A TRIBE IN BRAZIL STRUGGLES AT THE INTERSECTION OF DRUGS AND CULTURES

TABATINGA, Brazil -- The Tikuna Indians living near this Amazon
outpost long believed that their community was a portal to the
supernatural, to immortals who would guard them and secure their existence.

But lately they are finding that location may instead be a curse.

The Tikuna community, Mariacu, lies along a placid stretch of the
Solimoes River, less than three miles down a reddish-dirt road from
Tabatinga, a bustling commercial town.

While seemingly tranquil, the area has become a magnet for drug
traffickers who roam the borders here with Colombia and Peru.

Some Indians are accepting cash to work as drug mules, using their
knowledge of the rivers and dense rain forest to transport cocaine
into Brazil's growing market, local officials say. And a growing
number of young Tikunas are succumbing to drug and alcohol abuse,
which Indian leaders blame for some 30 adolescent suicides over the
past five years.

For the Tikunas, these traumas represent the latest threat in a fight
for tribal survival. With high unemployment and new challenges to its
subsistence livelihood, the community is struggling to keep young
people from losing themselves in the vices of the white man's world
and from destroying what is left of traditional Tikuna culture.

Like other Indian communities tucked close to growing urban areas,
Tikunas are tempted by the consumerism on display and frustrated that
it is beyond their means. To the youth especially, alcohol, drugs and
drug money seem to offer a way out. They have also unleashed a surge
of violence and disobedience.

Alarmed by these trends, Mariacu's two chiefs recently made an
unusual and desperate appeal for help: they asked the Brazilian
police, who generally do not have jurisdiction in Indian towns, to
enter their community and crack down on traffickers and substance
abusers, even if that would mean putting the Indians at the mercy of
Brazilian laws.

"We want government officials to help us save our children, so they
don't take part in these ruinous practices," said Oswaldo Honorato
Mendes, a deep-voiced Mariacu chief. "Every day the situation gets
worse. The younger generation does not obey. They do not show respect
for our authority as chiefs. They need to learn respect."

Respect and obedience to the chiefs are the pillars of tribal law,
which usually holds sway in Indian communities but has proved
insufficient to cope with new challenges.

The tribal leaders reached a breaking point in early October when
Ildo Mariano, 18, hanged himself while his parents were sleeping
inside their tiny wood home. For months, he had been drinking and
possibly doing drugs with friends who lived in Tabatinga, said his
father, Alfredo Mariano.

"He would arrive from class at night and hit the books, and then his
friends would pick him up and take him to I don't know where," Mr.
Mariano said one recent afternoon, as he sat outside on a wood bench
while a few feet away his wife boiled pupunha palm tree fruit.

Four days after Ildo's suicide, the chiefs summoned officials from
the federal, civil and military police in Tabatinga to a meeting in
Mariacu, where some 5,200 Tikunas live. They pleaded for the police
to do more to control drug traffickers and arrest lawbreakers in
their communities. The police officials listened politely but walked
away unconvinced they could help.

"It is a desperate request, but not one that we can legally respond
to," said Sergio Fontes, the superintendent of the federal police in
the northern city of Manaus, which oversees Tabatinga. "The chiefs
want to resolve a social problem with the police, and that is wrong."

The police generally may not enter an Indian community to carry out
investigations, and Indians generally enjoy immunity from Brazilian
laws, Mr. Fontes said. In addition, Brazil treats drug users as
victims who require treatment, not as criminals. They are usually
sentenced to receiving drug-addiction treatment and performing
community service in lieu of serving prison time.

And while drugs and alcohol are strictly illegal in Mariacu, store
shelves in Tabatinga are lined with liquor of all kinds. The Tikunas
also speak of a white paste, which most think is a form of cocaine,
that their youth are mixing with alcoholic beverages.

The Tikunas, who have lived in the region for centuries and migrated
to this area in the early 1840s, have traditionally fished and
planted bananas and cassava. According to legend, their god, Yoi,
fished them from a tributary of the Solimoes.

The borders with Peru and Colombia traditionally meant little to
them. Leticia, Colombia's southernmost town, is less than a 20-minute
minibus ride away.

They remained largely isolated until the 1940s, when Brazil's Indian
Protection Service, now the Fundacao Nacional do Indio, or Funai,
created an office for Indian affairs here, making the town a sort of
regional capital.

