Victims of the Miracle: Development and the Indians of Brazil

by Shelton H. Davis

The Brazilian government's effort to develop the immense Amazon region has created widespread controversy. Written in a clear, nonacademic style, Victims of the Miracle is the first in-depth account by an anthropologist of the social and environmental impact of the Amazon development program. Shelton Davis begins with an examination of the economic history of the Amazon Basin from World War II through the building of the Trans-Amazon Highway in 1970. He then analyzes contemporary Indian policy in Brazil and discusses the effects that highway construction and mining development projects have had on a number of Indian tribes. He also describes the rise of agribusiness in Brazil and the environmental damage caused by the recent deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[Danilo דניאל Lipisk · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book reminded me a song by Renato Russo from the "Legião Urbana" "Que país é esse?"

"Mas o Brasil vai ficar rico
Vamos faturar um milhão
Quando vendermos todas as almas
Dos nossos índios num leilão"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y68mlZ6X2v0&a...

The book addresses the main victims of the false Brazilian "economic miracle" of the 1970s: the natives and the environment, both destroyed by national and mainly international mining companies and by agribusiness, a violent process of land expropriation, forced displacement and cultural destruction of indigenous peoples and their lands.

Furthermore, we can also see the corruption and criminality of FUNAI, an agency created by the Brazilian military dictatorship to "integrate the natives into society", but whose representatives in practice participated in the deliberate murder of indigenous people, kidnappings and even sexual exploitation of girls from various tribes. Disgusting.

This is a book that remains relevant for understanding the roots of many conflicts that still persist between state development policies and indigenous rights in Brazil, since we can see that in the last governments of Lula, Bolsonaro, Dilma and Lula (2003/2010), Brazilian natives and the environment continued to be destroyed.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine the shock and awe for some of us---scholars of Brazil, Marxists, students of the Third World, environmentalists and many more---to find out in the 1990s that Shelton Davis, our hero, the man who had done more to expose the deprevation and genocide of the Brazilian Indian for the past thirty years, was now a high-ranking official at the World Bank. It was like finding out Mother Teresa operated her own brothel, or your father had stolen millions from your trust fund. Ah, well. "Let each man be paid his due". But, once upon a time Sheldon wrote a book of such scholarly and political force on the military regime's rape of the Amazon Indian, with plenty of help from U.S. agri0business and mining interests, that VICTIMS OF THE MIRACLE was required reading in institutions of higher learning in North America from UCLA to Harvard. For over 500 years the Brazilian Indians of the Amazon Rain Forest has been the subject of slavery, peonage, physical rape of women, men and children, spoliation of their native languages and religions and loss of territory. Yet, who knows this horror show, even today? Davis concentrates on the "go-go" years of military rule in Brazil (1964-1985) when cattlemen, miners, farmers and rubber trappers conquered Indian lands much bigger than most U.S. states, financed by the military, Brazilian banks and, yes the IMF and the World Bank. The dream of the generals was to turn Brazil into a "superpower" on the model of the United States, only in decades, not centuries. The nightmare for the indigenous was death from diseases introduced by the white man, aerial pollution, and forced labor. While Brazil's economy grew, at least until the early 1970s, winning the praise of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, no one paid much attention to the greatest genocide in this Hemisphere since Columbus. Then came the global energy crisis, inflation, and a massive foreign debt; all of which the Indians had to pay off through more labor and shipping their women and children to the cities. This ugly tale continues today with the burning of the Amazon for wood, rubber and gold. I'm glad Sheldon Davies was there to document this tragedy, all too avoidable, and who knows if he's done some good at the World Bank?