A newly discovered uncontacted tribe is already at risk of extinction. This is happening in Bolsonaro's Brazil, which has already been accused of genocide three times.
An uncontacted tribe of the Amazon, whose existence was confirmed five months ago, is already at imminent risk of extinction — indeed, extermination — while Brazil's authorities turn a blind eye. The existence of this group was recently confirmed by an official expedition, but its territory, located along the Purus river in the state of Amazonas, lies outside any protected area.
This represents a very serious danger, according to the NGO Survival. One need only look at what has happened to other uncontacted tribes in the Brazilian state of Amazonas: many of them have been massacred in recent years at the hands of timber traffickers and drug traffickers. This is the case, for example, of the Akuntsu: in 1995, by the time officials from Funai, the government department for indigenous affairs, contacted them in order to save them from extermination, it was already too late. The ranchers who had occupied their land had massacred all members of the tribe and bulldozed their homes to the ground to cover every trace of their crimes.
The surviving Akuntsu number just five. As Survival has reported, one of them, named Pupak, still has the lead of a bullet lodged in his back, and mimics the gunmen who chased him on horseback. Today the Akuntsu occupy a small plot of land in the forest. Although it has been officially recognised and demarcated by the Brazilian government, their territory remains surrounded by cattle ranches and vast soya plantations. All around, farms have by now replaced the forests of Rondônia, once highly extensive and home to numerous tribes.
A team of Funai operatives visited the area between August and October 2021, gathering evidence of the tribe's presence: hunting camps, woven baskets, bowls and bows. The group consists of hunter-gatherers, numbering several dozen people, who most likely speak an Arawá language — a language spoken by some indigenous peoples of the Amazon straddling Brazil and Peru.
What is certain is that they are outside the boundaries of indigenous lands. For this reason, the Funai protection team sent a report to the federation's headquarters in Brasília requesting the urgent establishment of a territorial protection ordinance to safeguard the region in which the tribe lives and, among other things, the organisation of a "health cordon" to prevent the spread of diseases such as malaria and covid-19, against which indigenous peoples have no immune defences.
Territorial protection ordinances are emergency measures used to protect the territories of uncontacted peoples for whom the lengthy process of official demarcation has not yet begun. In the case of the newly discovered tribe, Funai has issued no ordinance whatsoever in five months.
"There is dangerous negligence on the part of Funai in failing to initiate urgent measures to protect this isolated group, given that the area in which they were sighted is subject to invasions and is completely unprotected," denounced the Opi (Observatório dos direitos humanos dos povos indígenas isolados e de recente contato) in a joint statement co-signed with Coiab, the Coordination of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon. "We follow with great concern the ongoing dismantling of public policies on uncontacted peoples, first and foremost the government's frontal attack on territorial protection ordinances."
The situation of uncontacted peoples in Brazil is critical. Cattle ranchers, agribusiness entrepreneurs and extractive industries are putting pressure on the Brazilian government to cancel emergency protection ordinances that safeguard the territories of uncontacted peoples, with the aim of opening these territories — which amount to over 1 million hectares of Amazon rainforest — to mining and agribusiness.
In particular, an investigation has just revealed a conspiracy against indigenous peoples centred on Senator Zequinha Marinhoper, an ally of President Jair Bolsonaro and a supporter of the exploitation of indigenous lands: despite a report from experts, Funai denied the existence of evidence of an uncontacted tribe's presence in the territory of Ituna Itatá, while some of Funai's most senior officials met with Senator Marinhoper to show him the locations where evidence of the tribe's presence had been discovered.
The senator is alleged to have buried the report so that no protection ordinance would be issued — a condition that would have prevented agribusiness entrepreneurs from freely exploiting the lands. There are also fears, as has happened in the past, that the senator may have informed loggers and businessmen of the presence of indigenous peoples, putting their lives at risk.
The case of the uncontacted Amazonian tribe has also been discussed in Italy, where, during a hearing before the Standing Committee on Human Rights of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the Chamber of Deputies, Survival International invited Italian politicians to support the cause with concrete commitments.
Committee chair Laura Boldrini intervened, stating that "protecting these peoples is an ethical duty because this is a matter of universal interest and must therefore be a collective responsibility." The committee committed to scheduling, as soon as possible, Italy's ratification of ILO Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples (an international convention that recognises a set of fundamental rights for indigenous peoples, including rights over ancestral lands and the right to determine their own future autonomously), to summoning the Brazilian ambassador regarding the issues raised at the hearing, and to pressing for intervention at a European level.
"Survival is deeply concerned about the criminal conduct of Funai, which is failing to fulfil its legal obligations to protect this extremely vulnerable tribe, and the forest on which it depends," declared the director of the advocacy department at Survival International, Fiona Watson. "This is only the latest in a series of recent actions demonstrating how much Funai's senior leadership is in the grip of President Jair Bolsonaro's genocidal agenda," the director concluded.
The Brazilian president himself is accused on several fronts over his hostile policies towards indigenous communities. In 2021 alone, he was reported to the International Criminal Court in The Hague no fewer than three times: first, two indigenous leaders filed a dossier to highlight the processes of deforestation, deportation and killing of indigenous people that have been under way since the president came to power in 2019. Subsequently, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib), one of the strongest voices in the country on the protection of indigenous peoples, accused Bolsonaro of genocide and ecocide. The latest complaint comes, for the first time, from beyond Brazil's borders: AllRise, an Austrian non-governmental organisation, formally filed a complaint with the ICC against Bolsonaro, once again, for crimes against humanity.
