*Anna Júlia Lopes
“This passion began when I realized that you can survive in the forest without destroying it,” says Jair Candor, an indigenist field agent with Funai (Brazil’s National Indigenous Peoples Foundation), who has been working for 36 years to protect Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. At 64, he still treks through the forests of northwestern Mato Grosso to stop invaders and identify isolated communities in the region.
Now coordinator of the Madeirinha-Juruena Ethno-environmental Protection Front, Candor and his family moved to the Amazon when he was 6 years old, during the 1960s. At the time, the military regime made plots of land available to occupy the region. However, when his mother died, the family split up. Candor says that, because he was “older”, he wasn’t adopted, but went to live with rubber tappers, as he needed a place to work.
“There are many ways to collect Brazil nuts, rubber, copaiba and other things, so you can survive without having to deforest or destroy anything, either your own or anyone else’s. The Amazon forest is very rich. The Amazon rainforest is very rich,” says the sertanista, who joined Funai in the 1980s. He explains that he was given the role of “sertanista” when he started working at the institution, and that it was only in the early 2000s that the nomenclature “indigenista” came into use: “I joined back then, so I still have this role of sertanista”.
Originally, in the 17th century, sertanistas were men who went into the interior of Brazil with the aim of capturing indigenous people and exploring for precious metals. From the 20th century onwards, the word began to be used to define individuals who were familiar with the territory further away from urban areas. When talking about the activity, Candor mentions big names, such as the Villas-Bôas brothers, creators of Brazil’s first approved indigenous reserve, the Xingu National Park; and Sydney Possuelo, former president of Funai and responsible for dozens of expeditions into the Brazilian forests.
Candor explained to IPAM (Amazon Environmental Research Institute) that the work to identify isolated peoples consists of receiving information from local residents, usually from extractive communities in the forest. “These people bring the news. Someone has seen something or seen a footprint, a camp. When this information reaches Funai, the institution goes and checks it out,” he says. At the moment, Funai has 11 fronts based in the Amazon to identify isolated tribes. According to him, the front that is closest to where the community may have been spotted should go to the site to find out.
According to the him, until the 1990s, Funai still made contact with peoples who had no outside interference. “Our mission was to go into the bush, locate the people and make contact. There was no middle ground,” he recalls.
Candor says that it wasn’t until the end of the last century that a consensus was reached on how harmful forced contact was to isolated communities. As the populations never had contact with other people, they had no immunity to diseases such as flu, measles or even colds. Currently, contact is only made with peoples in conflict with traditional communities, other ethnic groups and farmers.
“We have our rules for going into the field: everyone has to be vaccinated, we don’t get so close to them that we can transmit something, we know when to go and when to come back and contact is only made in these circumstances: if they are at risk of confrontation with other peoples,” he says.
The dangers of forced contact are not limited to the communities, however. According to Candor, the professionals who track down the isolated ethnic groups also run the risk of their lives: “Even without forcing contact with them, just because we’ve passed too close to them, they’ve already thrown arrows at us.” He recalls that one of his friends, who was doing the same job and started working at Funai at the same time as him, was killed with an arrow when he entered a reserve where there had been an occurrence of isolated indigenous people.
Candor says he’s not afraid of dying, but he is careful. Before each expedition, he and his team meet to discuss everything that needs to be done in the field. Asked if he has any enemies, the he replies with a laugh: “That’s all I have”. Candor is referring to land grabbers and loggers in the region, but he stresses that pressure from these groups doesn’t bother him.
“Here, where I work, for God’s sake, it’s complicated, but it’s what I say: someone has to do it. But that doesn’t inhibit me either, it doesn’t get in my way. I don’t worry too much about it. My concern is with them [indigenous peoples], keeping them alive, keeping them calm, so that they can hunt, fish and live their lives,” he says.
The main objective of Candor and his team’s work is to monitor these communities to get a “sense” of whether they are doing well and whether they can carry out their subsistence activities, such as hunting and fishing, without interference. One of Funai’s concerns with these ethnic groups is to prevent invasion of their territories.
Candor explains that monitoring consists of two stages. In the first, the team carries out a survey taking into account the elements found during the expedition, such as traces of hunting and fishing. According to him, if the group believes that the members of the ethnic group are able to carry out their activities, the team retreats and returns to base. In the second stage, the area around the territory is inspected: from time to time, Funai officials visit the land to prevent invasions.
At the moment, Candor’s front has two isolated communities already confirmed. In addition to these, his team is also working on twelve other cases of possible ethnic groups that have not yet been found. Since he began working as a sertanista, he has participated in three contacts.
The first – and one of the most emblematic – was the contact with the Piripkura, in the 1980s. The search took the whole of 1988 and resulted in the documentary “Pirikpura”, released in 2017. At the time, Candor found the last three survivors of the ethnic group: two men, Tamandua and Pakyi, and a woman, Rita.
Later, he also confirmed the presence of Cinta-Larga indigenous people, in which a family of the ethnic group had moved away from the group and was living in isolation in the region. In 2019, he also made contact with the Korubo. At the time, indigenist Bruno Pereira invited Candor to take part in the expedition because he needed someone with experience in contacting isolated communities. In 2022, Pereira was murdered along with British journalist Dom Phillips during a trip to the Javari Valley, in the far-west of Amazonas. Their deaths were ordered by the leader of a group that practiced illegal mining and predatory fishing in the region.
For Candor, the first reaction when encountering an isolated community is to worry: “What are we going to do now?”. According to him, the concern is even greater when contact with ethnic groups is necessary, in cases of conflict.
Awarded for his work in protecting indigenous peoples and preserving the Amazon at the Brazil Conference, an event held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States, Candor says he is aware of the prejudice against indigenous peoples in Brazil and is concerned about bringing isolated groups into “our world”.
“My concern is this: what will become of the lives of these people? We’re taking them away from their peace and quiet, they live there in the greatest peace in the world, they don’t need much. They’re going to have to learn a lot of things, they’re going to have to get by. That’s our concern, to bring them into our world. Until they adapt to knowing our laws, knowing our codes, understanding how we live here, it’s very difficult for them,” he says.
In 2023, in an interview with the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper, Candor admitted that he was thinking of retiring in four or five years’ time. He confirmed to IPAM that this is still his plan. “One day I’m going to have to stop. Nobody is irreplaceable, we know the time will come,” he says. He says he has applied for retirement, which should be approved by the end of the year.
Although he is about to retire, Candor says he will continue to contribute to the protection of isolated peoples. He points out that, as he is in a commissioned position, he can continue in the role even after retirement. When he is no longer able to carry his backpack or trek during expeditions, his plan is to “pass the baton” after more than 30 years of work, in which he has helped to consolidate a policy of non-contact, based on respect for indigenous territories and with a focus on guaranteeing the survival and autonomy of these groups.
*IPAM’s journalist, anna.rodrigues@ipam.org.br