The decimation of the Amazon's native people over the past four centuries illustrates two patterns outlined in the seminal 1985 report by Benjamin Whitaker, the rapporteur on genocide for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Paragraph 41 (p. 20) states: "A conscious act or acts of advertent omission calculated neglect or negligence may be sufficient to destroy a designated group wholly or partially through, for instance, . . . disease [and] may be as culpable as an act of commission." Paragraph 33 (p. 17) discusses "the definition of genocide or 'ethnocide', the destruction of indigenous cultures," and "also 'ecocide'—adverse alterations, often irreparable, to the environment—for example . . . destruction of the rain forest—which threaten the existence of entire populations."

The Portuguese Colonization

The first Europeans to penetrate the...