Man Eat Man

GREEN HELL: MASSACRE OF THE BRAZILIAN INDIANS

by LUCIEN BODARD

translated by JENNIFER MONAGHAN

291 pages. Outerbridge & Dienstfrey. $8.95.

"Brazil, where the nuts come from," said Charley's aunt, thus inadvertently assessing the extent of nearly everyone's knowledge of a country that covers 6% of the earth's land surface. But Brazil, especially Amazonia, is the last old-fashioned Eldorado left, a trove of unexploited gold, rare woods, precious stones, exotic pelts and untold deposits of minerals. It is also one of the last places where the bloodshot eye of the fatigued humanist can still see in progress the fatal consequences of Eldorado: the destruction of indigenous peoples. Lucien Boclard, a French journalist and author (The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam), takes it all in, from the first Amazon man hunts in the 16th century to the huge inland island of Bananal where today Indian survivors stage ceremonies and even wars for tourist dollars in a government-built "primitive" village.

It was money, of course, that began the extermination of the Indians some 400 years ago. Portuguese adventurers, as thick as piranhas, swarmed up the Amazon, slaughtering all the Indians that seemed unfit for slavery. When the Indians, who had no concept of regular work, proved uneconomical, black Africans were imported. Indian, white and black blood blended into mulatto culture, which continued to prey on the tribal Indian. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries in the Mato Grosso, private armies of bandeirantes pillaged for gold, diamonds and slaves. Thousands of Indians who were not killed by gun died because they lacked the antibodies to ward off their invaders' most common illnesses. The Indians retaliated sporadically, piercing their persecutors with long arrows, eating their flesh and occasionally shrinking their heads (which commanded a high price as curios in the civilized world).

The rubber boom of the 19th century uncovered more tribes and spoils in the Amazon's west. To harvest "the trees-that weep," new horrors were devised. Down-and-outs from all over Brazil were lured with big promises, only to find themselves victims of a kind of grocery slavery. Overextended credit at the company store, accompanied by threats of death from company gunsels, kept the rubber workers toiling vainly to clear their debts. They were usually cheated and left to rot among their isolated stands of dried-up trees while the profits went to Manaus, that rococo Sodom in the middle of the Amazon's vegetable sea. Before the rubber bust, Manaus' theaters starred Pavlova and Bernhardt, and its richest residents sent their shirts to London to be ironed.

The savagery and vitality of Brazil's past, its "sadism and felicity," become a musky essence that pervades Bodard's writing, even when he deals with the present. People whom he meets or hears about in his travels deserve books of their own. There are the Vilas Boas brothers, Orlando and Claudio, who have dedicated themselves to saving the Indians. Orlando is burly, harsh and volatile. Claudio, idealistic and introverted, is so lost in an irreconcilable vision of the noble savage, the savagery of ignoble civilization, that he periodically retreats further into the jungle to read philosophy in a native hammock. There are the diamond diggers of Aragarcas, their skin made as hard as aluminum by insect bites, who blow each bonanza on preposterous luxuries sold to them at incredible prices by Levantine traders: mink coats for jungle prostitutes, a Cadillac shipped in pieces and reassembled to run back and forth on 100 yards of pavement.

Bodard is stunned by the cold beauty of Brasilia, the new futuristic capital designed by the socialist architect Oscar Niemeyer. The city, Bodard says, has been given "the face of socialism in its purest state, the face of political commissaries in a totally futuristic Kremlin. But the truth is that there is no socialism in Brazil and no socialism in Brasilia. It is only a dream."

Whatever road Brazil eventually takes, it will probably be a disaster for the remaining Indians. The Amazon will be further penetrated for its wealth, resulting in the callous elimination of more tribal peoples. It is a familiar story, especially to North Americans, who had the despair of their dead Indians raised to a grand passion in last year's bestseller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Bodard's brutal epic does even more. It gives North Americans a rerun of their own haunted past as seen through Brazil's uneasy present.

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