As the insurrectionist furor around the 2022 Brazilian presidential election dies down, the country is taking stock of Jair Bolsonaro’s three-year tenure. The populist’s outgoing administration has systematically eroded public institutions throughout the country, decimating indigenous and environmental health, and overseeing one of the worst national pandemic responses of any South American country. In many ways, these three issues are symptomatic of one general crisis: the government left its people to fend for themselves.
Since taking office in 2019, the Bolsonaro administration has been noted for its tendency towards deregulation. While conservative governments often defund public services in favor of the private sector, Brazil’s trend was particularly targeted. Bolsonaro limited the authority of the National Indian Foundation and downsized the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, paving the way for nominally illegal logging and mining operations to forcefully displace indigenous villages. Operating with impunity, or even with the tacit endorsement of the federal government, these industries often employed armed militias to evict native people from protected territories. Under pressure from the UN and foreign governments to conserve the rainforest, an invaluable receptacle for greenhouse gas emissions, the Brazilian government accused the international community of intervening in domestic politics. In some circles, the direct human cost on indigenous populations has been declared a genocide. Far beyond Brazil’s own borders, the eventual effects that deforestation in the Amazon would have on global warming are harder to quantify.
Brazil suffered heavily during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 35 million cases and almost 700 thousand confirmed casualties to date. Actual figures on both counts are likely to be far higher, in part because the country’s decentralized healthcare system often doesn’t penetrate into rural areas, leading to under-reporting and under-funding for vulnerable communities. Even prior to the first reported case on February 26, 2020, the then-new government had lowered the budgets of both the national health service (Unified Health System) and the task force for indigenous health (the National Policy for Attention to the Health of Indigenous Peoples). Left scrambling for both funding and manpower, health officials were left ill-equipped to address the pandemic even in well-populated areas, let alone indigenous populations with limited access to medical infrastructure.
The results for Brazil’s native population were devastating. At the height of the pandemic, in July 2020, indigenous people faced a mortality rate 6.5 times higher than that of the general population. As the pandemic has slowly receded, their already small population has been decimated, and any meager benefits of economic recovery have not been evenly distributed. While the replacement of Bolsonaro with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) may grant the beleaguered nation some reprieve, rebuilding social infrastructure that has been allowed to rot throughout a global pandemic will take years. That represents time that Brazil’s native communities do not have. The loss of their territory to ranchers and miners, their friends and families to disease, and their livelihoods to government malfeasance, are all damages that they could have ill-afforded even without COVID.
When Lula takes office on the New Year, one of his first priorities should be to strengthen task forces devoted to ensuring the complete recovery of native populations. Whether that recovery means reparations, economic aid, the restoration of their lands, or the provision of subsidized healthcare, government action must fix that which was wrought by government inaction.
TAKE ACTION: Several organizations work to protect both contacted and uncontacted indigenous tribes in the Amazon basin. Consider donating to one, advocating, or volunteering with one:
Survival International:
Amazon Watch:
CESTA-USP Amerindian Studies Center: