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Yanomami (Upper Orinoco) - 1994
Yanomami (Upper Orinoco) - 1994
Jacek Pałkiewicz2006-06-17 16:33:34
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www.palkiewicz.com
From the window of a tiny plane, the lands of the Yanomami Indians look like a world untouched by time - jungle-covered mountains and valleys cut by shiny ribbons of lonely rivers. As the plane swoops over the trees to land with a bump on a rough landing strip, men daubed in the red paint of welcome emerge clutching bows and arrows twice their own height and talking excitedly in the Yanomamis' ancient language. Naked women suckling babies stand cautiously at a distance, their cheeks pierced by long, ornamental straws.
A first-time visitor to this remote corner of the Amazon feels he has been transported back into pre-history. For 2,000 years the Yanomamis have lived in a primitive society where warriors still raid villages to steal women and some babies are killed to ensure the survival of others. But the devastating impact of the tribe's short exposure to modern man is also there for an outsider to see. In a nearby hut, men and women lie listless in hammocks, shivering with malaria. A few minutes' walk down a path where a stream once ran, mosquitoes swarm by stagnant pools. The stinking water is the mark of the "garimpeiros," the wildcat gold miners who have brought pollution and disease to the once-healthy Yanomamis and left them on the brink of extinction.
"Garimpeiros, malaria, many dead," one man said in a few Portuguese words he knew. Others crowded around government officials, pointing to a distant mountain range. "More garimpeiros," a translator explained. "They are armed." It has been nearly 20 years since the garimpeiros first swarmed into the Yanomamis' forests in a gold rush of gigantic proportions. In the early 1980s, an estimated 40,000 men were blasting riverbeds and polluting the water with mercury.
The Yanomamis were decimated. Malaria, tuberculosis and even common flu have reduced their numbers in Brazil to about 9,000, down from an estimated 20,000 just 20 years ago. Another
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See photographs from:
Brazil Gallery
,
Venezuela Gallery
