“THE BRAZILIAN CAVALRY was very incompetent. Competent, yes, was the American cavalry that decimated its Indians in the past and nowadays does not have this problem in their country.” That’s the
opinion of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, expressed on the floor of Congress in 1998. His views appear to have changed little since then; in a
video message to supporters 18 years later, he promised to revoke the protected status of an Indigenous reserve in 2019 and in the next breath added, “We’re going to give a rifle and a carry permit to every farmer.”
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Bolsonaro, consistent with his
anti-Indigenous stance throughout his career, said in a
televised interviewshortly after his election that if it were up to him, “there won’t be any more demarcations of Indigenous land.”
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In last year’s election, Bolsonaro campaigned hard on cuts to government funding for Indigenous services and freezing the expansion of federally protected reserves. He immediately moved to make good on these promises after his inauguration last month.
Meanwhile, armed bands of land grabbers, known as “
grileiros,” have been staging attacks on Indigenous communities — a pattern of violence that has surged in the wake of Bolsonaro’s election, according to Indigenous leaders and allies interviewed for this article.
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He referred to the invaders as “peons” sent by powerful bosses to cut down trees,
burn undergrowth, and plant grass for cattle grazing
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Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, now headed by
Tereza Cristina Dias, a former member Congress from the powerful “
ruralista” agricultural caucus, did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about whether the demarcation of Indigenous lands would continue.
Days after signing the decree, Bolsonaro
tweeted a video clip of another one of his ministers who argued in a cable news interview that many of the existing Indigenous reserves were established using fraudulent documents, and called the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples “spurious” and “treasonous.”