According to the Catholic Church’s Indigenous Missionary Council, violence against Brazil’s indigenous people surged last year as land conflicts and invasions of their reserves grew and the government failed to offer protection.
Its yearly report on violence against descendants of Brazil’s original inhabitants shows that there were 182 indigenous people murdered in 2020, up from 113 in 2019, a 61 percent increase.
There were 263 documented land invasions, an alarming increase of 137 percent over the previous year’s invasions on indigenous lands.
The government was condemned in the report for failing to safeguard indigenous population while promoting laws that would allow commercial mining, oil and gas exploration and the construction of hydroelectric dams on their reserve lands.
His words have emboldened illegal miners, squatters, and loggers, whose incursions of reservation lands have aggravated the coronavirus’s spread, critics argued. According to official numbers, over 800 indigenous people have died from COVID-19, which only count deaths on reservations and not among indigenous people in Brazil’s cities.
Their land claims have come to a halt. 832 of Brazil’s 1,289 reservations are awaiting official recognition.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who previously hailed US Army cavalry colonel George Armstrong Custer for ridding the prairies of indigenous peoples, has blasted reservations for taking valuable territory and has stated that he will not grant indigenous groups another inch of land. He has the support of powerful farm interests.
According to the research, the second year of Bolsonaro’s presidency saw the deepening of an exceedingly concerning scenario in terms of indigenous rights, territories and lives.
Brazil has 900,000 indigenous people, one-third of whom have relocated from reserves to metropolitan areas.
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