'They're killing us': world's most endangered tribe cries for help
Trundling along the dirt roads of the Amazon, the giant logging lorry dwarfed the vehicle of the investigators following it. The trunks of nine huge trees were piled high on the back – incontrovertible proof of the continuing destruction of the world's greatest rainforest and its most endangered tribe, the Awá.
Yet as they travelled through the jungle early this year, the small team from Funai – Brazil's National Indian Foundation – did not dare try to stop the loggers; the vehicle was too large and the loggers were almost certainly armed. All they could do was video the lorry and add the film to the growing mountain of evidence showing how the Awá – with only 355 surviving members, more than 100 of whom have had no contact with the outside world – are teetering on the edge of extinction.
It is a scene played out throughout the Amazon as the authorities struggle to tackle the powerful illegal logging industry. But it is not just the loss of the trees that has created a situation so serious that it led a Brazilian judge, José Carlos do Vale Madeira, to describe it as "a real genocide". People are pouring on to the Awá's land, building illegal settlements, running cattle ranches. Hired gunmen – known as pistoleros – are reported to be hunting Awá who have stood in the way of land-grabbers. Members of the tribe describe seeing their families wiped out. Human rights campaigners say the tribe has reached a tipping point and only immediate action by the Brazilian government to prevent logging can save the tribe.
This week Survival International will launch a new campaign to highlight the plight of the Awá, backed by Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth. In a video to be launched on Wednesday, Firth will ask the Brazilian government to take urgent action to protect the tribe. The 51-year-old, who starred in last year's hit movie The King's Speech, and came to prominence playing Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, delivers an appeal to camera calling on Brazil's minister of justice to send in police to drive out the loggers.
full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/22/brazil-rainforest-awa-endangered-tribe
= new reply since forum marked as read
Unfortunately, the indigenous peoples of Brazil are, by far, the most excluded ethnic group in the Brazilian society and politics. They have not even one single representative in the Congress or the Senate (the Green Party of Brazil is a sham - just a façade to a group of right wingers and Christian conservatives pretending to be leftists). The landowners, on the other hand, have about 100 congressmen in their pockets. They are known as "Bancada Ruralista". Most of them are affiliated to opposition parties of the current Brazilian government (major part being from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, PSDB, and the Democrats, DEM), but some of them belong to the support base of Dilma's administration.
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancada_ruralista
The Bancada Ruralista is also known as "Bancada da Motosserra" (literally, "the chainsaw group"
. They've been stronger in the past, during the time of the military dictactorship, but they still keep a huge power in Brazilian politics and huge influence in the media. Two of their recent projects are extremely dangerous to the Amazon and its inhabitants: the reform of Brazilian Forest Code (which they believe to be harmful to the development of agribusiness) and the transfer of the responsibility over demarcation of indigenous lands from the Federal Government to the Congress. The first is still being debated while the second has already been implemented. Other main activity of this group is blocking investigations against loggers and companies involved in the deforestation.
Their leader is the businesswoman and senator Kátia Abreu, also known as "Miss Chainsaw":
In the pic below she's receiving a gift from an indigenous militant during an event in Cancun.
Responsability over this issue, anyway, extends beyond the national boundaries of Brazil. The mainstream press would do us a favor if they started informing their readers and watchers not only who are the corrupted individuals and companies directly active in deforestation, but also who are their clients, the corrupters individual and companies generating the demand and buying from the first group. They won't, of course, because most of them are big advertisers of media groups.