Sydney Possuelo

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

Already in the sixties he worked on the Xingu project of the brothers with Villas Boas (Orlando Villas Boas, Claudio Villas Boas and Leonardo Villas Boas ), the first Indian conservation project in Brazil.

As an employee of the Brazilian government 's Indian affairs department, FUNAI in 1987 he founded the Department of isolated Indians living peoples. Beginning of the nineties was Possuelo President of FUNAI. In this office he sat 1991 against considerable resistance from the military, politicians and miners that the home of the Yanomami Indians in northern Brazil was declared a protected area. In his short tenure, which decried as corrupt authority converted to a recognized organization for the protection of Indian rights. The area of ​​the Indian protected areas has more than doubled. He was released as part of the political turmoil surrounding President Fernando Collor de Mello early as 1993. Since then he heads back the department for isolated Indian tribes.

Possuelo are seven initial contacts with hitherto unknown Indian peoples attributed since the seventies, the last tribe of Korubo 1996. Under the policy pursued by FUNAI he made the Indians with civilization known. Later he realized that introduced diseases, prospectors and loggers threaten the existence of these tribes. Since then occurs Possuelo to consistent isolation of untouched peoples. His work made ​​him widely unpopular - not only by the loggers, gold miners, or mine workers whose livelihood is the overexploitation of the rain forest, also by Catholic missionaries criticized his advocacy of any contact avoidance.

In 1998 he received the Bartolomeu de las Casas Prize, was from Time For Kids magazine ( an offshoot of Time magazine ) voted Hero of the Planet and recorded on the website of the UN in the category The Unsung Heroes of Dialogue. From the Royal Geographical Society in 2004 he received the Patron's Medal awarded for his work. Possuelo was released in 2006 by FUNAI, after remarks made by the FUNAI president Mércio Gomes, the indigenous peoples had enough land, sharply criticized. He was then director of the NGO Instituto Indigenista Interamericano.