Amos Roberts spoke to SBS Portuguese about why he decided to return to Brazil – after filling an extensive report about the Zika Virus in 2016 – this time to focus on the indigenous people from the Amazon under Jair Bolsonaro government.
“It is a story that resonates around the world, the importance of Amazon to the global climate. The struggle to protect the Amazon has been big news for many years now. I think it is also a story that resonates in Australia, in terms of the situation for the Indigenous people. I felt that a lot of the rhetoric that you’ve heard from Bolsonaro, was the sort of thing you heard in Australia from Pauline Hanson, something that it used to be quite mainstream in Australia several decades ago,” said Amos.
“I think some of the worrying signs are the undermining of the government agencies that were meant to protect the environment and Indigenous people such as FUNAI, IBAMA and Chico Mendes Institute. That are all kinds of things happening there that will make it very difficult for Brazilian law to be enforced.”
Amos highlights the fact that in the past there seemed to be a lack of understanding of Indigenous culture, of indigenous rights, a belief that the best thing for indigenous people was simply to be assimilated and made part of the mainstream. “I am sure it strikes a chord for many people in Brazil as well because there are many problems in terms of the plight of the Indigenous people, statistics there in terms of health and education. We are very familiar with that in Australia as well.”
Amos focused his investigation on the Munduruku tribe, located not far from the city of Itaituba by the Tapajos River.
”The story is looking at the impact that Bolsonaro might have in one particular part of the Amazon. We decided to focus on the Munduruku. This is a community that still live a very traditional way of life, and now their lifestyle is threatened by various things that relate to development in the Amazon: there’s a railway the government wants to build to transport soy beans, there is a very large hydroelectric project which slides the river banks they rely on for their fishing and their hunting, there’s illegal logging and mining going on.”
“The Munduruku are still hunter gatherers, their diet and lifestyle are still drawn from the forest and from the river, I was very impressed with that, the lack of material goods, lack of desire for material goods.
“We spent a few days with them and their community, and also spent several days in the county of Itaituba, with the Mayor there, who is pro-Bolsonaro and very excited about having a government that is pro-development and that has promised to relax many strict laws that restrict farming, and logging and mining in that area.”
Amos Roberts said that one of the differences between Brazil and Indigenous people in Australia is that indigenous territory in Brazil “you can’t have mining, you can’t have commercial agricultural, the land is there for indigenous people to leave off.”
“The process for land rights in Brazil under the Brazilian constitution, is that you go through a lengthy process to have the indigenous land demarcated and once it is done, there will be many protections in place.
“The Agricultural Minister was saying to me ‘what happens if the Indigenous people want to benefit from development, what if they want mining, what if they want agriculture?’. My understanding is that most of the Indigenous tribes in Brazil are not at the point that they want that, especially at the Amazon, where they prefer to live in a more sustainable way, on their land without that sort of exploitation.
“In Australia and New Zeland, where I come from, Indigenous people are also very involved in mining, forestry, fishing and they can balance the traditional and the modern. In Brazil I got the sense that it was one or the other. And the government is taking some advantage of that in terms of opening up some of these lands.”
You can watch “Brazil’s President versus The Amazon” on SBS Dateline this Tuesday 19 March at 9.30pm.
