Indigenous movements, is one of the BEST (and also one of the biggest) social movements on earth. It is pro-organic farming, pro-small food farm, pro-local food production, pro-environment (and I should say pro-'Pachamama,' Mother Nature--in deep sympathy with Nature), profoundly pro-democracy, anti-corporate, anti-pollution (from pesticides, chemical fertilizers and fuel), anti-rapacious logging and mining, anti-'neo-liberal' and anti-WTO/World Bank/IMF (the loan shark agents of the corpo-fascist rulers).
It is THIS movement that will save the earth, and humanity's tenure on earth, if we are going to be saved.
And I will give you one example of how--from Michael Pollan's book "The Botany of Desire." He discusses humanity's relationship with four plants--apples, tulips, potatoes and marijuana. (It is a brilliant book.) In the section on potatoes, he discusses the Irish Potato Famine of the 19th century. The English landlords had taken all the good farm land in Ireland and the Irish poor became dependent on the potato--an import from Peru--because it can be grown on poor land. But what the poor Irish farmers did not know is that the Peruvian Indigenous planted many varieties of potato, as a hedge against plant disease and failed crops--based on thousands of years of experience and Indigenous wisdom about Nature. The Irish planted (and knew about) only ONE variety of potato and planted it everywhere as their staple food source. When plant disease hit, it hit hard. It wiped out the entire potato crop, and tens of thousands of people died of starvation.
This is what we are now risking with corporate monoculture and corporations like Monsanto creating Frankenseeds and Frankenfood--the failure of our entire food chain, due to its lack of variety, "terminator seeds," GMO seeds and foods, and other horrendous anti-Nature practices. When you import chemically grown strawberries from Chile, say, and destroy local producers of less perfect but more variable strawberries, you risk the collapse of the strawberry species. Multiply that by every basic food--corn, rice, and other vegetables and fruits. We are the Irish. Our food chain is ONE variety of potato.
The campesino movement is based on this ancient agricultural wisdom--propagating a wide variety of species, preserving and passing seeds to the next generation, protecting the integrity of local food production, respecting Nature. This is why peasant farmers and small farmers are under vicious attack by corpo-fascist forces not just in Brazil, but throughout Latin America and throughout the world. The attack is led by the United States on behalf of our corporate rulers, and is allied with the worst elements of Latin American society--big landowners, fascists, killers of peasants. FOUR MILLION peasant farmers in Colombia have been driven from their lands by the Colombian military, with $7 BILLION IN U.S. MILITARY FUNDING--the worst displacement crisis on earth, outside of Sudan. Tens of thousands of peasant farmers, political leftists, human rights workers, advocates of the poor, teachers, journalists, union leaders and others have been murdered in Colombia, with a wink and a nod from the United States*.
In Jamaica, the entire local dairy industry was destroyed by the U.S. agriculture dumping of cheaply-priced powdered milk. Local dairy farmers who had provided fresh dairy products to their local communities were wiped out. So, too, were producers of other local foods, by the same means--U.S. ag dumping. The World Bank/IMF uses bought and paid for rightwing governments to inflict the country with crippling debt, then imposes conditions for repayment that include permitting the destruction of local agriculture and other industry. Jamaica can no longer feed itself and suffers dire poverty, and the only jobs are sweatshop jobs in a "globalized" area of the ports, out of the reach of Jamaican labor laws, where goods are assembled and immediately loaded onto tankers and taken elsewhere. The same thing was done to Haiti and its local rice production. Haiti, which used to export rice, now has to import it--from the U.S. (And guess who owns vast tracts of RICE farmland, with water subsidies, in California? Chevron!)
Similar, appalling economic destruction and in particular destruction of local fresh food production, has occurred everywhere that U.S. "globalisation" has gotten its vulture talons on the necks of the leaders--in South Korea and in India (where tens of thousands of farmers have committed suicide) and throughout Latin America, where campesino social movements have led the revolt against "neo-liberalism"--and are the chief support, or an important support, for leftist electoral victories in Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and many other countries including Brazil itself (and are an important political factor in countries like Mexico which are still under the "neo-liberal" boot).
