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Leaders of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon called this Friday for international humanitarian aid in the face of the abandonment in which they are found and the risk that they run amid the pandemic of the new coronavirus.
“There are no doctors in our communities, there are no prevention materials in the face of this pandemic (…) There is no support on the issue of food,” deplored José Gregorio Díaz, from the Coordinator of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (Coica) that groups to the nine countries that share the largest tropical forest in the world.
During a video conference between this organization and Amnesty International, Indigenous representatives complained about the little assistance they receive from the governments of the region despite the expansion of the Covid-19.
Díaz also denounced that the illegal miners and loggers take advantage of the confinement imposed in several countries in the area to operate “with impunity”, putting the communities in isolation at risk of contagion.
“One of the last options we ask for is for international humanitarian aid to be authorized to reach our communities (…) and thus prevent an ethnocide in the entire Amazon basin,” he declared.
According to Coica, which coordinates organizations in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana, There is no record of people infected with the virus in native towns.
In the world, at least 190,000 people have died and almost three million have been infected by the disease that emerged in China in December.
A month ago, a spokeswoman for Coica, Claudette Labonte, called for greater protection against the invasion of miners, drug traffickers, loggers, land invaders and tourists in the indigenous territories of the Amazon.
“Indigenous people living in voluntary isolation are especially vulnerable to infectious diseases since they have no immunity against most of these ills,” he told Agence France Presse.
Native communities are crucial guardians of biodiversity, a role recognized by the IPCC, the UN’s expert group on climate change. They protect a forest area that contains an estimate of more than 200,000 million tons of carbon.
The deforestation rate on indigenous lands is less than half that of other areas, but these communities are equally threatened by illegal activities and large agricultural projects promoted by governments.
The 60% of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil, the country most affected in Latin America by the new coronavirus.
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