Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples Have Long United Against Deforestation
The fires that spread swiftly across the Amazon in recent weeks drew international attention to a problem Indigenous Brazilians have been facing for years.
YES! Magazine
When rain started to fall on the flames overtaking the area around the small Amazonian town of Lábrea, Brazil, Marcos Apurinã let out a sigh.
The Indigenous leader knew the fires would continue to rage across the lower Amazon region in Brazil, known as the arc of deforestation, but the rain brought a brief moment of relief. He and the others in the Apurinã community in Lábrea and other surrounding towns had been fighting the fires for weeks.
“There have been huge fires in and around Indigenous territories,” said Apurinã from a meeting in Lábrea with representatives of 22 Indigenous peoples that took place over several days at the end of August. “They’ve destroyed the south of Amazonas state,” he said. “This region is seeing a lot of destruction because of the road and new paths being cleared so loggers can come in for wood, so they can ransack the forest.”
The fires currently ravaging the rainforest have largely been set by illegal miners, loggers, and farmers to quickly clear land. For the Apurinã and other Indigenous peoples living in the Amazon, it’s this deforestation that has long brought them together in an attempt to protect their territories, and the recent increase in fires across the region has made saving the rainforest more critical than ever.
As the fires ate large swaths of the rainforest, he continued his anti-Indigenous discourse at an August 27 meeting with governors of states that are home to the Amazon, saying during a live broadcast that many of the protected Indigenous territories “are located strategically” and that someone had been “arranging” the demarcations without saying who that could be. “Indians don’t have a political lobby; they don’t speak our language, but they have managed to get 14% of our national territory,” he continued. Just over a month after being elected, Bolsonaro said that pro-environment and -Indigenous policies were getting in the way of the northern state of Roraima becoming the richest in the country. Later that same month, he compared Indigenous peoples in Brazil to zoo animals. While Bolsonaro’s is not the first administration to neglect the problem of deforestation in the Amazon—in August 2005 there were approximately 64,000 fires registered in the region—“its contempt for the environment is particularly brazen,” Oliver Stuenkel, an associate professor of international relations at Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas Foundation, wrote in Foreign Affairs. Since taking office, Bolsonaro has attempted to hand the demarcation of Indigenous territories, overseen by the National Indian Foundation (Funai), to the Ministry of Agriculture, a move blocked by the Supreme Court. Two bills that would amend the constitution and legally open Indigenous lands to farming and logging, as well as allow their mineral and hydro resources to be extracted, are also currently making their way through Congress. They were slated to be voted on in the lower house on August 21, but Indigenous activists were able to stall the vote and convince their opposition to split up the two so they could be considered separately. When the fires overtaking the Amazon made headlines around the world, Bolsonaro accused countries that criticized his response of interfering with Brazil’s sovereignty and said, without evidence to back up his statement, that environmental nonprofits must have started the fires in an attempt to call attention to their cause and ruin his and the country’s international reputation.#operacaoverdebrasil
— Itamaraty Brazil🇧🇷 (@Itamaraty_EN) August 30, 2019
The Xerente indigenous fire brigades are combating fires in the Amazon Cerrado region. Since 2013 @funaioficial and @brasil_IBAMA have been promoting courses to prepare fire brigades at #PrevFogo, covering more than 27 million hectares in Indigenous Lands. 🇧🇷 pic.twitter.com/v0AHhPHH53
Bolsonaro made good on his campaign promise to cut the budget for Ibama, the arm of the Ministry of the Environment responsible for enforcing environmental regulations and fining those who break them, which has in turn imposed nearly 30% fewer fines since last year. The environmental watchdog also lost funding last month when both Germany and Norway pulled millions in funds donated annually to Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment to help curb deforestation in the Amazon. For Apurinã, the weakening of Ibama and its counterpart, the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), is particularly disheartening, but it hasn’t stopped him from carrying out the conservation work he does alongside other Indigenous leaders in the Amazon. At the meeting in Lábrea, they all agreed that working in conjunction with environmental agencies like Ibama and ICMBio would be the best way to protect their land, pooling their resources and using both traditional methods and new technology to monitor their territories and report any wrongdoing they come across. What they want, after all, is the same thing. If they fight together, they might be strong enough to keep the Amazon alive.🚨 On Tuesday a committee in Brazil’s congress approved a bill that would allow industrial agriculture on indigenous reservations. This would be DEVASTATING for indigenous peoples in the Amazon and almost certainly lead to more & larger fires. 🚨 https://t.co/VRHPETrXZv
— AMAZON WATCH (@AmazonWatch) August 28, 2019
Jill Langlois wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Jill is an independent journalist based in São Paulo, Brazil. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and Mongabay.
This article appeared on YES! Magazine on September 4, 2019. It is published under a Creative Commons license.
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