‘Uncontacted’ Amazon Tribe Members Are Reported Killed in Brazil

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/world/americas/brazil-amazon-tribe-killings.html

by spking • 9 years ago

224 127 9 years ago

nytimes.com

userbinator• 9 years ago

For a second, I thought there was a new product called Tribe from Amazon...

dmix• 9 years ago

“There is a lot of evidence, but it needs to be proven,” she said.

This won't stop the pitchforks from coming out well before we have such evidence, especially given they were workers from a mining company and the already hostile political climate regarding the topic of tribes. But personally I'd rather wait until this is the case before forming an opinion...

warned that given the small sizes of the uncontacted Amazon tribes, this latest episode could mean that a significant percentage of a remote ethnic group was wiped out.

If 10 people dying means a "significant percentage was wiped out" shows that they were already on the brink of extinction as it was. It's not clear from the article if that was an obvious consequence to the preptraitors involved or they knew it was a risk.

Either way hopefully it wasn't a case of disregard for human life, even if the tribe violently engaged them giving an exuse to use modern weaponry against them.

dogruck3• 9 years ago

Also this: With land disputes on the rise in many remote areas of Brazil, indigenous groups, rural workers and land activists have all been targeted by violence.

Not justifying alleged murder -- but looks to be a generally violent region and environment.

dogruck3• 9 years ago

Innocent until proven guilty. Gotta love this paragraph: “There is a lot of evidence, but it needs to be proven,” she said.

What's the evidence?

pvg3• 9 years ago

Innocent until proven guilty.

This is a principle of the US criminal justice system not a law of newspaper reporting and/or nature.

parineum• 9 years ago

It's a principle of the US criminal justice system that is derived from a moral intuition of justice. I hate seeing the US policy discarded because it's "irrelevant" to the context. The basis of the law is a moral issue that is always relevant. If murder wasn't illegal it'd still be wrong.

If you want to disagree with the moral principle, go ahead (but I suspect you'll sound like a tyrant).

Robelius• 9 years ago

Innocent unless proven guilty.

Until until is normally how people treat a suspect rather than a mindset where it’s innocent unless proven guilty.

oblio• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence

It's a Roman principle, not an American one.

secfirstmd• 9 years ago

Unless it involves Gitmo or drone assassinations.

alsetmusic• 9 years ago

What's the evidence?

You quoted the article, so I assume you read it. It states that "… the gold miners went to a bar in a near the border with Colombia, and bragged about the killings." Also, that "[t]he indigenous affairs bureau conducted some initial interviews in the town…"

In this case, the evidence appears to be a report of public acknowledgement of the crime and statements given in private interviews.

Perhaps you were asking about the content of the interviews, but you didn't specify.

meddlepal• 9 years ago

That's not evidence. Hearsay most likely. Definitely suspicious.

I could walk into a bar tell everyone I killed someone and boast about it. I may become a suspect or person of interest to the police, but they're gonna have an awfully hard time pinning me with murder based on purely bar talk. Now if the police have bodies or weapons etc. then this is a different story.

OTOH who knows how rigorous the Brazilian court system is...

dogruck3• 9 years ago

Ah, seems like an open and shut case. Some drunk braggarts combined with some loose talk around town. I'm convinced!

pmarreck4• 9 years ago

They also said that they had to either kill or be killed. Which you conveniently omitted. And given everything I've read about many of these tribes, they will not hesitate to fire arrows at you even if you're a futuristic helicopter hovering 300 feet above them simply observing

Alex3917• 9 years ago

Oh well, there goes potentially thousands of years worth of medical knowledge, linguistic insight, etc.

bdcravens• 9 years ago

The article said about 10 villagers, not the entire village.

folli• 9 years ago

Let's wait another couple of years, with increasing logging operations in the region, the introduction of diseases that their immune system hasn't encountered before etc.

ekianjo• 9 years ago

thousands of years worth of medical knowledge

If that can somewhat reassure you, most of the "traditional medicines" once tested in proper clinical trials, are just about the same as placebo. I'm not saying all, but a good majority. And people used to die from simple infections way more before we had modern medicine with antibiotics and the like, so I'd rather count on modern medicine any day for discoveries and treatments.

kamaal5• 9 years ago

That is not the point.

Staying in the jungle for a few thousand years leads you to optimize locally sourced flora and fauna to amazing levels to solve a range of medical conditions. That could be helpful to a lot of people in many social and financial conditions.

eternauta3k• 9 years ago

Most might be ineffective. But it only takes one effective one.

logibly2• 9 years ago

that's not true. Look around you. Turmeric for eg a "traditional medicine" coming flying through in most clinical trials. At least lot better then artificially high sample size to show some kind of statistical significance. This is just one example there are thousands more like these.

otabdeveloper1• 9 years ago

Perhaps the reason they're running around in loincloths in the year 2017 is because they don't prioritize 'knowledge' and 'insight' the way we do?

hallman76• 9 years ago

I've always been completely blown away that there were 'uncontacted' tribes on Earth at the same time that we had a rover zipping around Mars.

