The problem is clear a three-hour flight across the patchy forest from Maraba, where a clearing on the side of the river is home to a few hundred Parakana people, a tribe with no contact with the outside world until 1985.
Greenpeace can only reach the village because its plane is equipped to land on the sluggish water, but cattle farmers are steadily intruding. Hundreds of farms have been set up in the surrounding reserve, and they are not welcome.
“Since the invaders arrived there have been many problems,” says Itanya, the village chief. Food is harder to find, he says, and discontent is growing. “If the government [doesn’t] find a solution we will solve it ourselves. We know how to make poison arrows and we are ready to kill people.” It is not an idle threat: in 2003 the bodies of three farmers were discovered in the jungle not far from the village. Itanya says it was the work of a neighboring group.
“We asked them many times to stay away,” Kokoa, the chief of the neighboring group, said through an interpreter. “They wouldn’t, so one time we said to them that you will never go back and you will stay here forever. We killed them. We are proud that we defended our land.”
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