Eric Nepomuceno: Brazil: attacks on indigenous people and nature

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the truth is that With each passing day, the situation in Brazil becomes more and more confused and tense. Inexorably, the general elections on October 2 are approaching and the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro reiterates examples that he is increasingly furious and insists on his threats against the institutions.

The armed forces, a crucial element in the coup desired by Bolsonaro, remain in a resounding silence.

While those responsible for his campaign insist on asking him to be more sane and calm, his palpable imbalance creates scenes like those of last Thursday, when he tried to attack a protester who, what a contradiction, is a well-known activist of the most radical right in social networks.

This one, a reformed corporal from the same army that Bolsonaro calls Owncriticized him for his alliance with the most corrupt political parties in the country, which he had become the whore of the Centrazoreferring to the groups that are defined as Center and that are never sold: they are rented to power, as they have been in recent decades.

The scenario of crisis and misery (there are 33 million Brazilians in a situation of hunger, annual inflation is around 10 percent, unemployment reaches another 10 percent of the labor force) does nothing but increasingly cloud the electoral scenario.

Meanwhile, attention is divided between the presidential dispute and the insane struggle for survival of a growing battalion of wretches; Numbers and figures accumulate that do nothing more than project on the future president, who according to the polls will be Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a scenario of devastation that will cost an Olympic effort to reverse.

What is striking, for example, is the brutal increase in invasions and attacks against indigenous lands.

There were 1,294 cases in 2021, which means more than three each day or just over one every eight hours.

These attacks range from illegal exploitation of natural resources to damage to indigenous heritage, such as the destruction of entire villages and then the occupation of their territories.

The attackers are illegal miners, fishermen and hunters. In the lands of the Yanomami tribe alone, one of the most populous indigenous communities and one of those that most fight for their rights, almost 20,000 illegal miners operate.

The violence with which they act has no limits. The attacks multiply, and now even the children have become targets of the fury of the invaders and are killed in front of their parents.

It is true that illegal miners, hunters and fishermen, all invaders, always existed and always acted in a clearly criminal manner. But there have never been so many, nor have they moved with such impunity as now, thanks to the very clear dismantling of institutions for the protection of indigenous people carried out by the government of Jair Bolsonaro. In addition, they have the clear incentive of the president to continue invading illegally and exploiting nature at will.

The attacks are not limited to the Amazon region, wherever there are indigenous communities, on their lands duly –or supposedly– protected by the Constitution, the invaders act outside the law and under the complicit silence of the government.

More than ever, protecting indigenous communities and the environment, as dictated by the Constitution, translates, according to Bolsonaro, as a way to delay Progress.

In addition to the attempt to devastate the indigenous communities, another devastation, much more effective, concerns the environment.

In the first seven months of 2022, one million 479 thousand 739 hectares of forests were consumed by fires in the Amazon region. An increase of 7 percent compared to the same period of the previous year.

It may not seem like much, compared to the figures for unemployment, misery or hunger, which are at much higher levels, but it is about saving that margin of the little future that we have left.

There is research that shows us that three out of every four hectares that were set on fire were native vegetation, that is, fields and natural forests.

The data, what is worse, do not refer only to the Amazon region, they indicate that it is the whole of Brazil.

However, in the Amazon recorded in 2022, under the government (if you can say government) of Bolsonaro, the worst forest catastrophe of the last 15 years.

It is a shattered nation and it destroys the future.

And so we continue, heading for the gorge.