- The Brazilian military has been involved in a series of controversial episodes that have undermined emergency efforts to tackle the humanitarian crisis in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory.
- Reports show it failed (or sabotaged) airspace control and food deliveries to the Indigenous people, who suffer from malnutrition as a result of mercury contamination from illegal mining.
- President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has spent millions trying to evict the illegal miners and provide care to the Yanomami, but some 7,000 miners remain in the territory, while malnutrition, malaria and other diseases continue to afflict the Yanomami.
- Experts blame the military’s inaction of action against the illegal miners on a colonial ideology that was prevalent under Brazil’s former military dictatorship, and which was revived under the administration of Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
In 1964, the Brazilian military launched a coup d’état, overthrowing the democratically elected government and seizing control of the country. What followed was a 21-year dictatorship, authoritarian rule, censorship, and repression. The generals who took power were driven by their version of McCarthyism, fighting all aspects of civilian life that they accused of being communist or socialist.
The generals were backed by the elite, which had an interest in exploiting Brazil’s vast natural resources. Central to this vision was the Amazon Rainforest. They viewed it as a largely untamed and unpopulated wilderness. To the military regime, the Amazon was not a rich ecosystem teeming with life, nor was it the ancestral home of numerous Indigenous communities who had cared for it and made it home for millennia. Instead, it was a frontier to be conquered, a resource to be exploited in the name of progress and national security. Doing so also served their fearmongering narrative that a foreign enemy could invade Brazil through the jungle.
That ideology was (and still is) explicitly anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental, seeing the forest and its inhabitants as obstacles to be removed in the name of so-called development.
The dictatorship launched a series of aggressive policies aimed at integrating the Amazon into the economy. Slogans like “Integrar para não entregar” (“Integrate to avoid surrender”) reflected the regime’s belief that failing to develop the Amazon would leave it vulnerable to foreign exploitation.
Purge them all, Lula!