What has happened in Mariacu "is not the result of any abandonment of
Tikuna culture," said Joao Pacheco de Oliveira, a professor of
anthropology at the National Museum. Rather, he said, history and
non-Indian culture have reshaped the world around the Tikunas.

Tabatinga, once a small military town, began growing rapidly as a
border trading center in the 1980s and is now home to some 48,000
people. Tikunas began participating in Tabatinga politics in the
1990s, served as military reservists and sent their children to
public schools here.

But the region has also been a way station for drug traffickers since
the 1970s. The Colombian government's recent crackdown on
narco-guerillas has driven more drug shipments into Brazilian
territory, said Mr. Fontes, the police superintendent. The federal
police in Manaus have seized more than two tons of cocaine this year,
about 1,700 pounds in November alone.

"There has been an escalation of violence in the region of High
Solimoes, of drug-trafficking gangs, with an astonishing number of
killings, and the majority of these gangs are in Brazilian
territory," Mr. Fontes said.

The lack of jobs is proving stifling. A decade ago the fish in the
river began to decline.

With Mariacu's growing population and stagnant official boundaries
there is little room to expand cultivation areas, or to create open
spaces for children to play in.

Luz Marina Mendes, a sister of Chief Mendes, said she nearly lost her
19-year-old son, Donizete, twice last year when he tried to kill
himself during drug-induced stupors. She walked in on him taking
drugs last year, finding a whitish paste that her niece later told
her was a drug.

One day Donizete stumbled through the family's front door in a
violent rage, his arm bleeding from a deep, self-inflicted gash.
Another day, Ms. Mendes said, she saved him when she found him trying
to hang himself.

He later joined the army reserves and cleaned up while living on the
base in Tabatinga, she said.

"Virgin Mary, I went through such a rough time with him," she said,
her eyes welling up at the memory. "I struggled so much."

But reaching for outside help is a thorny issue.

While Indians who have not been exposed to outside culture cannot be
prosecuted at all under Brazilian law, so-called acculturated
Indians, like the Tikuna, can be under certain circumstances, said
Davi Cecilio, head of the Tabatinga office of Funai.

Even so, an acculturated Indian "cannot be imprisoned for the same
time as a white man," he said.

At Tabatinga's local jail, a half-dozen Indians were recently being
detained, suspected of acting as drug mules. Drug traffickers
approach Indians because they often do not understand that the
substances they are being asked to carry are illegal, said Lt.
Francisco Garcia, who runs the jail. The Indians probably suspect
that what they are being asked to do is not quite right but often do
not fully grasp the grave prison sentences they could suffer in the
white man's world.

And the lure of easy money is tough to resist. Most Tikunas in
Mariacu earn little more than Brazil's minimum wage of $168 a month.
In the jail, Max Tello, a 20-year-old Kokama Indian, another tribe in
the western Amazon, said he had accepted $404 in January to take a
bag of cocaine up the river, when he was working on a riverboat.

Queliane Gomes, 23, who is part Tikuna and part Kokama, and also in
jail, said she was paid more than 12 times as much as what she earned
as a housekeeper in Tabatinga to transport a bag of a white substance
that, she said, she later learned was cocaine.

While she realizes what she did was illegal, she said Indians should
be held to a different standard.

"The law of the white men is the law of the white men, and our law
has to take precedence, because our people didn't get here because of
the whites," Ms. Gomes said. "If we don't fight for our rights, our
ethnicity will cease to exist."

Portuguese is slowly eroding the importance of the Tikunas language
in Mariacu. Younger Tikunas are less and less interested in fishing
for a living or in carrying on the artisan traditions of their
elders, residents said. The younger Tikunas "want to have a
motorcycle like the whites in town do, to dance to their music, to
participate in the regular life of the whites in Tabatinga," said
Joel Santos de Lima, Tabatinga's mayor.

That lifestyle has brought violence that seems almost inescapable
some days, the chiefs said.

"The police are the security of Brazil, and they aren't doing
anything," Chief Mendes said. "It is their responsibility. It is what
they are paid to do."

But with the police rejecting the Indians' plea, for now, at least,
the Tikunas will have to find ways to cope with their own social
problems and the swirling new influences.

"The Tikunas are between two worlds," Mr. Fontes said, "and I don't
know which one is worse."