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Brazil's indigenous groups protest bill that would allow commercial mining on their land
By Marcia Reverdosa
Updated 1426 GMT (2226 HKT) April 20, 2021


Sao Paulo, Brazil (CNN)Indigenous groups gathered in Brazil's capital on Monday to demonstrate against a bill proposed by the federal government that would legalize mining on their lands.

Carrying banners reading "Invaders get out! Miners gets out, Agrobusiness get out! Bolsonaro get out!" about 100 indigenous people from six states across Brazil protested the legislation, which has been backed by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and lobbyists for the mining sector.

Lobbyists have been advocating for the revival of the bill -- known as Bill 191 -- since it was dismissed by Brazil's Congress last June. Last week, organizations of farmers and miners kicked off a coordinated pressure campaign, meeting with government representatives and urging the Congress to review and pass Bill 191, which would regulate mining including oil and gas projects, as well as hydroelectric dams, on indigenous territories for the first time.

Indigenous groups in Brasilia were also protesting proposed bills to give Congress the power to demarcate protected traditional lands (instead of indigenous affairs agency FUNAI) and demanding that that the federal government adhere to a Supreme Court decision last August to remove miners from indigenous lands. There are nearly 450 demarcated indigenous territories in Brazil.



https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/19/amer ... index.html

Outcry in Brazil over photos of people scavenging through animal carcasses
Pictures of destitute Brazilians searching scraps for food lay bare scale of economic and social crisis

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Sun 3 Oct 2021 10.48 BST

Heart-wrenching photographs of destitute Brazilians scavenging through a heap of animal carcasses for food have laid bare the hunger crisis blighting Latin America’s most populous nation, where millions have been plunged into deprivation by the coronavirus pandemic and soaring inflation.

The images, taken in Rio last week by the prize-winning photojournalist Domingos Peixoto, show the group rummaging for scraps in the back of a lorry that had been transporting the discarded offal and bones to a factory that makes pet food and soap.

“Some days … I want to cry,” the lorry’s driver, José Divino Santos, told the reporter Rafael Nascimento de Souza, who was covering the story with Peixoto for the Rio newspaper Extra.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... -carcasses

A Senate panel backed a report calling for charges against Mr Bolsonaro including crimes against humanity, after 600,000 deaths from coronavirus.

The findings will be sent to the chief prosecutor, a Bolsonaro appointee.

The president has maintained he is "guilty of absolutely nothing" but the crisis has dented his popularity.

Brazil's death toll is second only to that of the United States.

There is no guarantee this vote will lead to actual criminal charges, as the report's recommendations must now be assessed by Prosecutor-General Augusto Aras, who is expected to protect the president.

‘I’d eat an Indian’: rivals seize on unearthed Bolsonaro cannibalism boast
In a now viral video of a 2016 interview, the Brazilian president claims he would eat human flesh

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Sun 9 Oct 2022 15.58 BST

It was a shocking statement, even for a politician who has glorified torturers and called for rivals to be shot.

“I’d eat an Indian, no problem at all,” Jair Bolsonaro bragged to a foreign journalist in 2016, as he described a trip to an Indigenous community where he had purportedly been offered the chance to consume human flesh.

Indigenous leaders have rejected Bolsonaro’s boast as yet another lie from Brazil’s far-right president. The Yanomami people from the territory Bolsonaro claims to have visited say they have never engaged in such acts.

However, footage of Bolsonaro’s cannibalism comments – first broadcast on his official YouTube channel six years ago – has gone viral on social media and been seized on by Brazil’s opposition as further proof of the president’s depravity.

“Bolsonaro has revealed that he would eat human flesh,” a television advert produced by Bolsonaro’s leftist rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, declared on Friday after the remarks were unearthed.

Lula nearly beat Bolsonaro in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election last Sunday and hopes to finish the job when 156 million Brazilians vote in a second-round showdown between the two men on 30 October.

In its efforts to re-elect Lula, Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, his campaign has dug deep into Bolsonaro’s extensive back catalogue of callous and inflammatory pronouncements.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... lism-boast

Brazilians vote in a second-round showdown between the two men on 30 October.