Brazilian indigenous speak out
Amazon nations should decide region’s future: Bolsonaro
ALTAMIRA, Brazil, Aug 29, (AP): As fires raged in parts of the Amazon, Mydje Kayapo sat in a small boat looking out over the Curua River in the Bau indigenous reserve. The smell of smoke filled the air, and Kayapo was worried.
“The fire is coming closer and closer to our reserve,” he told a visiting news team from The Associated Press. “Now it is about 20 kilometers (12 miles) away.”
Kayapo, one of the Bau people’s leaders, helps organize a village watch group to protect the community’s lands from encroaching flames as well as illegal loggers, miners and others seeking to exploit the area. With fires spreading quickly to wide swaths of indigenous territories in recent weeks, his task has grown more critical.
So far in 2019, Brazil reported 83,000 fires, a 77% increase from the same period last year. Many of those were set in already deforested areas by people clearing land for cultivation or pasture. With over 98% of Brazil’s indigenous lands within the Amazon, the threat to groups like Kayapo’s are particularly exposed.
According to Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, an estimated 3,553 fires are now burning on 148 indigenous territories in the region.
“Just outside, our reserve is being heavily deforested. It’s being badly destroyed,” Kayapo said. “We indigenous people need to be united.”
As a multitude of international players discuss how to develop and protect the Amazon, Kayapo and others find themselves on the front line of firefighting efforts and an ever-acrimonious feud with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Boslonaro has come under harsh criticism for environmental policies that some say are weakening safeguards in the rain-forest. He maintains Europeans are trying to infringe on his country’s sovereignty, while also arguing that the demarcation of indigenous lands has hindered business interests.
On Tuesday, he reasserted his claims at a meeting of Amazon regional governors, arguing that reserves are being exploited by outsiders to halt the growth of Brazil’s economy.
“Many reserves are located strategically, someone arranged this,” Bolsonaro said, without noting who he was referring to. “Indians don’t have a (political) lobby, they don’t speak our language, but they have managed to get 14% of our national territory.”
As rhetoric escalates, indigenous leaders have some of the most at stake.
Saulo Katitaurlu, a leader in the municipality of Conquista D’Oeste in Mato Grosso state, appeared woeful as he walked along the banks of the Sarare River.
Farming
“The non-indigenous do whatever they want and then put the blame on the Indian,” Katitaurlu said, explaining that when his group reported a fire to authorities, a rancher said the tribe had set the blaze themselves.
This year, he said his indigenous group, the Nambikwara Sarare, felt the effects of farming and ranching expansion even more acutely and said inspectors were “not going after” the criminals.
“Some years ago there were a few (fires) but now there are more,” Katitaurlu said. “With the Amazon burning, this is the largest (fire) that has ever happened and the smoke is coming here. Today the sky is clean, but two days ago it was full of smoke and hot.”
Leaders of all Amazon nations except Venezuela will meet Sept 6 “to come up with our own unified strategy for preserving the environment, and also for exploration sustainable in our region,” Bolsonaro said Wednesday.
Although Brazil’s president and international players have dominated the discussion, some indigenous leaders appear to feel the most effective way to influence environmental preservation policies is to raise their own voices – or take matters into their own hands.
Bolsonaro said Wednesday that Latin America’s Amazon countries will meet in September to discuss both protecting and developing the rainforest region, which has been hit by weeks of devastating fires.
The Brazilian leader also escalated a deeply personal dispute with French President Emmanuel Macron, accusing him of portraying himself as “the one and only person” concerned about the environment.
Bolsonaro’s remarks pushed back at international allegations that, on his watch, the weakening of environmental safeguards in Brazil had set the stage for farmers, developers and others to set fires more aggressively this year as a way to clear land, much of it already deforested. They also highlighted the Brazilian government’s contention that some international offers of help to fight the fires were an infringement of Brazilian sovereignty over the region.
Macron and other European leaders argue the fires in the Amazon require a global response because of the ecosystem’s critical role in draining heattrapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Macron criticized Bolsonaro for allegedly lying to him about his commitments to biodiversity, prompting the Brazilian to accuse the French leader of evoking his country’s colonial past.
On Wednesday, Bolsonaro said Germany and France had tried to “buy” Brazil’s sovereignty. The acrimony has sidelined a pledge of $20 million from the Group of Seven nations to help protect rain-forest in the Amazon, though Bolsonaro said he would accept “bilateral” aid and that Chile was sending four firefighting planes. Britain has pledged $12 million and Canada has offered $11 million.