Tom Phillips - 'He wants to destroy us': Bolsonaro poses gravest threat in decades, Amazon tribes say
Indigenous leaders who
say Brazil’s new president is trying to force them from their lands are braced
for a new era of ruin
As a blood-orange
sunset drifted towards the forest canopy, Raimundo Kanamari sat on the
riverbank and pondered the future of his tribe under Brazil’s far-right
president. “Bolsonaro’s no good,” he said. “He wants to
destroy the lot of us, bomb our villages. That’s the news I heard.” For all Jair
Bolsonaro’s well-documented
hostility to indigenous rights, an aerial assault on the Amazon seems
far-fetched. But campaigners believe that under Brazil’s new administration
indigenous communities face their most severe threat since military
rulers bulldozed
highways through the region nearly five decades ago, leaving behind a
trail of death and environmental destruction.
“Not since the
dictatorship have we lived through such a tough moment,” said Jaime Siqueira,
the head of the
Indigenous Work Centre (CTI), a Brazilian NGO supporting indigenous
communities fighting to defend their lands. Ewerton Marubo, a
leader from the Javari Valley indigenous territory – an
almost Portugal-sized hinterland sheltering Brazil’s largest
concentration of uncontacted tribes – said its 6,000 inhabitants were bracing
for a new era of ruin. “We are in a situation
of great danger. [Bolsonaro] is proving himself to be the number-one enemy of
the indigenous,” he said... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/26/bolsonaro-amazon-tribes-indigenous-brazil-dictatorship
