Sao Paulo, Brazil - It takes days of travel by boat and foot to reach indigenous tribes deep in Brazil's Amazon rainforest, but that hasn't stopped evangelical Christian missionaries from countries like Germany and South Korea from descending on hundreds of Indian villages.
Unlike Portuguese conquerors five centuries ago, the new proselytizers say they aim to help with medical and social services more than to convert the animist tribes to Christianity.
The missionaries sometimes strip down to loincloths so they fit in better and even search for tribes that have never before made contact with the outside world.
But they often lack the permission of Brazil's government, which is now trying to regain control of the activity. Many anthropologists fear the missionaries will harm indigenous people by weakening native culture and religion and by exposing them to new germs and illnesses.
"I've been visiting Roraima since last year," Choi Yang Sook, a South Korean Presbyterian missionary said, referring to one of Brazil's six Amazon states. "Lots of missionaries!"
Some foreign missionaries work with Indians near big cities, others with the isolated Amazon tribes. Still others hope to reach tribes that have had no contact whatsoever with the outside world and save them from clashes with advancing loggers or farmers while also trying to avoid passing deadly germs.
Many offer services like dental and health care. While they say they don't try to convert Indians to Christianity, they often expose Indians to Christian teachings, sometimes even translating the Bible into native languages.
DEATH BY SHUNNING VS. MODERN MEDICINE
But critics say a weak Brazilian state has left the 215 known tribes vulnerable to the outreach efforts of evangelicals, however well-intentioned they may be. They fear oral history, origin myths and native religions will be lost.
"The Surui no longer worship shamans because missionaries told them it was bad. That's a terrible, immense cultural loss," said Ivaneide Cardozo, a board member at Kaninde, a nonreligious group in Rondonia state.
Christian groups say the government is acting irresponsibly and that its policies prevent it from intervening even in life-or-death situations involving tribespeople. In an effort to protect indigenous culture, many government officials do not want to introduce outside influences in tribal villages including food and medicine.
"This relativist stance violates the human rights of Indian children all over Brazil," said Braulia Ribeiro, who heads the Brazilian chapter of the international missionary group Youth With A Mission, known as Jocum by its Portuguese acronym.
Her group, one of the biggest, 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.
That caused a fuss 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. There was a risk of contamination from contact that shouldn't have been made," said Roberto Lustosa, vice president of Funai.
GOVERNMENT STRUGGLES TO KEEP PACE
Facing criticism that it was letting religious groups work unsupervised in Brazil and unable to say how many were active, Funai in November ordered all of its 61 field offices to canvass the countryside to contact all religious groups on Indian lands and register them.
In theory, nongovernmental groups must have their projects approved by Funai before working with indigenous tribes.
"I'll have to admit that we don't have a lot of control over this situation," Lustosa said. He faults a lack of funding and says Funai needs 1,500 new employees to do its job well.
He also blames politicians who are born-again Christians.
"Congress has 100 evangelicals (out of 513 representatives) and they have a lot of power. Other (Funai) presidents have tried to deal with this issue and were attacked like we are being now," Lustosa said.
Brazil isn't the only country in the region grappling with missionaries. In October, neighboring Venezuela, expelled the New Tribes Mission evangelists for allegedly mistreating Indians.
Church groups working with Indians not only fight with Brazil's government. They fight among themselves too.
A group funded by Brazil's Catholic church, called the Indigenous Missionary Council, or Cimi, which works to expand Indian lands, filed a legal request asking the government to verify that Jocum isn't trying to convert indigenous groups.
Ribeiro denies Jocum pushes Christianity on Indians, even though its Web site says its mission is to "know God and make him known." Her group has members from 149 countries and sends 25,000 people on missionary projects worldwide each year.
She also says that Jocum's own anthropologists are more adept at preserving Indian cultures than the government.
In the case of Suruwaha, the government was forced to rely on Jocum missionaries who speak the native language to communicate with tribal leaders.