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Spy drones and daily murders of the most isolated indigenous people in the world

2022-11-23T04:43:14.326Z


International law grants uncontacted communities the same rights as other citizens, but in the Amazon they continue to be threatened by multiple dangers


One Saturday in September, during a trip to the United Kingdom in the midst of a campaign to defend the Amazon rainforest, Olimpio Guajajara learned of the murder of his relative Janildo Oliveira Guajajara, in Brazil.

During one of the breaks in his work with the Human Rights organization Survival International, Guajajara had wanted to go see "the ancient stones" of England: "When we returned from visiting the megalithic site of Stonehenge (Wiltshire), we learned that Janildo had he was ambushed and shot dead,” explains Sarah Shenker, researcher for the protection of the lands of the uncontacted tribes with Survival.

While Guajajara was approaching those monuments that humanity had built five thousand years ago, in the middle of the street of a city close to the Arariboia indigenous land, another guardian of the Amazon fell shot, a habitat that is being destroyed at an increasingly frenetic rate: up to 12,000 square kilometers are lost annually, according to the latest estimates.

Oliveira is the sixth protector killed with violence since the body of caretakers was created, around a decade ago, to mitigate deforestation caused by illegal loggers entering their lands.

"Indigenous people are always the best guardians of their forests, because they live with it," says Shenker, who clarifies that the Guajajá guardians "carry arrows and bows, the traditional weapons they use to hunt."

They protect with their own lives an area in the northeast of the Amazon, a home-nature that they share with the Awá people, part of whose inhabitants reject any contact with society.

Although there are more than 100 indigenous peoples, including those in the Amazon, in the Chaco, in Indonesia, on some islands belonging to India and in West Papua, who do not maintain contact with the world, "the Awá are among the most vulnerable and harassed from the earth”, Shenker narrates.

They are fragile in front of the stranger, above all because they do not have the necessary defenses for many diseases that currently circulate.

They show that they want no relationship with other humans by pointing arrows into the sky when planes pass by or by leaving crossed boards on the roads.

It is likely that these ways of showing that they do not want contact with others come "from everything they have seen in the past, because they have suffered attacks in which they have seen their relatives die, or from diseases brought by people who have entered their land to steal”, he argues.

This is not a

traveling

cinema

The daily harassment suffered by the Awá in the Brazilian Amazon jungle was evident a few months ago, when a video that they themselves had recorded was released to denounce the presence of drones flying over their lands.

In this community there are people who have never come into contact with the outside world.

Other of its members act as mediators with neighboring towns and the rest of society, in such a way that these events can be made known through the media and social networks.

"They did not know who was responsible for the drones or the reason why they were flying over them," but, "accustomed to having their jungle invaded," they intuited that these flying cameras "could have to do with the theft of their land," he argues. Shenker.

In addition, "they see that the government does nothing to safeguard the land, despite the fact that every day they suffer the intrusion of armed commandos that threaten them," adds this militant researcher who spends a good part of the year living in Brazil and organizes campaigns from there. of support to those peoples of Latin America.

In that corner of the Amazon jungle, where green has not yet been defeated by agribusiness, oil wells or mercury contamination from gold extraction, the native communities must live with organized crime that stems from drug trafficking or with that low intensity espionage.

The damage caused by the loggers can be seen on a satellite map, which shows how where there used to be jungle, now only a few green islands remain, which belong to indigenous lands, says the activist.

Having destroyed the trees in the surrounding forests, they only have the option of "invading and stealing high-value wood from indigenous lands, illegally, because that is demarcated and protected by the Brazilian constitution and legislation." international," he emphasizes.

Indeed, deforestation in the Amazon is measured today in record numbers, something to which illegal logging has surely contributed, which increased by 22% in one year (compared to the same previous period), according to official numbers, given to meet in Brazil, in November 2021. The loss of 13,235 square kilometers of trees between 2020 and 2021 was the highest figure of vegetation loss recorded in the last 15 years, according to the balance prepared by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE ).

Deforestation in Brazil: neither trees nor children of this land

For the Survival researcher, this long-standing situation has been compounded by the negligence —if not the complicity— of the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro who, "far from conserving, encourages the opening of paths for what they call 'economic development' ”.

Nor do the proposals to change national legislation in Brazil contribute to make it difficult for indigenous people to register their territories, or to make the extraction of minerals and other raw materials more profitable for those who have this large-scale exploitation in their hands.

Faced with this climate of tension, the indigenous guardians "have not stopped working, because they see that it is the only way to protect their lands," explains Shenker.

Also for them, new technologies (drones and satellite images) can be allies when it comes to bearing witness to the accelerated destruction of biodiversity on their lands.

As a counterbalance, some of these rights to the preservation of the land itself have been recently included by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) in the section on "territorial protection" of the territories of "peoples in voluntary isolation", in the report called Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Pan-Amazon, published in October 2019. In it, the autonomous body of the Organization of American States (OAS) mentioned, precisely, "the exacerbation of the challenges of indigenous and tribal peoples warned by the IACHR through its various mechanisms for the protection and promotion of human rights embodied in its previous publications”.

With clear arguments, and in favor of the indigenous peoples, part of the collective action consists in turning public opinion into the struggles of the indigenous peoples and their recognition as contemporary societies, on an equal footing with the others.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-11-23

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