Gibson said it. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

sharkweek• 9 years ago

One of my favorite poems, by the late great Gil Scott-Heron, "Whitey on the moon"

A rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY

I think it's obviously short-sighted to not budget for advancement, but it's important to remember this disparity exists.

carapace• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

It is home to the Sentinelese who, often violently, reject any contact with the outside world, and are among the last people worldwide to remain virtually untouched by modern civilization. As such, only limited information about the island is known.

They are the control group. (And they live on Sentinel island! Get it?)

kamaal5• 9 years ago

It is also a little scary.

Human civilization and progress associated with it is a function of continuity and inertia. And that requires all the right inputs . Else it is perfectly possible to keep going in infinite loops between the past and the current.

I remember reading somewhere the human race would be way more advanced had the hellenistic period continued.

War, politics, economics, social conditions, religions they have to be all perfect.

simonh2• 9 years ago

I remember reading somewhere the human race would be way more advanced had the hellenistic period continued.

I find those claims unconvincing. You can't just look at all the ups and downs in human social and technological development, pick and arbitrary upswing way back in the past, then project a continuous upward slope from that and pretend it was a realistic possibility.

Individual technological achievements that long ago were a fine thing, but as you say yourself a lot of different factors and technologies and situational chances have to come together to reach the industrial age. Maybe a few extra nudges in the right direction here and there in history might have helped things along a bit, but realistically it was still going to take a very long time for all the different pieces to come together.

_0w8t• 9 years ago

Consider if a really big disaster happens or total nuclear war etc., who have better chance to survive it, our modern civilization or some remote tribe in Amazon? And from that point of view a rover on Mars is not that impressive. If it will be a human colony there that can survive without Earth, then we are talking. But it requires a lot more advances and political will.

blubb-fish3• 9 years ago

at the end of the day life is not about being impressive. life is about living. and I have not doubt those tribes are happier than 90% of the people belonging to advanced civilizations.

pvaldes• 9 years ago

Is an interesting question. The people in the former modern civilization would be probably better fitted for glaciation events and living in a changing environment. On the other hand the battlefield of a nuclear war would be most probably the north, making more difficult to survive the first months and to find safe (non poisoned) places at long term.

drzaiusapelord• 9 years ago

our modern civilization or some remote tribe in Amazon?

They won't make it either. Nuclear war is a game ender. Also this has kinda already happened on a tiny scale, namely the British testing of weapons in the Australian Outback in the 50s and 60s. It wasn't very good for the natives:

"He said, 'We thought it was the spirit of our gods rising up to speak with us'," she said.

"[He said] 'then we saw the spirit had made all the kangaroos fall down on the ground as a gift to us of easy hunting so we took those kangaroos and we ate them and people were sick and then the spirit left'."

Mr Morgan is sharing his story, in his words, so it won't ever be forgotten.

"After the explosion the fallout went north," Mr Morgan said.

"Powder, white powder killed a lot of kangaroos [and] spinifex [grass]. Water was on fire, that's what we saw."

Mr Morgan said water "died" but that he and the two men he was with drank the water, even though it was still hot.

"The smoke went into our noses, and other people still have that poison today," he said.

"We all poisoned, in the heart, in the blood and other people that were much closer they didn't live very long, they died, a whole lot of them."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-07/aboriginal-mans-story-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maral...

addicted• 9 years ago

So 10 people were killed and possibly loads of culture destroyed because people wanted more shiny rocks. It goes to show that as advanced as we think we as modern humans are we are pretty damn primitive.

nippples3• 9 years ago

we as modern humans

Most humans had literally nothing to do with this.

adventured• 9 years ago

Most humans had literally nothing to do with this.

It's impossible to apply effective collective guilt and to properly human-bash, if the "we" isn't used, that's why it is so frequently invoked that way. They know that the extreme majority of people had nothing to do with it when they use that phrasing, it doesn't have any captivation what-so-ever if you say: an extraordinarily small number of people out of seven billion are/were the problem/cause. It applies similarly to nearly every popular topic of human bashing, from animal cruelty to war (just as when people say their faith in humanity has been restored because of the act of one person, they're making a similar intentional error of collective application).

amelius2• 9 years ago

Well, one could argue that collectively we've created (or at least allowed to exist) the conditions for this to happen.

vixen99• 9 years ago

True and the peaceable majority are irrelevant.

ainiriand• 9 years ago

Humans, the salt of the earth.

humanrebar• 9 years ago

It's worth noting that in the original context, humans aren't the salt of the Earth.

aaron6953• 9 years ago

So we let the human zoo keep on running and are supprised they get murdered?

We refuse to supply them with medicine, technology and law and order and murders happen? Supprise supprise.

What a awful awful thing it is to leave them in the stone ages, and all the horrific things that happen in tribes, just for our entertainment.

OT There is a parellel here to possible libitarian utopias. Sure you are without government, but as such you have no protection.

