The new Brazilian president has transferred the functions of Funai, the body responsible for regulating indigenous reserves, to the Ministry of Agriculture, which sees the Amazon rainforest as nothing more than land to be exploited.
Hard times lie ahead for Brazil's indigenous peoples and for the Amazon rainforest, which has provided them with sustenance and shelter for generations. Jair Bolsonaro, who officially became Brazil's 38th president on 1 January, inaugurated his term with an outright attack on the country's native peoples: he stripped Funai (Brazil's department for Indigenous Affairs) of its responsibility for demarcating indigenous lands and handed it to the Ministry of Agriculture.
The well-founded fear is that the Ministry of Agriculture, heavily beholden to the agro-industrial sector, will drastically curtail the areas granted to native peoples and further accelerate the devastation of the planet's last great green lung, all in the name of increasing agricultural output. After a recent modest decline, deforestation has started rising again in the Brazilian Amazon, and the removal of land from native peoples — who currently account for around 13 per cent of Brazilian territory — will only make matters worse. "There will be an increase in deforestation and violence against indigenous populations," said Dinaman Tuxá, executive coordinator of the Articulação dos povos Indígenas do Brasil (Apib).
Read also: Jair Bolsonaro is in power. What he said in his first address to Brazil
Survival International, the global movement for indigenous peoples, highlighted in particular the devastating impact the measure will have on uncontacted tribes. "It is an assault on the rights, lives and livelihoods of Brazil's indigenous peoples," reads the statement issued by the organisation. "If their lands are not protected, they risk genocide. And entire uncontacted tribes could be wiped out." The disappearance of Brazil's first inhabitants represents an attack on the very soul of the nation, which risks severing its own roots forever.
Restrictions on the territories reserved for native peoples will also lead to an impoverishment of biodiversity; indigenous peoples are in fact the best conservationists and custodians of the natural world. Numerous studies have shown that they are better at caring for the ecosystems they inhabit, and for wildlife, than anyone else. "We do not want to be wiped out by the actions of this government. Our lands play a fundamental role in preserving biodiversity," said representatives of the Aruak, Baniwa and Apurinã tribes. "We are ready for dialogue, but we are also ready to defend ourselves."
Read also: Brazil, reforestation at risk after the election of Jair Bolsonaro
The decision to strip Funai of its most important function — namely the identification and demarcation of indigenous peoples' territories — exemplifies Bolsonaro's thinking on social rights, which earned him the approval of former US Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. "Not one more square centimetre for the Indians," the new president had repeatedly said during the electoral campaign, holding up as a model the two decades of military rule that, from 1964 to 1985, saw the government wage a ruthless war against native peoples.
Native peoples will therefore be unable to expand their territories, which have already been extensively taken from them in the past; their lands will be opened up to mining and commercial exploitation, and there are fears of an increase in reprisals against them by death squads funded by the enormously powerful agro-industrial sector, which accounts for around 23.5 per cent of national GDP. The freedom of action of non-governmental organisations working in Brazil will also be curtailed — organisations that Bolsonaro considers guilty of "manipulating indigenous peoples," who must instead be integrated into "real Brazil." Finally, the new health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, announced that cuts to healthcare spending for indigenous peoples are planned.
