This seemed like the best thread for this link: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2010/08/the_most_isolated_man_on_the_planet.single.html
I know we have some Brazilian members; I'd be especially interested in your take(s) on that story.
I can buy that there's a last surviving tribe member of anything somewhere in the wild here in Brazil, but I've never heard of this story before (unsurprising as the news here tend to gravitate towards other matters). The report seems to really, really exaggerate and romanticize the actions of the Brazillian government in this regard, however...
If you lived here in Brazil, you'd probably take this story with a grain of salt, as Kuro did... Not all Indians are as innocent as the media likes to portray them. A great many deal of them make deals with drug dealers to provide aircraft landing/takeoff sites for their drug running planes, they have shady deals with mining companies that do illegal mining deep into amazon forest (surprisingly enough, some amazonian regions have *EXTREMELY* rich reserves of both diamonds and uranium ore). Plus, the most common activity, by far, is the dealing with illegal lumber companies, to extract precious mahogany wood and other very high profile trees, including latex trees. There's also the deal with foreign companies interested in researching flora & fauna unknown to biology, but don't want to pass through the extreme bureocracy involved here to actually get the permit to do so, or to in a hurry, patent a medication or even, *gasp* a plant. For every Indian chief that dies protecting his tribe from invading "civilized" man, there are at least two that deal with shady individuals. I daresay 90% of the tribes now here in Brazil are mostly cultured by know, as one will know if he visits the larger communities, where ammenities such as jeans, T-Shirts and stereos will be found. Some Indians get rich and then split off the community, leaving them in shambles while they go chill out on Copacabana or Ipanema beaches in Rio...
Theres also the matter of the Quilombolas (Escaped slaves from pre 19th century) and the Quilombos (Independent communities founded by those slaves). The matter is complicated due to the fact that most of those communities were unknown as they resided mainly in isolated areas (as there were headhunters after them), but some cities have expanded into their territory... But some shady individuals exploit this fact of there not being an official way of determining whether a location was actually a Quilombo or not to *claim* it as such, and forge it's way into proving it, claiming it's territory (which is protected by law as a cultural and historical site), which they then turn into profit by various means.
US citizens will sympathize with what i'm saying, since many Native Americans abused the fact that their reserves were not subject to taxation to build Casinos and other stuff to profit and abuse the law that was made to protect their culture.
Now you take what i say with a grain of salt, because i'm actively biased against Indians, as i see the preservation of their culture by maintaining their isolation as a idealistic and unoptimal way of utilizing territory and manpower. Indians are no innocents, and acculturing them slowly is better than just leaving them alone and leaving half the country's territory locked down to any kind of development, preventing such beneficial projects as river transportation, construction of Dams, legitimate mining & lumbering, etc... Brazil had a much better chance to become a first world superpower than 90% of the rest of the world, and yet, despite not being in any war since the Paraguai conflict (since the Brazilian involvement into WW2 was pretty minor and i do not count it), the country is behind South Korea, which was DEVASTATED, and managed in 60 years to leap ahead in a mind-boggling way.
Sometimes i just wanted the power to become the dictator of this country and just do what needs to be done, execute all corrupts, pass a law that makes corruption a crime equivalent to High Treason and put 10% of the country's Internal Product towards Education.
