In Brazil, Bolsonaro receives the indigenous merit medal. An absurd choice that takes no account of the genocide charges brought against the president.
In Brazil, the theatre of the absurd is playing out. Justice Minister Anderson Torres presented president Jair Bolsonaro with a merit medal for his commitment to Brazil's indigenous peoples. The award's stated rationale reads: "In recognition of his significant selfless service for the well-being, protection and defence of indigenous communities."
It was a deeply ill-judged ceremony, given that Bolsonaro stands accused, from multiple quarters, of crimes against humanity, genocide against indigenous peoples, ecocide, and of having allowed the extermination of several uncontacted populations in order to seize new lands to exploit and deforest.
Since taking office as president in 2019, Bolsonaro has pushed environmental protection to the margins of Brazilian politics, replacing it with an ever more intensive exploitation of the Amazon rainforest. Various agencies have had their funding cut, including Funai, the National Indian Foundation, one of whose core tasks is to safeguard the rights of indigenous communities.
Furthermore, last summer the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) was due to rule on the question of the so-called marco temporal — a proposal backed by the agribusiness sector and supported by Bolsonaro's government — which holds that indigenous peoples who cannot prove they were physically living on their lands on 5 October 1988, the day the Brazilian constitution was enacted, no longer have any rights over those lands. The ruling was subsequently postponed to an unspecified date.
Now, through another bill, the government has proposed accelerating mining activities, on the pretext that the war in Ukraine is disrupting the supplies of fertilisers needed for grain harvests.
The nation's indigenous merit medal is a long-standing tradition and, in previous editions, has been awarded to academics such as anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro and to indigenous leaders such as the iconic environmentalist chief Raoni Metuktire.
This year, alongside Bolsonaro, the justice minister also presented the award to himself and to three other ministers. "It's absurd," tweeted Sonia Guajajara, national coordinator of the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib), the confederation that in August 2021 filed a complaint against Bolsonaro before the International Criminal Court (a complaint subsequently reiterated by an Austrian NGO in October of the same year). As the organisation announced in a statement, Apib will pursue legal action to annul the justice ministry's order.
Socialist Party MP Alessandro Molon also joined the chorus of protest: "It is scandalous that the very government that is trying to legalise mining on indigenous lands, putting at risk the very existence of these persecuted and mistreated peoples, has the audacity to award itself merit medals for all the harm it has done."
