Born into an indigenous community in the rural area of Boa Vista (RR) and a longtime activist in the movement, the current president of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai), Joenia Wapichana, believes that the murder of the indigenist Bruno Pereira and the English journalist Dom Phillips, in June 2022, once again attracted the attention of the country and the world to a historic problem: the fragility of the protection of indigenous territories throughout Brazil, in particular the Amazon. “What I ask myself is: would the case have all this repercussion if there hadn’t been a foreign journalist among the victims?”, commented Joenia when talking to the Agência Brasil reporter about the double homicide that completes one year this Monday ( 5). “We have several cases involving [agressões de todos os tipo contra] indigenous peoples and that, generally, receive little publicity”, added the president of Funai, stating that, in general, Brazilian society receives “little information about the seriousness of what is happening in the” Amazon region. According to the Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi), an organization linked to the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), of the 176 murders of indigenous people identified in Brazil in 2021, at least 99 were registered in states of the Amazon, headed by Amazonas, where they were At least 38 occurrences were counted. Memory Dom and Bruno were last seen alive, on June 5, 2022, when they were visiting riverside communities around the Vale do Javari Indigenous Land, close to Atalaia do Norte (AM). A correspondent for The Guardian newspaper, the English journalist was traveling through the region interviewing community leaders and other characters for a future book-report on the preservation of the Amazon rainforest. Bruno, on the other hand, coordinated meetings with communities served by the União dos Povos Indígenas do Vale do Javari (Univaja), a non-governmental organization for which he had worked since he left Funai in February 2020, a few months after being dismissed from the position of general coordinator. of Isolated and Recent Contact Indigenous Peoples. People close to him allege that Bruno’s dissatisfaction with the direction that the government team of then-president Jair Bolsonaro imposed on indigenous policy was decisive for him to ask for leave, claiming he needed to deal with personal matters. When he started to work in Univaja’s community self-protection projects, Bruno received new death threats – something he already lived with in public service and which he reported to the authorities. “[Antes dos homicídios de Bruno e Dom] foundation employees, including Bruno himself, had been warning of the need for the body to strengthen its Ethno-environmental Protection Bases and guarantee the safety of its workers, indigenous peoples and other communities,” said Joenia. “[Já após os assassinatos] At that moment of fragility, not only were the servers not given the proper security conditions, but everything that was going on was called into question.” The president of Funai admits that, despite the actions implemented after the murders of Bruno and Dom, such as the sending of police from the National Public Security Force, the region still suffers from a lack of personnel to patrol an area as vast as that of the second largest indigenous land in the country, with around 8.4 million hectares (each hectare corresponds, approximately, to the measurements of an official soccer field). “It is a very big challenge to guarantee the structure [necessária] to the protection of indigenous territories. There are administrative issues such as, for example, the shortage of servers, which is very large. Furthermore, in order to move forward with public policies [que cabem à fundação implementar], we need prepared people”, pondered Joenia. She assured that, “little by little”, the foundation and the federal government have been trying to meet the main claims of the indigenous movement, such as the resumption of demarcations of Union areas intended for the exclusive use of native peoples. An example cited by Joenia: after more than four years without any new indigenous land being recognized, in April of this year the federal government approved six new reserves. “This will not happen overnight. Funai has sought [realizar] more permanent actions, but we need to reinforce our structures. Gradually, the government is strengthening the bases of protection, but a policy is needed [de segurança pública] more effective, more permanent. It is necessary, for example, to give more support to river inspection, which is a bottleneck, a weakness that was very visible during the recent crisis [humanitária] yanomami”, concluded the president of Funai.
Agência Brasil
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