Long before he became president in January, Jair Bolsonaro argued that protections for Brazil’s indigenous peoples were onerous and economically restrictive. “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians,” he said in 1998. So when heavily-armed miners took over an indigenous village in a remote region of the Amazon in late July and killed an elderly community leader, Senator Randolfe Rodrigues publicly blamed Bolsonaro. It’s one of several signs that the fate of the Amazon—and with it, a crucial factor in the global fight against climate change—is increasingly being fought in Brazil on the battleground of indigenous rights and bodies.

Commonly referred to as the lungs of the world, the Amazon produces about 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen. Its destruction, which has proceeded gradually for centuries, is now approaching an irreversible “tipping point,” according to researchers. While the struggle to protect the environment and indigenous lands is not unique to Brazil, the specifics of the Amazon are exceptional. Far from the fringe issue it is often treated as in mainstream political discourse, solidarity with native peoples has become a global ecological imperative.



Recent months have seen a surge of depredation in the Amazon, with Brazilian papers reporting this week that deforestation in July 2019 was 304 percent higher than in July 2018. The Economist, which put the problem on the cover of its August 1 issue, referred to Bolsonaro as “arguably the most environmentally dangerous head of state in the world”: Rather than protecting what is left of the world’s largest tropical rainforest, the president seems intent on opening up the jungle to commercial activities like mining and livestock grazing, his disregard for the ecological and climate value of the Amazon exceeded only by his contempt for its most vulnerable residents.

Solidarity with native peoples has become a global ecological imperative.

Bolsonaro’s belligerence toward minorities is one of his defining political characteristics, one that helped fuel his rise to the presidency in a country primed for a reactionary turn after almost a decade and a half of left-wing governments. His right-wing designs on the Amazon hearken back to an earlier era: the military dictatorship that governed the country from 1964 to 1985, which Bolsonaro has variously praised and chided for insufficient brutality against dissidents. The regime saw unmet potential in the region, held back by the lingering presence of disruptive indigenous peoples whose preservation of traditional ways of life got in the way of logging, mining, and cattle ranching.

Indigenous Brazilians, who live on protected lands throughout the country, over half residing in the Amazon rainforest, have faced recurrent violence from those seeking to exploit the land. “The land is our mother. You plant, you take from her, you use her but you respect her, taking care of her,” an indigenous woman told The Guardian in March—an attitude she said white people do not share. During Brazil’s military dictatorship, the generals in power sought to transform the underdeveloped, sparsely-populated region into a modern commercial powerhouse stitched together with highways, factories, and homes. Seeking to build a road from Manaus to the Venezuelan border in the state of Roraima, the regime had no qualms about cutting directly through territory belonging by the Waimiri-Atroari people.