President Hugo Chavez ordered them to leave by mid-February for "exploiting" Indians.
The relocation began late January to meet a February 12 deadline, NTM said. Missionaries had been hoping the Venezuela Supreme Court would rule against the November order, but on February 2 the court said the president’s demand was legal. Although it granted another hearing "on the constitutionality of the order," NTM fears this will be a lengthy judicial process.
President Chavez has accused NTM, which works with indigenous tribes, of "imperialist infiltration" and links to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), charges the group strongly denies. "We don’t want the New Tribes here. Enough colonialism,!" Chavez said last year about the activities of NTM, which has its headquarters in Sanford, Florida.
He accused the missionaries of building luxurious camps next to poor Indian villages and circumventing Venezuelan customs authorities as they freely flew in and out on private planes. NTM, the president said, was involved in "true imperialist infiltration, the CIA, they take away sensitive, strategic information. And on top of that, exploiting the Indians."
ACCUSSATIONS DENIED
NTM spokesman Ron Van Peursem denied the accusations. "We don’t see how we could be posing a risk to national sovereignty, but if the government feels that way…please put us under greater scrutiny, greater controls. We would invite that," he said, adding that the group has nothing to hide.
At the end of 2005, New Tribes Mission was reportedly forced to sell its property in the tribal regions, saying it had "exhausted all efforts to retain the property" located at Tamatama.
"A half century of precious memories are attached to the land. Missionary children grew up there. Missionaries are buried there. Numerous work teams from churches labored to build homes, classrooms and dorms there. It’s hard to lose such a place, but that’s what’s happening," NTM said in published remarks.
TRIBAL PEOPLE SUFFER
NTM said that the tribal people are "the real losers in this contest between governments and ideologies." It is one of Latin America’s biggest evangelical church-planting and Bible-translating agencies and has 3,200 workers in 18 countries in all continents, including 160 staff members in Venezuela.
Last year, an estimated 3,000 tribal people from ten tribes in southern Venezuela reportedly
gathered in Puerto Ayachucho area to support NTM. The group carried banners and sang hymns in their different languages as they marched through the streets. "This is a show of support by the tribal people of the State of Amazonas," NTM quoted Josa Cayupares, speaking for the Puinave tribe, as saying.
News of the removal of NTM staff members came as in neighboring Brazil pressure was mounting on missionaries as well, Reuters news agency reported Wednesday, February 8.
In an effort to protect indigenous culture, many government officials apparently do not want to introduce outside influences in tribal villages including food and medicine.
CHILDREN RIGHTS
"This relativist stance violates the human rights of Indian children all over Brazil," said Braulia Ribeiro, who heads the Brazilian chapter of the evangelical missionary group Youth With A Mission, in an interview. Her group, known as Jocum by its Portuguese acronym, is in battle with the government for having taken two children from the Suruwaha tribal village in the Amazon state of Rondonia to get medical treatment in Sao Paulo, allegedly without obtaining permission from the government’s Indian affairs agency FUNAI.
One has cerebral palsy and the other is a hermaphrodite. Suruwaha parents, like many hunting tribes in the Amazon, traditionally abandon children with physical deficiencies to die in the jungle. Worried the children would be shunned, Jocum persuaded their parents to treat them with modern medicine, Reuters reported.
That reportedly caused an uproar in the outside world, even though the kids have returned to the tribe, their health improved, and are being accepted by their parents. "Indians who never left the forest had contact with pollution, germs in hospitals, viruses and bacteria," Reuters quoted Roberto Lustosa, vice president of FUNAI as saying. "There was a risk of contamination from contact that shouldn’t have been made," he argued. (With BosNewsLife News Center, BosNewsLife Research and reports from Venezuela and Brazil).
