Imagine living in the heart of the rainforest, concerned only with how to catch your dinner and with continuing to deliberately avoid all contact with mainstream society, when you see a helicopter appear in the sky — noisy and reeking — carrying people who have decided the time has come to tell you about their god and, why not, infect you with their diseases.

This is what will soon happen in Brazil, where New Tribes Mission (NTM), one of the largest evangelical missionary groups in the world, has launched a project to evangelise uncontacted Amazonian tribes.

Uncontacted tribes want to remain that way

More than a hundred uncontacted peoples still exist in the world today. They are not relics of a distant past, Survival International, the global movement for indigenous peoples' rights, has stressed — they are people who have chosen to live differently, without severing their bond with the natural world.

Most of these peoples are aware of the populations, large and small, living around them. They have nonetheless chosen to have no contact with them, most likely scarred by the violent encounter with colonial society in the past, marked by massacres and epidemics.

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Funai in the hands of an (ex) evangelist

The election of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil, which took place the previous year, made the future of Brazil's indigenous peoples and of the Amazon rainforest even more uncertain. Bolsonaro inaugurated his mandate by stripping Funai (Fundação nacional do Índio), Brazil's department for indigenous affairs, of its responsibility to demarcate indigenous lands, transferring it to the Ministry of Agriculture, which is heavily dominated by the agro-industrial sector.

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As if that were not enough, the previous January he chose evangelical missionary Ricardo Lopez Dias as the new head of Funai's department for uncontacted Indians — perhaps, critics suggest, to secure further political support from Brazil's powerful evangelical lobby. "Putting an evangelical missionary in charge of Funai's department for uncontacted Indians is like putting a fox in charge of a henhouse," commented Sarah Shenker, coordinator of the uncontacted peoples campaign at Survival International. "It is an open act of aggression, a blatant declaration of intent to forcibly contact these tribes, which will destroy them."

A new threat to native peoples

Dias, who now works in anthropology, spent many years working with the American organisation New Tribes Mission, today known as Ethnos 360, which is known for its repeated attempts to contact and evangelise uncontacted tribes. "It is one of the most fundamentalist missionary organisations," reads a Survival statement. "The manhunts carried out by NTM in Paraguay in the 1970s and 1980s caused a great many deaths."

Read also: Brazil, another guardian of the Amazon murdered, Paulo Paulino

Ethnos 360, at the very moment when coronavirus is beginning to spread widely in Brazil as well, has announced the imminent use of a helicopter to convert previously unreachable Amazonian tribes — even though such contact was explicitly prohibited by the Brazilian constitution in 1988, when it was established that any initiative to contact these peoples should come from the peoples themselves. Funai had, moreover, already previously ordered NTM missionaries — who in the late 1980s attempted to evangelise the isolated Zo'é tribe with grave consequences — to stay away from indigenous lands.

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"This new helicopter flight programme will allow Ethnos 360 aviation to help our missionaries already in the region and to open doors to reach another ten groups of people living in extreme isolation," the evangelical organisation stated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjRjSkY13To

How to spread disease

The mission of this fundamentalist Christian group, beyond spreading the word of Christ and eroding millennia-old beliefs and cosmologies, could also spread dangerous infectious diseases, such as Covid-19, to isolated tribes with no immune defences. "Measles and chickenpox have killed vast numbers of Indians, but the greatest massacres have been caused by respiratory diseases, and coronavirus is one of these," explained Douglas Rodrigues, of the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Federal University of São Paulo, who works with indigenous populations.

Read also: How the genocide of Native Americans altered the Earth's climate

The European settlers who arrived in the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century killed an incredible number of people in conflicts, but condemned even more through the diseases they brought with them, giving rise to terrible epidemics that killed around 90 per cent of native populations in the following century. Even after the colonisation period, many isolated peoples were decimated by diseases — for us mundane ones, such as influenza and the common cold — after coming into contact with evangelical missionaries. Often, Survival has explained, 50 per cent of a tribe is wiped out by disease in the year following first contact.

Read also: Deforestation in the Amazon is approaching the point of no return

Indigenous rights sold off

The introduction of new diseases is only one of the many threats facing Brazil's native peoples, rendered ever more vulnerable by Bolsonaro's aggressive socio-environmental policies. He misses no opportunity to attack indigenous people, calling them "prehistoric men," and to encourage the occupation of their territories. Uncontacted tribes are literally at risk of genocide and ethnocide — that is, the destruction of their culture.

"It is now clear that a deliberate decision has been made by the Brazilian government to open indigenous territories to evangelical missionaries, as a decisive step towards seizing their lands and exploiting their resources, such as gold, minerals and timber," said Sarah Shenker. "If all of this is not stopped, many peoples will be exterminated."

The fears of native peoples

Several communities have already voiced their fears. "In Brazil, NTM has destroyed our social organisation and our peaceful coexistence," said Beto Marubo, an indigenous leader from the Javari Valley. "The world we have known for millennia has been dismantled. The missionaries' activities will result in the total loss of the last uncontacted peoples of the Javari Valley."

Read also: Brazil's Red January: indigenous people protest against Bolsonaro

"We know Ricardo well," said one of the leaders of the Matsé people, also from the Javari Valley, referring to Ricardo Lopez Dias, who spent a decade working in the area as a missionary. "We don't want his church here, because he won't let us paint our faces, inhale rapé (a type of tobacco smoked collectively by men), or use frog poison for hunting."

The destruction of forests, the introduction of unknown diseases — such as the new and feared coronavirus — and religious proselytism therefore risk causing the permanent disappearance of many uncontacted peoples, depriving humanity of some precious and irreplaceable pieces of its diversity.