Posts tagged Brazil
Uncontacted Amazon tribes endangered in Peru, Brazil -indigenous group

Reuters

December 8, 2021
Deep in the Amazon rainforest, the world's largest area containing isolated and uncontacted tribes is under increasing threat from illegal logging and gold mining, advancing coca plantations and drug trafficking violence, a new report warns.

An undetermined number of indigenous people that could number several thousand inhabit a vast swathe of forest twice the size of Ireland that overlaps the Brazil-Peru border.

Their longhouses in jungle clearings have been spotted from planes but encounters with outsiders or clashes with invaders are anecdotal.

In the most comprehensive study to date of the so-called Javari-Tapiche corridor, to be published on Thursday in Lima, a Peruvian indigenous organization says the world's largest number of uncontacted people are in danger.

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Brazil’s Bolsonaro vowed to work with Indigenous people. Now he’s investigating them

Mongabay

May 4, 2021
A week since the Climate Leaders Summit, where Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro pledged to work with Indigenous peoples to protect the Amazon, his government is being accused of acting to intimidate them.

At least two prominent Indigenous leaders in the country have recently been summoned for police questioning for criticizing the government, raising concerns from human rights organizations, politicians, celebrities and academics about Bolsonaro’s abuse of power and the undermining of freedom of expression.

Sônia Guajajara, one of the top Brazilian Indigenous activists and head of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) — the country’s main Indigenous association — was called on April 26 to appear before the federal police to testify in a probe for allegedly “slandering” Bolsonaro’s government.

“The persecution by this government is unacceptable and absurd. They will not silence us,” Guajajara said on an April 30 Twitter post.

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The Kayapó Indigenous People in Brazil are Fighting Hard to Protect the Amazon

One Green Planet

March 1, 2021
The government of Brazil is considering a bill that would open Indigenous territories to gold mining and mining by the oil and gas industries. This would threaten both the Amazon rainforest and the people that live there.

Over 6,000 Kayapó from 56 communities recently voiced their opposition to the bill: “We do not agree with individual statements made by Kayapó relatives in favor of gold mining,” their declaration reads. Although some leaders have succumbed to pressure to support the bill, the Kayapó people as a whole stand firmly against it.

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