village. "New - town" "Newton" – all the same in America. In England, we might have been called Neville. One thing I can tell you – we have no known relationship to Sir Isaac Newton, or to the inventor of Nabisco’s famous cookie "Fig Newtons." My mother’s family came over in the late 1800’s from Poland and worked in the foundries in 140 degree heat among molten iron and steel. On her side, I’m pure Polish – at least according to recorded last names that all in "ski." Polish and French mongrel whatever – I’m a typical American from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That is what makes the USA unique. We average folks do appreciate this about our country even if we don’t talk about it very much, even though we don’t think about it very much. It’s just something that is in our blood – our mixed "mongrel" blood, if you will. Hey, where else can you hear so much bitching about immigration? Right now, we’ve got a Presidential campaign going on. We HATE the Republicans; we HATE the Democrats; we hate the Mormons and anyone from New York City, unless your name is Giuliani, and then, we love him only conditionally (he's been married three times, after all. Geez!) We yell and scream at each other and fill the front pages of The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle with our rhetoric, and we keep on humming along anyway, the most productive and creative country in the world. We bumble along and stumble along, collectively speaking, and learn from our mistakes – eventually. So, Chavez’s rhetoric is just a hollow threat – barely a gnat buzzing in our collective ear. A foolish threat, really, when you think about it. And perhaps it cost him winning the referendum he wanted to win. I mean, people in Venezuela aren’t stupid. They have internet, they have satellite television and radio broadcasts. They have brains, they think, they talk to each other. Chavez is operating as a 19th century politician in a 21st century world. I just pray that he doesn’t set his country too far back along the path to progress. I’m all for sharing the wealth of the land among all the people. We do that here – through the tax structure. It’s not perfect, but it’s acceptable to us on the whole. We adjust; we tinker; the pendulum swings one way right, and then back to the left, generation after generation. Most of us folks are in the big PLOP middle of that pendulum swing. On the other hand, pure "book learned" socialism has been proved to be a failure, as has book-learned communism All the most successful and enduring governments in the world are mixtures of democracy, republicanism and socialist sentiments. So come on, Chavez, get with the program, already. Cuba is a dead country. The folks there are just waiting for Fidel to croak so that they can live again. Don’t model yourself after Fidel. He’s the past. Russia: Putin is hailing the voting results yesterday as a validation of his leadership. Cough cough, choke choke. Will the man just fade into the sunset and become a senior statesman as Gorbachev did when his Presidential term was up? I certainly hope so, but who knows what Putin has planned? I have tremendous respect for Gorbachev. History will prove Gorbachev to be a man of immense courage and long-term vision. I have NO respect for Putin who has, through his actions the past several years, clearly demonstrated that he has neither commitment to advancing democracy nor a true long-term vision for the future of his country. It is too bad. I had great hopes when Putin first came to office, because Russia needed the discipline he imposed after the seeming anarchy of the years following the "collapse of the iron wall" and the Yeltsin years. Unfortunately, Putin ended up destroying all of the historic democratic advances that were put into place under Yeltsin. It seems that he has no regard for truly advancing the Russian people out of their "peasant" mentality, still very much intact after the collapse of Stalanism. What a shame. Personally, I think there is a "resonancy" (is that a word?) between Americans and Russians. I think Russians – who have produced some of the greatest geniuses in the world – could become an incredibly marvelous, dynamic society, just like we have here – if they could just, as a whole, get over that "peasant" mentality – it’s a sort of gigantic inferiority complex. Americans became Americans because they didn’t want to be peasants anymore – that’s the bottom line, when all is said and done. Our ancestors were able to emmigrate here and start over. At the risk of sounding trite, they were able to leave behind the bonds of oppression and begin anew. Most of the Russian people do not have the option to leave everything they knew behind and start over in a new land but – even if they did – they might choose not to take it anyway. Whatever the case, politicians like Putin DO NOT HELP the Russian people, THEY HURT them. They hurt the very people they pretend to want to help to greatness. As I said in the case of Chavez, Putin is using 19th century political tactics in the 21st century. What a shame. He is under-valuing his own people. How long will he be able to get away with it? From what I read, Russia’s largest cities are in many ways very 21st century; but in the countryside, the 19th century ways still appear to resonate – or so Putin would have us believe. What is the real truth? Does anyone really know? We have so few Russian voices to whom we can listen - let alone trust - that we are hearing something real, something not scripted, something not propaganda. I freely admit to a legacy of ongoing paranoia from the horrid Communist years under which shadow of nuclear holocaust at any second I grew up. I trusted Gorbachev and Yeltsin. They are now vilified by Putin and his cohorts. I do not trust Putin – he has shifty eyes and the mannerisms of a weasel. Garry Kasparov, world chess champion for many years, speaks out, and because of his accomplishments he receives world-wide attention. I think many of the things he says make a lot of sense. Kasparov makes more sense to me that what I hear out of the mouth of Putin, who plays the same xenophobic tricks on Russia that Chavez has attempted to play on Venezuelans. Does Putin have it right? Is his phoney paranoia about US justified? Is the USA out to somehow "get" Russia? Think about this for a few