Leaders lead by persuasion, example, and consensus. People follow a leader because they want to, not because they have any real authority. Villagers have the final decision to respond to a leader's wishes or not.
The treatment of the Yanomami by the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments has been fraught with the usual bickering and political and agendas.
In 1991 Venezuela established the Biosphere Reserve of the Upper Orinoco-Casiquiare, the largest such area in the world. The decree establishing the Reserve placed it under the authority of the Ministry of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, and called for the establishment of a management committee to regulate affairs within it that would include representatives from the Indian groups living in its boundaries.
The decree recognizes Indian rights to land and resources, establishes measures to protect the traditional livelihoods, and prohibits colonization of the area or any other interventions which violate the rights of the Indian communities. It also directs the Ministry of the Environment to promote self-development among the Indians in the Reserve, and insists that all management plans respect a culture's territorial unity. Furthermore, the decree provides for consultations with the Indians' own organization, the United Yanomami Communities of the Upper Orinoco (SUYAO), in the management plans for the Park.
Critics contend, however, that in reality the biome has given little legal protection to the Yanomami, and the conservation policy established has had little input from the indigenous people living there. The area is too remote, too large to adequately patrol, and the reality of communicating and collaborating with the Yanomami considerably more involved than on paper. True or not, a story about an ambitious reporter traveling into the forest to ask a Yanomami what he thought of Venezuela's degree illustrates one difficulty the government faces. The Yanomami responded with "What's Venezuela?"
Even so the laws and boundaries are much more strictly enforced than in Brazil where government policy has sometimes actively sought to exterminate the Yanomami way of life in order to development the area economically. The governor Roraima (the Brazilian state that encompasses Yanomami territory), Ramos Pereira, once stated that "a rich area cannot permit itself the luxury of preserving half a dozen Indian tribes hindering the development."
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