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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.
“As a result, there is nothing to protect indigenous peoples from the risk of genocide caused by an infection introduced by strangers who enter their lands illegally,” argued the signatories, who also include supermodels Gisele Bündchen and Naomi Campbell, the author. Mario Vargas Llosa, artist Ai Weiwei, architect Norman Foster, and actor Meryl Streep.
Salgado, who documented the Rwandan genocide in 1994, warned that the 300,000 indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon faced annihilation.
“In Rwanda we saw a violent genocide, an attack, where people were physically killed. What will happen in Brazil will also mean the death of the indigenous people, ”said the 76-year-old man who has spent the past seven years photographing the region for his grand final project.
“When you endorse or promote an act that you know will eliminate a population or part of a population, this is the definition of genocide … [It will be] genocide because we know this is going to happen, we are facilitating … the entry of the coronavirus … [and therefore] permission is being given for the death of these indigenous peoples. “
“It would mean the extinction of the indigenous peoples of Brazil,” added Salgado.
Fears that Covid-19 could devastate indigenous communities grew last month when the death of a Yanomami teenager revived horrible memories of epidemics caused by road builders and gold diggers in the 1970s and 1980s.
“In some towns, I knew that measles killed 50% of the population. If Covid does the same, it would be a massacre, ”said Carlo Zaquini, an Italian missionary who has spent decades working with the Yanomami.
The Brazilian city hitherto most affected by the coronavirus is Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas, where part of the Yanomami reserve is located.
Salgado, who is calling for the creation of an army-led task force to evict intruders from protected areas, admitted that Bolsonaro would not act of his own free will. But he believed that international pressure could compel the government to do so, as happened last year when global outrage resulted in the military deploying to extinguish fires in the Amazon.
“In the Brazilian Amazon alone, we have 103 indigenous groups that have never been contacted; they represent the prehistory of humanity,” said Salgado. “We cannot allow all this to disappear.”
