Brazil budget cuts put uncontacted Amazon tribe at risk, say activists
Brazil budget cuts put uncontacted Amazon tribe at risk, say activists
Tribe, who fired arrows at helicopter photographing them, also face threat from proposed change to land laws, says group
Adam Vaughan
@adamvaughan_uk
Friday 23 December 2016 09.48 EST
An uncontacted Amazon tribe could be at risk as Brazil makes austerity-driven budget cuts and proposals for constitutional change affecting land rights move through parliament, campaigners have said.
The tribe were photographed from a helicopter by Ricardo Stuckert this month near the border with Peru.
“These are dark times if you’re an indigenous person in Brazil,” said Fiona Watson, a field director at the London-based human rights organisation Survival International. “For the people in those photos the biggest threat is the loggers and drug traffickers on the Peru side. That’s the immediate, visceral threat. But the other threat is thousands of miles away in [Brazil’s] congress.”
The prospect of budget cuts to the governmental body tasked with protecting indigenous people, Funai, could be the “writing on the wall” for the tribe and the 102 other such uncontacted groups in Brazil, Watson said.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/23/brazil-budget-uncontacted-amazon-tribe-risk-indigenous
