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By Reuters 
11h ago
By Anthony Boadle
Brasilia – A senior expert on isolated tribes of the Amazon in Brazil was killed by an arrow that struck him in the chest as he approached an indigenous group, friends and a police witness said Thursday.
Rieli Franciscato, 56, had spent his career as a civil servant at the government’s indigenous affairs agency Funai, working to establish reserves to protect Brazilian tribes.
On Wednesday, as he approached a hitherto uncontacted indigenous group, he was hit by an arrow over the heart in the forest near the Uru Eu Wau Wau reserve in the western Brazilian state of Rondonia, near the border with Bolivia.
“He screamed, took the arrow out of his chest, ran 50 meters and collapsed, lifeless,” said a policeman accompanying the expedition in an audio posted on social networks.
The Kanindé Ethno-Environmental Defense Association that he helped find in the 1980s said that the indigenous group had the nobility to distinguish between a friend or an enemy from the outside world.
His death comes at a time when Brazil’s indigenous peoples are increasingly threatened by invasions by illegal land grabbers, loggers and gold miners, emboldened by the policies of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who wants to develop the Amazonia and reduce the size of the indigenous. Bookings.
“We are puzzled by so many deaths in this Brazil that no longer respects indigenous rights,” said Ivanei de Cardozo, a friend of Franciscato and co-founder of the Kanindé association.
The main authority on the isolated tribes that remain in Brazil and former head of Funai, Sydney Possuelo, said that Bolsonaro had fulfilled his campaign promise to destroy the agency that is meant to defend the rights of indigenous peoples.
Possuelo said the government had withdrawn funds from Funai and left her without the necessary security personnel at her isolated posts, just as increasing land invasions increase the risk of violent clashes.
Brazil’s presidency did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bolsonaro has repeatedly proposed the need to integrate indigenous people, whom he has described as living “like cavemen,” into the broader Brazilian society.
“Rieli was a calm, methodical, soft-spoken man who knew the dangers very well, but he was alone and that is why he went to ask the police to accompany him,” Possuelo said. Possuelo explained that the presence of the police could have triggered the attack.
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