If you piss off a country and they bomb you/stop you resupplying, you don't really have any recourse.

lawlessone• 9 years ago

"What a awful awful thing it is to leave them in the stone ages, and all the horrific things that happen in tribes, just for our entertainment."

Contact usually hasn't been good for the health of many of these people.

aaron6953• 9 years ago

I'm better off than my parents who were better off than their parents etc for a while.

Sorry, it's called progress. We war less, we rape less, we murder less, we live longer.

And why this mythology than contact now is combiariable to contact 200+ years ago is beyond me.

Anyway, as the zoo keepers we gave a responsibility for our exibit.

We are possibly letting them down here. If we are going to keep them in the dark ages we need to step up.

noam87• 9 years ago

The level of ignorance and /r/iamverysmart-worthy pontificating that's on display in this thread is truly embarrassing.

Worse than embarrassing, it's the embodiment of banal evil; because it's precisely this ignorance and blitheness that's enabling the atrocities that continue to go on in South America.

For Christ's sake, people, travel -- or read a damn book at the very least before sharing such ill-founded opinions.

Except for rare uncontacted tribes, South American natives are actual people you can meet and talk to. Ask them yourself why they choose not to join our wonderful shiny way of life.

trentmb• 9 years ago

Gee mister, I sure hope that I can be as smart as you one day!

Boothroid2• 9 years ago

This makes my heart ache so much that I can hardly bear to read it. I also feel like I detect a note of insecurity in many of the comments - it's as if the idea that our modern lifestyle and its impacts may be problematic and or in some aspects inferior to pre-modern ways of living is somehow threatening, and must therefore be rejected. I think it's massively ignorant and brutish to view earlier civilisations with such contempt, and collectively suicidal for humanity for us to carry on regardless when the Earth seems to be giving us plenty of signs that we are heading for disaster unless we change.

feralmoan• 9 years ago

Topical, I watched a movie last night that covers a lot of the things you mentioned - Lost City Of Z http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1212428 it didn't get great ratings but was good, cinematic and thoughtful imho

Boothroid2• 9 years ago

Cheers for the tip, looks right up my street and is on Netflix

swlkr• 9 years ago

If you're interested in the idea that primitive people had something there you should read the unabombers manifesto

mateus1• 9 years ago

I can't put into words how ashamed I am as a Brazilian.

Our country is going to hell in a handbasket.

Simon_says• 9 years ago

Nah, it's not going anywhere.

kafkaesq6• 9 years ago

Your countrymen are just playing catch-up, on top of what the European colonialists did for centuries.

And not just "settlers" and miners acting on their own - but acting on the direct behalf of, and and funded by their local governments:

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/revealing-the-history-of-ge...

darawk• 9 years ago

They're catching up to where Europe was 200 years ago? Kind of insulting to Brazilians, don't you think?

pmarreck4• 9 years ago

If these are similar to other "uncontacted" tribes I've read about, they seem to react quite violently/aggressively when confronted (it doesn't matter if it's a reaction to fear... if someone's shooting arrows at you first and asking questions later and you have a gun... most people are going to return fire), so if the gold miners said they either had to kill or be killed, I'm inclined to believe them unfortunately.

papercrane2• 9 years ago

Their self-defense claim is one thing, but it's a whole other thing to brag about it, claim to have a trophy and to have desecrated the bodies.

pmarreck4• 9 years ago

Could be a rationalization to cope with the trauma/horror of having killed someone, similar to "inappropriate" wartime or gallows humor; depersonalizing your victim is one way to avoid the full guilt of what you did and is a common psychological coping mechanism (that's not saying it's good...)

taternuts• 9 years ago

The ridiculous thing is that they were allowed to go there in the first place. It's relatively common knowledge that these tribes are extremely hostile to outsiders and should be left alone, allowing gold mining there is basically signing their death warrants.

kafkaesq6• 9 years ago

If these are similar to other "uncontacted" tribes I've read about, they seem to react quite violently/aggressively when confronted

As you would do, if a bunch of assholes started encroaching on your ancestral property.

So if the gold miners said they either had to kill or be killed, I'm inclined to believe them unfortunately.

No -- what they needed to do was just GTFO out of there, being as they clearly had no business being in those areas in first place. Paycheck, or "boss's orders" be damned.

Danihan3• 9 years ago

Why does the concept of "ancestral property" somehow suddenly make violence acceptable to you. If the bank or government forecloses on my mother's house, I can shoot whoever comes to take ownership?

sprafa• 9 years ago

you've never been (or perhaps don't know the culture) in Brazil. Had you been you might recognize this for what it was most likely was - murder.

jjawssd• 9 years ago

Why is this article considered worthy of being posted on "Hacker News?" I fail to understand how this is at all relevant to "Hackers."

replayzero• 9 years ago

I saw that as Amazon Prime members...

‘Uncontacted’ Amazon Tribe Members Are Reported Killed in Brazil

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