Pará, bloody Pará

Even when the police doesn’t kill in Pará, Brazil, it still lets others do the killing. The coup and the political power of the rural sector in Brasília have provided Amazonian gunmen with a carte blanche. We are living in times of death. The massacre of nine men and one woman in Pau D'Arco, on …

Xingu, the clamor coming from the forest in Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival

By Barbara Arisi & Felipe Milanez * Much to the chagrin of ranchers and agribusiness, one of Rio de Janeiro’s popular samba schools, Imperatriz Leopoldinense, is making visible the terrible consequences of agribusiness and hydropower dams on the Xingu Indigenous Park in this year’s Carnival. It’s the biggest party on earth. The greatest multitude of …

The Few Remaining: Genocide Survivors and the Brazilian State

The death of Konibu, an elder Akuntsu shaman and political leader, forces us to consider what has been the role of the Brazilian state in this ongoing genocide, and what can be done to stop it. Konibu was an elder Akuntsu, shaman and political leader. He died last Thursday 26 May 2016. The death of Konibu brought …

War and cover up in the Amazon

FUNAI, Brazil's National Indigenous Foundation, is accused of ignoring a serious conflict between two indigenous tribes in the Amazon. Two hours after the original version of this text was published in Carta Capital, FUNAI informs about first contact omitting information about massacre. A “tribal war,” following the omission of the state, reportedly provoked a massacre of members of the …

A strange mirror in the Amazon frontier

I was born in Jacundá, but I did not know these stories. I did not know my story, the story of the place I came from. Each film has shocked me in a unique way, terrified me and made me want to know more of the land I came from. (Mainara, student in the region of Pará, …

Decolonisation and the Munduruku Protocol: It’s time to listen and to respect

International conventions, in particular the International Labor Organisation Convention 169 (ILO169), establish that local communities should be consulted when a planned project will affect their territory. Consultation with indigenous peoples, as written in Article 6, should be undertaken through appropriate procedures, in good faith, and through the representative institutions of these peoples. This statement is followed by the article …