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Police raid office of Brazil NGO linked to brigade that helped battle Amazon fires
Source: The Guardian
Police raid office of Brazil NGO linked to brigade that helped battle Amazon fires
Raid and arrests of four volunteer firefighters were a politically-motivated attack, indigenous associations and campaigners say
Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Tue 26 Nov 2019 22.35 GMT
Last modified on Tue 26 Nov 2019 22.57 GMT
The headquarters of an award-winning Brazilian NGO which works with remote communities in the Amazon has been raided by police, who also arrested four volunteer firefighters and accused them of starting wildfires to raise international funding.
At dawn on Tuesday, heavily armed police raided the offices of the Health and Happiness Project, (known by its Portuguese initials as PSA) in Alter do Chão in the Amazon state of Pará, seizing computers and documents.
PSA has close links to the Alter do Chão volunteer fire brigade, which in September helped battle huge widfires raging through protected areas in this popular tourist region. The four arrested firefighters were members of the volunteer brigade, and one of them works for PSA.
The arrests came three months after Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro sought to blame a surge in Amazon fires on NGOs, without providing any evidence.
“It is a Kafkaesque situation, we were all taken by surprise without understanding why,” said the Health and Happiness Project’s coordinator Caetano Scannavino. “If (the firefighters) were really criminals they must be Hollywood actors because they tricked us.”
-snip-
Raid and arrests of four volunteer firefighters were a politically-motivated attack, indigenous associations and campaigners say
Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Tue 26 Nov 2019 22.35 GMT
Last modified on Tue 26 Nov 2019 22.57 GMT
The headquarters of an award-winning Brazilian NGO which works with remote communities in the Amazon has been raided by police, who also arrested four volunteer firefighters and accused them of starting wildfires to raise international funding.
At dawn on Tuesday, heavily armed police raided the offices of the Health and Happiness Project, (known by its Portuguese initials as PSA) in Alter do Chão in the Amazon state of Pará, seizing computers and documents.
PSA has close links to the Alter do Chão volunteer fire brigade, which in September helped battle huge widfires raging through protected areas in this popular tourist region. The four arrested firefighters were members of the volunteer brigade, and one of them works for PSA.
The arrests came three months after Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro sought to blame a surge in Amazon fires on NGOs, without providing any evidence.
“It is a Kafkaesque situation, we were all taken by surprise without understanding why,” said the Health and Happiness Project’s coordinator Caetano Scannavino. “If (the firefighters) were really criminals they must be Hollywood actors because they tricked us.”
-snip-
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/26/brazil-police-raid-ngo-office-amazon-wildfires
