‘This is a lethal threat’: Indigenous groups fear Bolsonaro’s hold on voters in Brazil’s Amazon towns

 

 

"Monteiro gave several reasons for her decision, including Bolsonaro’s pledges to fight crime and create jobs. But one issue explains why the son of the disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro is so popular here and across Roraima, where 14 of 15 municipalities backed the far-right politician.

 

Mucajaí was the launchpad for much of the illegal gold rush in which tens of thousands of miners invaded the nearby Yanomami Indigenous territory during Jair Bolsonaro’s environmentally calamitous 2019-2022 presidency. Prospectors used the meandering Mucajaí River to sneak into those protected Indigenous lands near the border with Venezuela, bringing malaria, mercury poisoning, hunger and destruction to its 32,000 Indigenous people. Ranches carved out of Mucajaí’s rainforests conceal clandestine airstrips from which helicopters and planes ferried supplies, miners and sex workers into jungles that the Yanomami’s ancestors are thought to have occupied for at least 1,000 years."

 

READ REPORT BY TOM PHILLIPS

‘This is a lethal threat’: Indigenous groups fear Bolsonaro’s hold on voters in Brazil’s Amazon towns | Brazil | The Guardian