moments. What is it, exactly, we would be expected to do in order to somehow take over Russia or perhaps destroy it forever? Launch a nuclear attack? Steal all of their oil and gas with our super-secret UFO machines? Join up with the Chinese and invade to take over all their natural resources? (Somewhat similar to a plot line in an old Tom Clancy novel). Use a thousand folks running NGOs, scattered across all of the Russian republics, to somehow overthrow the government? The degree to which you believe that any or all of these scenarios is likely to happen will have a direct effect on the amount of Social Security retirements you will eventually be entitled to receive from the US government :) Seriously, doesn’t it seem likely that if Putin thought he really WAS right (and a majority of the Russian people believed this along with him), he would not worry about retiring from office? He would just ignore the rules he is allegedly working under (Russian Constitution) and sworn to uphold, and wave his hand off the end of his nose at anyone who calls him a fascist dictator, for he would be confident in his "rightness." There is a pattern of behavior that supports his desire to become the next Russian "caesar." He has actively worked to pass laws and uses law enforcement with impunity to repress "dissenting" political parties from free assembly, from participating in elections, and has actively curtailed their publication rights by either shutting down newspapers that do not agree with Putin’s "official" line or jails dissent publishers. He also has his secret service people kill off people who really piss him off (we can name a few, can’t we). In contrast, in a free and open society, any political party should be able to mount a list of candidates on a ballot for any election with a minimum of red-tape, and have the voters choose them, or not. Anyone should be able to say just about anything they want to say – no matter how offensive we might find their speech. Does not the Russian Constitution (like the Constitution of the United States of America) guarantee these rights – and more – to all Russian citizens? And yet the reality is so different. The courts have been corrupted – honest judges are either sidelined or eliminated in one way or another – and so one finds oneself "going along to get along" just in order to survive. How sad. How very very sad. The promise that was Russia after the Iron Curtain collapsed is no longer even a ghost. That initial, ephemeral but promising spirit of freedom and glory has utterly and completely disappeared. Well, I don’t have all the answers. I do understand that political repression, whether imposed from the right or the left, is never the answer. At best, it’s a temporary fix, and inevitably invites more problems than it ends up suppressing. What’s that old saying – "the tide turneth for no man." The tide of human freedom is inevitable. I wish the Putins, Chavezes, Moraleses, George W. Bushes and Ahmadinejads of the world understood this fundamental principle of history. The Stock Market: Our tiny Investment Club (4 members) sustained little damage to our net worth during the past several months of up and down DOW. I’m so thrilled! As the "resident investment guru" I feel a grave responsibility for educating the members toward making correct investment choices, using appropriate analysis protocols – with long term growth in mind. I'm not tooting my own horn here, although it seems like I am! What I want to emphasize is that anyone - and I do mean anyone - can learn the fundamentals of sound investing, just like I did, by joining an investment club in December, 2000. I moved on from that club to found the current club I'm in, in January, 2005. On January 5, 2008, "Invest Wise" will celebrate our three year anniversary. We will be having another SPA DAY on December 15th. Yippee! I have decided that this SPA DAY will be in celebration of our anniversary. I just have to tell the rest of the ladies about it :) We made our very first investment in May, 2005. Our initial unit value then was $10. Today our official unit value is $18.23. That’s down from $18.43 unit value a month before – but I expect that once we record the dividends we will receive on our stock during December, that unit value will bounce right back up. When we hit $20 unit value we will have officially doubled our money. I’m not talking about doubling our money by piling up a lot of cash that sits earning little interest in our brokerage money market account. We are fully invested in the stock market. Our stock picking regimen is rigorous. But once we buy, we are subject to market forces just like any other investor. We have picked some real winners, no true losers - yet. Our goal is to double our money every five years. It looks like we are on track to do that well before our first five year anniversary! I couldn’t be more pleased! Mother Nature: You cannot – ever - defeat Mother Nature. If you think you’re greater than She is, She will slap you back down to size in no time at all. It takes only a hurricane or two, or a typhoon or two, or a tidal wave, or a volcanic eruption here and there, or a drought, to demonstrate just how powerless we puny humans are in the face of Mother Nature’s relentless power. I’m sitting here now typing this and the evening news is on NBC. There are weather problems on both the east and west coasts! Darlings, that’s nothing to what we can get hammered with here, in little ol’ Milwaukee. Well, I do have to admit, we don’t have any "extinct" volcanoes nearby that could suddenly bloom into life after a million years, like they do in Seattle (showing my geographic ignorance now, aren’t the Cascade Mountains near Seattle, and don’t the Cascades have extinct and/or dormant volcanoes???). Not that Seattle has been overcome by a volcanic eruption – just a lot of rain. So much rain, in fact, that the foundations of seemingly secure buildings housing very expensive condominiums – approved by the Building Inspection Department of the municipality, no less – are now being threatened to wash away! Oh my! Darlings, I’m SO glad I live in Milwaukee, right on top of a great lake where at least I know I’ll always have fresh water to drink – unless the Chavezes of the world figure out a way to steal that from us (in the name of the socialist people, of course)...