It is a component of the Lula government’s efforts to fend off illegal miners, loggers and poachers who have wreaked environmental havoc.
Indigenous activists plan to bring some of Brazil’s most sensible ministers to the spot where Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed in the Amazon rainforest, while security forces are about to launch a primary environmental offensive in the remote border region.
Leaders of Univaja, the indigenous arrangement Pereira worked for in Brazil’s Javari Valley, said senior politicians, adding Justice Minister Flávio Dino and Indigenous Peoples Minister Sônia Guajajara, would do so on Feb. 27.
The scale is part of a high-profile crusade through the new government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to fend off illegal miners, loggers and poachers who wreaked environmental havoc during the four-year tenure of his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
Last week, special forces agents from environmental hedge firm Ibama and federal police launched what is expected to be a months-long operation to expel tens of thousands of illegal miners from Yanomami indigenous territory, after claiming their 28,000 citizens had been victims of a “genocide. “under Bolsonaro.
Beto Marubo, one of Univaja’s most sensible leaders, said the government delegation would be taken to the decrepit riverside base that protects the front of the Javari Valley territory, the world’s largest safe haven for indigenous tribes living in isolation.
The ministers are also reportedly taken to the spot where Phillips, a British journalist working for the Guardian, and Pereira, a Brazilian indigenous expert, were shot dead on the fifth of June last year while travelling by boat on the Itaquai River.
“We’re going to exhibit them,” Marubo said. It will be a historic moment. “
As the activists spoke, Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported that the Defense Ministry planned to launch a “mega-operation” in the Javari Valley on the same day as the ministerial visit. The springboard for this operation would be Atalaia do Norte, the remote river town Phillips and Pereira were seeking to succeed when they were attacked by a trio of men enraged by Pereira’s defense of the area’s indigenous communities.
Univaja activists welcomed the steps taken by the new government towards indigenous communities and the environment, but expressed skepticism about the “mega-operation”. Long-term intervention that would pull indigenous communities and activists out of ongoing violence.
“The threats continued [after the killing of Phillips and Pereira]. The invasions continue. They constantly threaten us. . . No one is in our area, whether they are indigenous or what we call “the whites,” Paulo said. Marubo, president of Univaja.
Paulo Marubo said urgent government action is now needed in the Javari Valley, which, along with environmental crimes, has a main transit address for cocaine produced across the Peruvian border, “so that what happened in Yanomami indigenous territory doesn’t happen here. “.
“We’ve lost a wonderful friend,” de Pereira said. And we don’t feel in our own land. . . There is no security in our region. . . We too are human beings. We have lived in those lands for thousands of years. . . And we are the greatest protectors of the forest.
The ministerial conference planned for Javari is another highly symbolic gesture of how Brazil’s attitude toward the environment and environmentalists has changed since Bolsonaro passed into Lula’s hands on Jan. 1.
After the disappearance of Phillips and Pereira, Bolsonaro’s management faced conviction for delaying feet in the search effort. Bolsonaro claimed the men had embarked on a “misguided adventure. “No minister visited the Javari region in the days or months following his assassinations.
Lula’s ministers, on the other hand, expressed solidarity with the families of those killed and the indigenous communities whose fate they recounted when they died. Following Lula’s election last year, his close minister, Marina Silva, said the new government will fight to honor the reminiscence of the rainforest martyrs killed to save the Amazon.