User:MastersonK09
The year is 1945, and you are standing in the middle of a large scale military attack. This attack has been going on since Brazil was founded. Getulio Vargas is the president of Brazil and his military-run reign of terror will not end until 1964. Why? Vargas claims that his country needs cleansing, so only the pure of blood can remain. Poor people and Indians are the first on a monumental hit list. Welcome to a nightmare-like slaughter, in which no one is safe. No, that's a lie. This is genocide, and only the native Brazilians are to 'blame', which means that they are the ones to die. Brazil is a large country, which is 8,511,965 square kilometers (3,290,000 square miles) which means that this is a large genocide (Countries of the World 228).
"There are three main groups of Brazilians. They are: the native Indians who lived in the forest areas before Brazil was discovered by the Europeans; the white Europeans, first the Portuguese and then other European newcomers; and the black Africans who were brought to Brazil as slaves. For 400 years people from each group married people from other groups, so there are many different combinations of people in Brazil today." (Peoples of the World 61). These people were all put together as one nation. Suddenly the Indians are considered as impure by the European and the African people. However, in reality, no one in the entire country of Brazil is what the President and his followers would consider 'pure'. Again, "before the arrival of Europeans in 1500, Brazil was home to at least 1,000 tribes with a total estimated population of five to thirteen million people...Today, there are around 350,000 Indians in Brazil in over 200 tribes, who live scattered across the country." (Indians in Brazil 1) The rest have disappeared or been killed brutally over the years.
The first stage in this frighteningly well-organized attack is classification. This is when members of a specific group are separated into an 'us or them' situation in which one group is put against the other. In this case, the white and Mexican people are getting put up against the native Brazilians. The native Brazilians, hereon termed as Indians, are isolated indigenous tribes. Getulio Vargas claimed that these Indians were not of pure blood and ethnicity because generations back, the Indians had once freely mingled with everyone else in Brazil, creating people called mestizos (the child of one white parent and one Indian parent), mamelucos (the child of a Portuguese and an Indian), and cafusos (one Indian parent and one black parent) (Peoples of the World 61). There are also different types of the native Brazilian pure-blood people. "The most famous Indian groups are: the GUARANI, TUPI, CARIB, AKWE, KAYAPO, and GE. The Indian groups are divided based on which language family their language comes from. However, some groups speak a language that is unique to them and not part of any family." (Peoples of the World 61). Now, however, they are separated (Erikson 2).
The second stage of this genocide is symbolization. The Indians are given no specific derogatory names, and are classified only by their natural appearance. However, the Indians are infamous in Brazil for their longhouses, in which they reside. In other cases, symbolization might include degrading names, or marks on the flesh that distinguish them from other people. For example, in the Holocaust all Jews over the age of six were forced to wear yellow stars of David that marked them as Jewish people that are separate from other people. In this particular genocide in Brazil, there is no such thing. Everyone can tell which people are the indigenous tribal people by their natural physical appearance. These events have no relevant effect on this particular genocide.
Third stage: dehumanization. This stage has apparently been almost eliminated in this genocide. However, it does exist. This genocide is actually considered as a common and accepted practice. However, "frightened and famished, these small isolated indigenous groups have been submitted over the last decade to a process of ethnic cleansing by the cattle ranchers. The pattern of terrorist expulsions, evidence of killings, and destruction of the Indians' homes and means of subsistence, coupled with complete judicial impunity for the perpetrators indicates that the genocide of these Indians is commonplace and accepted in the region." (Walsh 2).Dehumanization is when the people being slaughtered are considered as less than human, sometimes even less than animals, and they are treated as such. The Indians sometimes even begin to believe that they themselves are less than they are.
The fourth stage of genocide is organization. In this stage, army groups are trained, as the government is responsible for organizing the slaughter. Terrorist groups are not involved in this scenario, although in some places the terrorists actually take over the entire genocide. The common people of Brazil barely even notice as the militias are trained to kill innocent people. Every day, military soldiers train themselves to not care as Indians around them fall to their deaths.
The fifth stage of genocide is called polarization. Propaganda sent out by Vargas is spreading false claims of how the Indians were working with the Communists and were planning to take over the entire county of Brazil. For some inexplicable reason, the citizens of Brazil believed these claims and began separating themselves from the Indians (Erikson 2). "Vargas' generation succeeded in encouraging Brazilians to identify with 'the nation' above other possible communities such as racial, ethnic, or regional ones. In the process, nationalists created enduring nation myths and symbols which successfully marginalized racial consciousness for the rest of the twentieth century." (Erikson 2)The Indians are all alone, which is basically targeting them as people to kill.
The sixth stage of genocide is identification. Identification means that the victims of the genocide are separated because of their ethnic identity. Monumental death lists are written and planned out. Often, though not in this scenario, they are segregated into ghettoes, forced into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved to death. In this particular genocide, the Indians are not forced to wear any identifying symbols, as their ethnicity is already obvious due to their skin color and appearance.
The seventh and most brutal of all the stages in any genocide is called extermination. This is called 'extermination' because the people who are murdering the innocent people do not believe that the people being killed are not fully human. In Brazil, machines are taken and run down the towns of the Indians. Many of the Indians simply vanish and are never seen again, so are termed as dead or missing persons. "Whether the 450,000 missing Indians were assimilated or exterminated is not certain, but a significant number were probably victims of genocide." (White 2) Some of the Indians are simply shot down. Soon the indigenous people of Brazil may become extinct due to the violent slaughter of their peoples.
The final stage of genocide is denial. In order to 'cover up' the atrocities that the government of Brazil is committing, they plant forests and plants over the dead land that is covered in the spilled blood of the Indians. The bodies of most of the dead have not been found. The national government claims that the Indians simply packed up and left, and were not killed at all. They say that the people of the indigenous tribes, if they did die, must have deserved the death. The government simply doesn't want to be put in any responsibility for the murder of innocent people.
The genocide in Brazil is an ongoing and terrifying thing, which is, to say the least, fascinating. There are eight different stages of genocide, and everyone in Brazil is astonishingly well aware of this (Stanton 2). This genocide is continuing to this day, and in general it is an accepted practice. Genocide is not to be accepted and everyone needs to take a more active role in fighting against it. Everyone needs to accept that there is genocide in the world, and that it is not just the normal thing that has always been, and always will be. Fight the prejudice. Stop the hate. Work together to stop genocide before it is simply too late.
--MastersonK09 21:25, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)Kathleen M. and Danielle S.MastersonK09 21:25, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)--