Brasília, April 19, 2004 (Agência Brasil) - The president of the National Indian Foundation (Funai), Mércio Pereira Gomes, lamented the death of 29 prospectors in the Roosevelt Indian reserve, in Rondônia. He said, however, that the conflict is part of the Indians' fight for land in Brazil. Three bodies were discovered in the region a week ago. The Federal Police (PF) expects to remove another 26 severely decomposed cadavers from the area this week. The PF believes that they were all victims of confrontations between Indians and prospectors during Holy Week, in the beginning of April.

"We are sorry for those who died and their families. But we also need to tell the Brazilian people that the Indians are exercising an elementary defense of lands invaded by completely illegal prospectors," the Funai president pondered. Gomes defends the immediate discussion of proposals to alter Constitutional article 231, paragraph 4, which deals with the exploitation of mineral resources in the country.

In his view, the National Department of Mineral Production (DNPM) needs to find mineral deposits outside the reservation to regularize the activities of prospectors and mining firms. "The Indians, for their part, need authorization to mine their lands," Gomes argues. "A decree would be sufficient to resolve this issue. We just need to develop the debate and do everything with a great deal of care so as not to cause a stampede to the area."

According to the Funai president, since diamond deposits were discovered in the Roosevelt reserve, in 1999, invasions by prospectors have become frequent. Both the Funai and the Indians asked the prospectors to leave the reserve. A confrontation last year had already left some Indians wounded and around eight prospectors dead. The Cinta-Larga tribe currently has around 1.5 members, spread across a 1.6 million hectare region.

"The reserve received as many as 5 thousand trespassing prospectors," Gomes recalls. "After the first confrontations with the Indians, our intervention, and the PF's, this number dropped to 600. During Holy Week, when the most recent conflicts occurred, there were still 150 prospectors in the reserve."

Last Monday the Funai received a denunciation that a group of 20 prospectors had invaded the reserve to reclaim the corpses of their other 26 missing mates. In response, the Foundation sent a team of 15 qualified staff members to the Cinta-Larga tribe. The team is led by Indian specialists Walter Blos and Apoena Meirelles. They were the ones who provided the PF the coordinates for the operation to retrieve the bodies.

For the Funai president, it is necessary to admit the possibility that some of the dead might be victims of disputes among the prospectors themselves.

Translator: David Silberstein