In its annual report on violence against the descendants of Brazil’s original inhabitants, the Catholic Church’s Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) said there were 182 murders of Indigenous people in 2020, compared with 113 murders in 2019, a 61 percent increase as land invasions of Indigenous territories increased and the government failed to provide protection.
There were 263 reported land invasions of Indigenous territories, CIMI said, an “alarming” increase of 137 percent over the previous year. Of 1,289 reservations in Brazil, 832 are waiting for official recognition.
The report blamed the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro for failing to protect Indigenous communities, while pushing legislation that would open their reservations to commercial mining, oil and gas exploration and the building of hydroelectric dams. Last year, Bolsonaro’s government saw “the deepening of an extremely worrying scenario in terms of Indigenous rights, territories and lives,” the report said. Bolsonaro has emboldened illegal miners, squatters, and loggers, whose invasions of reservation territories have exacerbated the spread of the coronavirus.
The Brazilian president recently visited an Indigenous territory and defended illegal mining which has an “enormous impact on the environment and Indigenous people”, Cesar Munoz, Americas senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Thursday on Twitter.
Bolsonaro has previously praised US army cavalry colonel George Armstrong Custer for clearing Indigenous people from the plains of North America.
He has also criticised reservations for occupying valuable land and has said he will not grant another inch of land claimed by Indigenous communities. He is backed by powerful farm interests, as part of a group of lawmakers known informally in Brazil as the “beef, Bibles and bullets” bloc.
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