He was found by chance on August 24 in the Brazilian state of Rondônia during a routine patrol by agents responsible for the protection of indigenous people. In the heart of this forest where he has always lived: lying in a hammock outside his straw huts, his rotting body covered in brightly colored parrot feathers, “as if preparing for death“said Marcelo dos Santos, a retired explorer who had followed him for Funai, the national indigenous foundation of Brazil. His death, considered natural, dates back to more than a month.
Known as the “Man of the Hole,” the last member of an Indigenous group was found dead this month in Brazil, marking the first recorded disappearance of an isolated tribe in the country. https://t.co/ep4jasih8m
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 30, 2022
Spotted in 1996 near the border between Brazil and Bolivia, the man resisted all attempts at prolonged contact for 26 years. Only rarely has he accepted the few seeds and tools left for him to improve their quality of lifebut he twice fired arrows at Funai agents who got too close to him.
In 2008, a Franco-Brazilian anthropologist, Vincent Carelli, grabbed his face between the foliage. We see it in his film “Corumbiara”. But the latest footage dates back to 2018, taken on the sly by officials from the government’s indigenous affairs department. The man, of fine corpulence, is almost naked. He cuts a tree trunk with a kind of axe. No one has seen him since.
‘Man of the Hole’: Last known member of uncontacted Amazon tribe dies https://t.co/7NtkeV12AV pic.twitter.com/p3PqeYitMZ
— New York Post (@nypost) August 30, 2022
He was famous and yet… he had no name. He had simply been called “Índio do Buraco”, “the native of the hole”, because he systematically dug pits three meters deep, either in his huts for hiding or shelter (Funai had listed 53 different straw houses since 1996), or in the jungle to capture animals. He died without ever revealing what ethnicity he belonged to. No one ever heard him utter a single word.
We know, despite everything, that he was the last survivor of his tribe, decimated over the years by anarchic colonization and illegal logging in Rondônia. In the 1980s, farmers looking for land to expand distribute rat poison as an offering, there are only a handful of survivors. Fifteen years later, in 1995, other individuals attacked the camp and massacred what remained of the tribe. “The man in the hole” is the only one to survive. Living in complete isolation away from strangers, running away from men was his best chance for survival.
In 1998, to protect it, the Funai created a huge fenced reserve of 8,000 hectares known as the “indigenous territory of Tanaru” – under the Brazilian constitution, indigenous people are entitled to their traditional lands.
Access is restricted, agents patrol regularly… But several times his plots of cultivated land and his huts are destroyed. In 2009, farmers damaged a Funai observation post and fired shots. Indigenous rights groups have demanded that even after his death, the Tanaru reserve be given permanent protection. For the Brazilian investigative journalism agency Agência Publica, “the man in the hole” was the “symbol of the resistance of isolated indigenous peoples” in Brazil.
The man in the hole is not the last isolated Indian in the Amazon: there are still around thirty groups deep in the jungle, of which we know almost nothing of their language or culture.
But Brazil has a total of around 240 tribes, which have been increasingly threatened since Jair Bolsonaro came to power by the incursions of miners, loggers or farmers. The Head of State – who puts his mandate back into play in October – does not hide his contempt for the Indians. He even said that his country had “made a mistake“by not decimating them, as the United States had done. Jair Bolsonaro both relaxed regulations to expand logging, ranching and mining in the Amazon and reduced protections for indigenous groups and protected lands, and cut federal funds and personnel, weakening agencies responsible for enforcing indigenous and environmental laws.
The risks facing indigenous peoples in Brazil were highlighted recently when activist Txai Suruí received death threats after delivering an impassioned speech at the opening ceremony of the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow.