Sydney Possuelo

Sydney Possuelo

Sydney Possuelo (born April 19, 1940 in São Paulo ) is a Brazilian anthropologist and sertanista (Indian scout).

As early as the 1960s , he was working on the Xingu project of the Villas Bôas brothers ( Orlando Villas Bôas , Cláudio Villas Bôas and Leonardo Villas Bôas ), the first Indian protection project in Brazil .

As an employee of the Brazilian national Indian authority FUNAI , he founded the department for isolated Indian peoples in 1987. In the early 1990s Possuelo became President of FUNAI. In this office in 1991, against considerable resistance from the military, politicians and gold diggers, he succeeded in declaring the home of the Yanomami Indians in northern Brazil a protected area. During his short term of office, the authority, which had been decried as corrupt, turned into a recognized organization for the protection of Indian rights. The area of ​​the Indian sanctuaries was more than doubled. In 1993 he was dismissed as part of the political turmoil surrounding President Fernando Collor de Mello . Since then he has headed the Department for Isolated Indian Peoples again.

Seven first contacts with previously unknown Indian peoples are ascribed to Possuelo since the 1970s , the last being the Korubo tribe in 1996. As part of the policy pursued by FUNAI, he introduced the Indians to civilization. He later realized that introduced diseases, prospectors and loggers threaten the existence of these tribes. Since then, Possuelo has been advocating the consistent isolation of the untouched peoples. His work made him unpopular in wide circles - not only with the loggers, gold prospectors, or mine workers, whose livelihood is the overexploitation of the rainforest, his advocacy of avoiding any contact is also criticized by the Catholic missionaries.

In 1998 he received the Bartolomeu de las Casas Prize, was voted Hero of the Planet by Time For Kids magazine (an offshoot of Time magazine) and was included on the United Nations website in the section The Unsung Heroes of Dialogue . In 2004 he was awarded the Patron's Medal by the Royal Geographical Society for his work. Possuelo was fired from FUNAI in 2006 after sharply criticizing statements by FUNAI President Mércio Gomes that the indigenous peoples had enough land. He then became director of the NGO Instituto Indigenista Interamericano.

Web links

• Claudio Angelo: Prime Directive for the Last Americans , Scientific American, May 2007
• The Economist: Land wars. Ancestral claims and modern interests , February 2, 2006
• Interview with Sydney Possuelo about uncontacted tribes (in German)