The natives of the Amazon on Wednesday called on the international community to set up a "emergency fund" of five million dollars to protect them from the coronavirus and avoid an "ethnocide" of the guardians of the largest tropical forest on the planet. "As indigenous peoples, we are in danger of extinction," said José Gregorio Diaz, Venezuelan leader of the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (Coica), bringing together Amerindians from the nine countries sharing this region.
During a virtual press conference, he specified that "only five million dollars" was necessary to constitute an "emergency fund for the Amazon" , in order to help "directly" more than 3,000 indigenous communities, destitute face the risk of contagion. "If we continue to wait for (an intervention from) the state, we will die, and we do not want to disappear," said José Gregorio Diaz, deploring that "the social policies of the governments of the nine countries fail" until 'to these populations.
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The Amazon basin has at least 26,500 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, including 1,630 dead, he said, stressing that the virus "is affecting much more forcefully" the indigenous communities, especially cross-border. "We are here to ask for help from global civil society, from humanity," added José Gregorio Diaz.
More than 500 indigenous peoples, including 66 in voluntary isolation, according to the Coica, live in this region which is shared by Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guyana, Guyana, Peru, Surinam and Venezuela. But at least 60% of the seven million km² of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil, the country most affected by the new coronavirus in Latin America.
“ The Amazon represents 30% of biodiversity and 70% of the planet's oxygen. But its real importance lies in the interrelationship of the indigenous peoples of the forest to ensure the life of all, ” added Tabea Casique Coronado, head of Coica for science and education. Failure to "preserve this inter-relationship, which largely ensures ecological stability, the planet will suffer a climate collapse without return" , he said, alerting to a risk of "ethnocide" if urgent measures are not taken to protect Native Americans.
At the end of April, José Gregorio Diaz had called for international aid, denouncing the fact that "there are no doctors, no equipment to prevent this pandemic" in these indigenous communities, recognized as guardians of biodiversity by the IPCC, UN group of experts on climate change.