This murder in Brazil is horrible--but it pales by comparison to the massive murder of campesino activists in countries where the U.S. has control--Colombia and Honduras being the worst cases. The U.S. ambassador actively colluded with the white separatists rioters and murderers in Bolivia, in a rightwing coup attempt, in September 2008, who killed at least 15 unarmed peasant farmers. U.S. armed Peruvian police open fired from a helicopter gunship on Indigenous protesters who were trying to protect a region of the Amazon from rapacious corporate mining and logging. Peru is a U.S. client state, but there were still some political consequences for the corrupt U.S. puppet government. Peru's democracy may yet be strong enough to oust that government in the next election. Bolivia is independent, and is pursuing prosecution of its U.S. funded/organized murderers.
Bolivia now has a president who was (and still is) the head of the coca leaf farmers' union. He threw the U.S. ambassador out of Bolivia. The Indigenous and campesinos are in the majority in Bolivia, where the coca leaf--an ancient Indigenous medicine--is now protected by the Constitution. Coca leaf production--for tea and for chewing--goes hand in hand with local food production. U.S. "war on drugs" pesticide spraying kills ALL CROPS, including food crops; poisons farm animals and damages human DNA. This has been perhaps the most important factor in the election of leftist governments in Bolivia and Paraguay, and it is a key factor in the flood of immigrants now fleeing into Venezuela and Ecuador from Colombia (a portion of the 4 million displaced campesinos in Colombia). Pesticide spraying--and mass murder and terror--drive the peasants from their lands, often into urban squalor, where they can no longer feed their families and where they become a very cheap labor pool for (often U.S.) corporate sweatshops and as menials (maids, cooks, gardeners) for the rich. This was the syndrome of the "neo-liberalism" of the '90s into the '00s--massive migration of the poor to the cities. It is the crisis that prompted the democracy revolution in Venezuela--which sparked the general revolution that is occurring in Latin America.
The trend in U.S. policy is overwhelmingly murderous and its chief targets are campesinos. The perpetrator in this case--the death squad murder of land reform activist Pedro Alcantara de Souza in Brazil-- may have been a local rich landowner. But both the policies and the "message" from the U.S. is that murder is an acceptable method of "control" of the peasants.
Brazil, which has a very popular leftist president, former steelworker and union leader, Lula da Silva, will no doubt genuinely seek justice in this case, as they did on the similar death of Dorothy Stang--the Catholic nun who fought for Indigenous rights in the Brazilian Amazon. But who will pursue justice for the murders of thousands like them, in the U.S. occupied country of Colombia, and the U.S. client state of Honduras?
The U.S., with egregious hypocrisy, rails against Venezuela and Cuba on human rights. The U.S., which slaughtered a million innocent people in Iraq, to steal their oil. The U.S, which created torture dungeons around the world. The U.S, which is still killing civilians in Afghanistan. The U.S., which is funding the slaughter in Colombia and ignoring the growing slaughter in Honduras. WHO is setting the example for REAL human rights atrocities throughout the world? WHO has an Attorney General who got Chiquita International excecutives off with a handslap for their funding of death squads who killed four thousand union leaders and members on Chiquita farm lands in Colombia?
The U.S. REWARDS the killing of campesino leaders! It not only funds such murders and may be participating in such murders*; it REWARDS those who look the other way; those who DON'T prosecute such crimes; those who TAKE MONEY FROM the murderers to arrange impunity. They make them Attorney General. They prop them up with money and militarism and psyops/disinformation campaigns and phony elections as the leaders in client countries. They funnel billions of U.S. tax dollars to their rightwing, coup plotting groups.
So, WHO sets the tone, and WHO sets the example, as to the expendable lives of the poor, and in particular the expendable lives of peasant farmers and their advocates in Latin America?
---------------------------
*(There is growing suspicion that the U.S. military--and also the U.K. military--may have been active participants in a particularly horrendous slaughter of campesino and other leftist activists in Colombia--the discovery of a mass grave containing up to 2,000 bodies, near a U.S. military base in Colombia--La Macarena--a region of special interest/activity by the U.S. military and the USAID.
A recent DU thread about this massacre:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x33499A Huffington Post article about the massacre:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/us-colombia-cover-up-atro_b_521402.htmlThe La Macarena massacre (includes a description of, and links to docs about, U.S. ops in La Macarena)
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303The UK military connection
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2010/02/04/silence-on-british-army-link-to-colombian-mass-grave/ 
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