Ten days after Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took office, dozens of men entered protected indigenous land in a remote corner of the Amazon, hacking a pathway beneath the jungle canopy.
Inspired by Bolsonaro’s vow to open more native territory to commercial development, the men, armed with machetes, chainsaws and firearms, had come to stake their claims.
A tense stand-off ensued with members of the Uru-eu-wau-wau tribe, who captured the January confrontation on a cellphone video viewed by Reuters. The trespassers threatened to set fire to their villages to drive them out, tribal members said. Tribesmen readied poison-tipped arrows in their bows.
The invaders retreated. But a bullet-riddled sign at the entrance to their sprawling reservation now serves as their calling card.
The placard is emblazoned with the acronym FUNAI, a federal agency charged with protecting indigenous land rights that is widely loathed by agricultural interests.
“It was a warning that they are coming back,” Awip Puré Uru-eu-wau-wau, a 19-year-old tribal member, said a few weeks after the encounter in the northwestern state of Rondonia.
The confrontation is part of a surge of threats and illegal incursions that tribes and indigenous rights groups say have accompanied Bolsonaro’s rise to power. Land invasions have increased 150 per cent since he was elected in late October, according to the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a Brazilian advocacy group.
On the night of Bolsonaro’s victory, a health post and a school were firebombed on Pankararu lands in northeastern Pernambuco state, CIMI reported. In midwestern Mato Grosso do Sul, the group said, convoys of farmers fired shots at the Guaraní Kaiowá community to intimidate the tribe.
Brazil is home to about 850,000 indigenous people representing roughly 300 tribes. Their vast reservations, accounting for about 13 per cent of Brazil’s territory, have long been a source of conflict with outsiders looking to tap their natural riches.
Bolsonaro has railed against what he sees as excessive federal protections for these minorities. He compared natives on reservations to animals living in zoos, suggesting they would be better off assimilating and enjoying a cut of profits that could come from opening their holdings to farming, logging and mining.
He has dismissed reservations as an impediment to agribusiness, one of his top supporters. — Reuters
Anthony Boadle
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