The Cinta Larga (or Cinturão Largo) are a people
indigenous to the western
Amazon Rainforest
The Amazon rainforest, Amazon jungle or ; es, Selva amazónica, , or usually ; french: Forêt amazonienne; nl, Amazoneregenwoud. In English, the names are sometimes capitalized further, as Amazon Rainforest, Amazon Forest, or Amazon Jungle. ...
of
Brazil, numbering almost 2,000. Their name means "broad belt" in
Portuguese, referring to large bark sashes the tribe once wore. The tribe is famous for shadowing
Theodore Roosevelt's
Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition, making no contact.
Language
The
Cinta Larga language
Cinta Larga is a Tupian dialect cluster of Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, ...
is a
Mondé language, belonging to the
Tupi language family
The Tupi or Tupian language family comprises some 70 languages spoken in South America, of which the best known are Tupi proper and Guarani.
Homeland and ''urheimat''
Rodrigues (2007) considers the Proto-Tupian urheimat to be somewhere betwee ...
. It is written in the
Latin script.
[
]
History
Since the 1920s, the tribe has often come into violent conflict with prospectors entering the region to harvest rubber, timber, gold or diamonds. In the 1960s, this culminated in the "Massacre at 11th Parallel The Massacre at 11th Parallel occurred in 1963, when men hired by a rubber company killed 3500 members of the indigenous Amazon group Cinta Larga and destroyed their village. Only two villagers survived.
The massacre was a part of the larger, ongo ...
" in which rubber prospectors killed many of the Cinta Larga by throwing dynamite into their village from a plane, and then finishing off the survivors, including killing women and children with particular cruelty. Only two members of that Cinta Larga community survived the massacre.
It is believed the plane made a first pass over the village, dropping sugar to lure a crowd to the central plaza. Then, it swooped in low to drop the dynamite on the assembled Cinta Larga. The bodies were buried in the riverbank, and that village was abandoned forever.[''The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Lost Tribes'', First Edition, Crown Publishers, United States, 2011, p. 227-228]
Diamond mine controversy
In 2004 the tribe was responsible for the murders of 29 miners illegally unearthing diamonds in the area. In exchange for an $810,000 community grant from the Brazilian government, the tribe agreed to shut down the mine and refrain from killing intruders. The grant expired in 2007, and the tribe has implied it may reopen the mine.
Notes
Further reading
* Millard, Candice. '' The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey''. New York: Doubleday, 2005. .
Ethnic groups in Brazil
Indigenous peoples in Brazil
Indigenous peoples of the Amazon
{{Brazil-ethno-group-stub