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Nature or sinister design: what's going on in town with highest rate of twins?

In Candido Godoi rumours about tests on villagers by Nazi geneticist Mengele vie with theories about water supply

Tom Phillips, Friday 11 December 2009

Staring out over the rolling pastures of Brazil's deep south, 65-year-old twin Cecilia Kunkel placed the blame squarely with her parents. "It's hereditary, isn't it," she said. "It's like an illness."

Across the valley, on the porch of his wooden farmhouse, Jose Ignacio Lunkes, 63, the father of identical twins, said it was all about nature.

"It's the water," he beamed, before adding: "Or perhaps it is a message from God."

Facts are as scarce as twins are common in Candido Godoi, a tiny agricultural town in southern Brazil that is said to boast the highest rates of twin births on earth. According to one Brazilian university study, 10% of births in one region of Candido Godoi between 1990 and 1994 were of twins, more than five times the state average. The same study showed nearly 50% of these twins were identical, far higher that normal rates.

And in the absence of any concrete scientific explanation, myth and rumour abound in this town of 6,400 inhabitants.

Many, like Lunkes, who is also the grandfather of twins, believe the town's twin boom is down to the water supply, extracted from the appropriately named rio Duvida, or Doubt river, that runs past his home. Others say minerals in the earth must be responsible. Recent years, however, have seen a more sinister explanation in this remote farming town where nearly 80% of residents are of German descent, shopfronts bear names like Danzer or Finkler and where an antiquated German dialect is still largely preferred to Brazil's official language, Portuguese.

According to these rumours Josef Mengele – a Nazi scientist often referred to as the "Angel of Death" – is the man behind what locals call the "twin revolution".

Mengele, thought to have died near Sao Paulo in 1979, is said to have visited the region in the 1960s, performing a number of obscure tests on local women who subsequently gave birth to twins, often with blonde hair and blue eyes. One of the town's former mayors has claimed that Mengele went about his work under the alias Rudolf Weiss.

Mengele, who fled to South America, was notorious for his obsession with creating an Aryan master race through genetic experimentation and his tests on twins in Auschwitz. Holocaust survivors say that the Nazi doctor routinely used twins – dubbed "Mengele's children" – as human guinea pigs. He is said to have diverted thousands of young children from the gas chambers to his operating tables, convinced that twins held the key to this master race.

Long-held suspicions about Mengele's activities in the region around Candido Godoi gained strength last year after the launch of a book by Argentine journalist, Jorge Camarasa, called Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America.

The book reiterated claims that Mengele had spent time clattering around Candido Godoi's dirt tracks in a mobile laboratory conducting genetic experiments on women.

Brazilian scientists and historians have dismissed such theories as spurious and scientifically impossible but with geneticists struggling to explain the "twin revolution", the Mengele theory still carries some weight.

Until the theory reappeared in Candido Godoi, locals saw the twin phenomenon as a major selling point. They built a fertility statue for tourists to visit, sold bottles of fertility water to women who hoped to bear twins. They continue to hold annual "twin parties" at which twins gather for a banquet.

(...)

In: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/11/twins-brazil-mengele-theory

Bom, e até o final do artigo mais histórias relacionadas ao Mengele ter passado e manejado algo por lá são levantadas. Eu que vivi com essa comunidade por 2 meses sei bem, como o artigo fala, que nenhum habitante de lá acredita nisso como sendo a razão dos gêmeos, e muito menos querem sua comunidade relacionada com a idéia do nazismo. E aí fico me perguntando, por que ainda as pessoas ficam falando nisso? Por que um jornalista ainda coloca tantas vezes a palavra "Mengele" em um texto sobre uma população que não acredita nessa hipótese, e onde mesmo não há provas nenhuma sobre isso? Os jornalistas têm muito poder mesmo... Os antropólogos, ao menos, considerariam as crenças nativas, respeitariam e mesmo defenderiam: nunca colocando um título como esse em uma reportagem internacional. É vender a razão disso? E para isso tem que relacionar uma comunidade toda, que não tem como se defender dos meios de comunicação, a um monstro nazista? Pelo amor heim, que jeito de terminar o ano...

Escrito por Ana Amalia às 12h54
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One day I’ll find relief I’ll be arrived and I’ll be a friend to my friends who know how to be friends One day I’ll be at peace I’ll be enlightened and I’ll be married with children and maybe adopt One day I will be healed I will gather my wounds forge the end of tragic comedy I have been running so sweaty my whole life Urgent for a finish line And I have been missing the rapture this whole time Of being forever incomplete One day, my mind will retreat,

One day I’ll be secure, like the women I see on their 30th anniversaries I have been running so sweaty my whole life Urgent for a finish line And I have been missing the rapture this whole time Of being forever incomplete Ever unfolding Ever expanding Ever adventurous and torturous But never done One day, I will speak freely I’ll be less afraid And measured outside of my poems and lyrics and art One day I will be faith-filled I’ll be trusting and spacious authentic and grounded and whole I have been running so sweaty my whole life Urgent for a finish line And I have been missing the rapture this whole time Of being forever incomplete

Os ingleses descobriram meus amigos gêmeos do Rio Grande do Sul! E a imprensa deles vem repetir o que a nossa já fez de errado e já foi repudiada pelos nativos a ponto de vários deles não falarem com jornalistas nunca mais... Olhem o que saiu no guardian.co.uk:

Nature or sinister design: what's going on in town with highest rate of twins?

(foto tirada em 04/07/2009, galeria Como Assim?!, Benedito Calixto)

(Não vá embora - Arnaldo Antunes / Marisa Monte)