Donning army fatigues, Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello boarded an air force SuperPuma helicopter last week and flew over the dense rain forest of Roraima in the northern Amazon. The region is home to the Yanomami, a stone-age tribe threatened with extinction. For the past three years, their federally protected lands have been devastated by gold prospectors, whose search for riches has led to the deaths of an estimated 1,200 Indians from the 9,000-member tribe, largely through disease. Last October a federal court ordered the miners to leave the territory. But hundreds remained, using crude landing strips to fly in...
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