New Delhi: Two organisations – one international and one based out of Brazil – have released a call for worldwide solidarity against Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro’s “genocidal” policies that threaten to steadily deplete the Amazon rainforest with disastrous consequences for the climate and people.
The Brazil’s Indigenous People Articulation (APIB) and Progressive International, the international mobilisation of left-leaning organisations, have drawn attention to Bolsonaro’s remarkable assertions against the rights of indigenous people and his intention to forge ahead with the Ferrogrão railroad project.
The APIB has earlier called the 1,000-km plan one which “will tear the Amazon Forest in two, drastically affecting local communities and their forms of life, especially indigenous and traditional black communities (“quilombos”), and leading to unfathomable environmental impacts.”
Calling the movement the “struggle for life,” the two organisations have highlighted that this is primarily an effort to draw attention to the situation of indigenous people who will be particularly affected by Bolsonaro’s programme, which threatens their “persecution, dispossession and extermination.”
The protest at the country’s capital of Brasilia is slated for August 22, 2021.
This call to mobilise comes days after it was reported that following years of warnings and mounting fears among scientists, “terrifying” research has revealed that climate change and deforestation have turned parts of the Amazon basin, a crucial “sink,” into a source of planet-heating carbon dioxide.
The organisations note the president’s own words: “The Indigenous person can’t remain in his land…Any [Indigenous] reserve that I can reduce in size, I will do so.”
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Several bills on the anvil now aim to worsen the glaring statistic of invasions into indigenous land increasing to 135% in 2019 alone. Violence recorded in this period, against indigenous communities, has doubled, the statement notes.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest fell 10% in July from a year earlier, after four straight monthly increases, preliminary data showed earlier in August, but destruction remains far higher than before Bolsonaro took office, a Reuters report recently found.
Cleared forest in the month of July totalled 1,498 square km (578 square miles), nearly twice the size of New York City, according to government space research agency INPE, the report said.
Progressive International and APIB mention impending legislation like PL 490, PL 2633, and PDL 177, which aim to impose arbitrary cut-off dates and other hurdles on the process of demarcation of land belonging to indigenous people.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, July 27, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Adriano Machado
The bills will “eliminate sovereign Indigenous territorial rights, authorise land grabs, and deny recognition of Indigenous peoples,” the organisations note.
The statement also reflects on the irreversible damage in store for the rainforest.
“The dispossession of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples goes hand in hand with the deforestation of their lands to serve the profits of the settlers that displace them.”
The note observes that under Bolsonaro, deforestation of the Amazon has reached “records highs” – 11,000 kilometres cleared in 2020 alone.
“We are fast approaching the Amazon’s ‘tipping point,’ when the rainforest will no longer produce enough rain to sustain itself,” the organisations say, adding that at that point, “the rainforest will become a savannah: trees will die, fields will burn, and billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide will be sent in the atmosphere.”
The organisations have issued a call to mobilise against Bolsonaro, defend the Amazon and other unique Brazilian biomes like Cerrando and Pantanal, in an effort to save Brazil’s people.
“[I]n the accelerating collapse of our climate, the extinction of the rainforest will endanger ecosystems everywhere. In this way, the fate of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples is entwined with the fate of our world,” they note.
Progressive International and APIB also observe that this movement against Bolsonaro’s policies extends to all governments around the world that are complicit in his policies, and all corporations that seek to profit from it.