Indigenist Jair Candor searches for isolated peoples in the Amazon – 08/30/2023 – Environment

Jair Candor had been searching the Amazon rainforest for three days when he heard the voices. After a decade of documenting their trail, that day in 2011 was the first he saw them: a family of nine walking in the woods, all naked, with their children on their backs and arrows taller than they are.

For years the loggers had said that this isolated indigenous group was a myth. But now Candor, hidden behind trees, was recording the first video ever taken of them.

When he finished, with tears in his eyes, he cursed the loggers, said his colleague Claiton Gabriel Silva, and challenged them to say that the people did not exist.

Candor, 63, is perhaps Brazil’s most adept tracker of uncontacted peoples, one of a dwindling group of people hired by the Brazilian government to explore some of the Amazon’s most pristine areas to find evidence of groups that have lived without contact for generations. with the outside world and virtually unseen.

The objective is not to contact them, but to protect them. The law requires proof of the existence of isolated groups before their land can be demarcated, prohibiting outsiders from entering. Candor seeks to locate the groups without being seen, so that they can remain isolated and for himself to protect himself.

“My curiosity is great,” said Candor. “But respect for their rights is greater.”

Over the course of 35 years, he has led hundreds of expeditions into the forest, contracted malaria dozens of times, by his own estimation, and survived two attempts on his life, in one of which an indigenous man threw arrows at Candor’s team, while in the another, a group of loggers attacked the Funai post where he worked.

Candor uncovered evidence of the existence of four small civilizations, each of which researchers believe has its own language, culture and history. One is the smallest known Brazilian people, the Piripkura, with three known survivors.

Candor’s work led to the creation of legal protections covering an area of ​​18,000 km^two, a surface larger than that of Puerto Rico. For this very reason, he is one of the most effective figures working for the preservation of the Amazon today.

These protections are critically important for the forest as it rapidly approaches the tipping point that could convert large areas of forest into savannah, causing the Amazon to emit more gases than it currently absorbs.

Candor’s work also earned him many enemies. One morning in June, as he drove down a rutted dirt road into the forest, the indigenist spoke about politicians who pressured his bosses to fire him, ranchers who tried to bribe him, and loggers who hired assassins to try to kill him. Today Candor walks around with a 9mm pistol tucked into his bulletproof vest.

“I’m not scared,” he said, smiling. “What worries me are the snakes.”

The video he filmed in 2011 was of the Kawahivas of Rio Pardo, one of 115 groups believed to live in isolation in Brazil — more than any other country. The lack of evidence means that a third of these groups remain unprotected. That’s why expert bushmen like Candor, who have learned to locate forest dwellers who don’t want to be found, are crucial to their survival.

Candor’s family moved to the Amazon when he was 6 years old. It was the 1960s, and his parents responded to a call from the military regime for settlers to occupy the forest. They would help tame the “green hell”, as the government called it, and would earn a plot of land as a reward.

Three years later, Candor’s mother died. His family scattered. He ended up being adopted by a group of rubber tappers. He stopped going to school and started learning how to survive in the woods.

In 1988 the military government had fallen and Brazil was trying to pass a new Constitution that would recognize the rights of indigenous peoples over their lands. To protect them, the government needed new forest experts. Candor, then 28 years old, had gained a reputation for working hard and befriending indigenous people in the forest. The government hired him.

On the first expedition he led alone, in 1989, Candor found two members of the piripkura the government had been looking for for four years. Another people had given them that name, which means butterfly, due to the speed with which they moved through the forest, as if they were fluttering. Candor noted that they needed very little to survive: fire, two nets, a dull-bladed machete.

“We need a house, we need a car, we need a bunch of crap,” he commented. “There you find those two men living happily with nothing — no clothes, no supermarket, no water or electricity bill.”

He himself also began to let go of things. In 1992, an expedition took longer than anticipated, and he missed his own wedding. The bride didn’t want him back. He later married a different woman and had two children. But even today he only comes home about eight times a year.

Candor also lost the feeling of being safe. In 2018 an informant warned him that a group of men linked to loggers was coming to kill him.

He was at a Funai post in the jungle. It was too far away for the authorities to send help. But instead of fleeing, Candor decided that he and his team would protect the outpost, despite his adult son visiting there. He handed weapons to his son and his six colleagues. His son received the only bulletproof vest.

Candor ordered everyone to position themselves in arrowhead formation, so that they wouldn’t shoot each other, and to shoot down the hill. “I saw it in a movie,” he explained.

The nine intruders broke the padlock on the gate around 9 pm. Candor and his men heard gunfire, so they returned fire. One of the invaders was killed. The others fled. The subsequent investigation found no evidence that the men linked to the logging companies were carrying weapons, but their leader was arrested.

Two years later, in 2020, one of Candor’s colleagues was killed by an arrow shot by a member of a people that the indigenist had been observing for years. And last year Bruno Pereira, an expert on uncontacted peoples from a younger generation of indigenists, was killed along with a British journalist, Dom Phillips, for their work trying to protect land that had been preserved for uncontacted groups.

Candor knew the two indigenists who died well and knows that this could have happened to him.

He thinks he has only four or five more years before he retires. Until then, he commented, he will continue to risk his life to help indigenous peoples.

“We are the only people who are fighting for this,” he said. “Their voice out here is us.”

_{Translated by Clara Allain}