Indigenous rights and the coronavirus pandemic
Amazonas, Brazil
Valeria Fernandez-Soriano considers how Covid-19 has impacted the lives of South America’s indigenous groups.
Indigenous communities in the Americas are no strangers to attacks from our modern society: from Wall Street-backed oil companies to state criminalisation, tribespeople are subjected to the worldwide greed and blatant disregard of the civil protections supposedly enshrined in international law. In 2020, coronavirus has switched this survival mode to overdrive – not least because the demand for testing kits and PPE has pushed remote villages to the back of the queue. In Brazil, measures facilitating the pursuit of wealth in the region, including decimating the annual budget of FUNAI, the governmental body responsible for the protection of natives’ interests and culture, has resulted in structural inequity and the collapse of a healthcare network encompassing the Amazon.
These groups are particularly susceptible to death by respiratory disease due to their secluded lifestyle and lack of immunity to even the common flu. Furthermore, deforestation and crude oil operations have made resources increasingly scarce, and many groups have become dependent on state-provided food packages and pensions. Previously, members regularly travelled by boat to the nearest cities to collect what they needed to feed their community. Today, embarking on such a perilous journey is simply not possible without a high risk of infection, and human rights groups are finding it similarly difficult to deliver crucial supplies.
Many tribes have already experienced casualties, as the virus creeps into the most guarded corners of the world. The death of a Yanomami teenager, Alvaney Xirixana, is a harrowing warning for vulnerable tribes, and has propelled community leaders to take precautionary measures into their own hands to avoid tribal annihilation. Others have opted to split into smaller groups in order to limit the spread amongst their tribe, and tried to follow social-distancing guidelines by temporarily abandoning communal practices and holy rituals. However, some key strategies for reducing the rate of infection are difficult to meet; handwashing, for instance, is a near impossibility in communities with a chronic lack of access to water. In Pampa del Indio, situated in the Argentine province of Chaco, the Qom are stuck in a vicious cycle of marginalisation and poverty. Drought and malnutrition has already claimed the lives of many in this tribe.
More alarming still, armed gangs of land grabbers across South America are taking advantage of the pandemic to attack tribespeople in what has been a decades-long conflict over the rights to reserves and ancestral land. Unbelievably, in Nicaragua and Brazil, these illegal land grabs are part of government concessions cynically provided at a time when the world’s focus has been diverted to containing the spread of Covid-19. In Brazil, Bolsonaro’s administration has gone as far as to issue a presidential decree pending approval in Congress that would legalise land grabbing in government-controlled reserves. Some federal lawmakers champion the proposed measure as an economic overhaul that will make Amazonian territory lucrative again; the reality is that the decree is unconstitutional and is the final nail in the coffin for indigenous peoples who have been battling for the right to simply exist.
The move is unsurprising coming from a man who, in a 1998 Congress meeting, expressed deep regret for the Brazilian Cavalry’s failure to exterminate indigenous people with the same vigour as the Americans during colonisation. Bloodthirsty and bellicose, his contempt of marginalised groups echoes the rhetoric of the authoritarian military dictatorship that terrorised the country from 1964 to 1985. Following its collapse, the Constitution was enacted to rectify decades of institutionalised discrimination and abuse, but the full demarcation of indigenous lands guaranteed under it has yet to be fulfilled.
Successive governments rocked by corruption scandals preferred to appease allies in Congress with major financial interests in the Amazon Basin. Then, within hours of taking office, Bolsonaro signed an executive order stripping FUNAI of its constitutionally-attributed power to identify traditional settlements, transferring it instead to the toolkit of the pro-agribusiness Ministry of Agriculture. His new Minister of Agriculture, Tereza Cristina, is being scrutinised for accepting a R$30 million donation from a prominent landowner who ordered the 2003 assassination of the 75-year-old Chief of Guarani-Kaiowá tribe Marcos Verón during an attempt to retake ancestral land that had been appropriated as a cattle ranch.
Today, tribes like the Guarani-Kaiowá have resorted to direct action by occupying highways adjacent to their ancestral land, vowing to regain territory, patch by patch. However, confrontations mean the tribe members are exposed to gunslingers and police brutality, and the calculated vilification of indigenous peoples in politics has ensured that even peaceful demonstrations are met with teargas and slander. If Bolsonaro’s decree were to be enacted, there is no saying how many members may lose their lives in vengeful and sadistic takeovers by thugs emboldened by a vituperative President.
Environmentalists are also afraid that the road of recovery from Covid-19 will lead straight into the Amazon. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Chinese government depended on fossil-fuel reliant infrastructure to bolster the economy. With a depression looming on the horizon, global financiers and state-run corporations will be clamouring to get a piece of the Amazon. As these ecosystems are considered the most biodiverse blocks on the planet, it’s difficult not to feel pessimistic about our prospects – the pursuit of wealth pays no second thought to perpetuating the endangerment of carbon sinks. Nonetheless, the resistance of these indigenous groups battling for their sacred territories, while also acting as guardians of the biomes keeping our planet alive, is truly inspirational, and we owe it to them to ensure they are not left behind in matters concerning all of us, like the dire consequences of this pandemic.