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Brazil’s leaders must take immediate steps to save the country’s indigenous peoples from a Covid-19 “genocide”, a global coalition of artists, celebrities, scientists and intellectuals has said.
In an open letter to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, figures such as Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt, David Hockney and Paul McCartney warned that the pandemic meant that indigenous communities in the Amazon faced “an extreme threat to their survival.”
“Five centuries ago, these ethnic groups were decimated by diseases brought by European colonizers … Now, with this new scourge that spread rapidly throughout Brazil … [they] they may disappear entirely as they have no means of fighting Covid-19, “they wrote.
The organizer of the petition, Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, said intruders, including gold miners and illegal loggers, should be immediately expelled from indigenous lands to prevent them from importing a disease that has killed more than 240,000 people worldwide, including 6,750 in Brazil.
“We are on the eve of genocide,” Salgado, who has spent nearly four decades documenting the Amazon and its inhabitants, told The Guardian.
Even before Covid-19, the indigenous peoples of Brazil were locked in what activists call a historic fight for survival.
Critics accuse Bolsonaro, a far-right populist in power since January 2019, of stimulating the invasion of indigenous reserves and dismantling government agencies that supposedly protect them.
“Indigenous communities have never been so attacked … The government does not respect indigenous territories at all,” said Salgado, pointing to the crippling budget cuts and the recent firing of several of the top environmental officials who had attacked illegal loggers and loggers. .
But the letter said the pandemic had further worsened Bolsonaro’s bleak prospects by paralyzing remaining protection efforts.