Protect local communities and indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Prevent genocide in Brazil

To the International Community

We are deeply concerned about the dramatic situation in which several Amazonian communities find themselves, particularly Indigenous Peoples.

We have reason to believe that the current situation is acquiring the contours of a genocide, whose pattern is discernible in the evictions following the dwindling numbers of inhabitants of these lands.

The spread of COVID-19 has resulted in a calamitous number of deaths among indigenous communities, particularly among the elders: the masters, teachers and leaders of these communities. With them, a crucial source of knowledge, essential to the very survival of humankind, is fast disappearing.

This kind of knowledge derives from direct experience accumulated over the course of centuries through careful observation and understanding of thousands of nuances inherent in the relationship between humankind and nature — and inherited across the generations. It is, therefore, a heritage that no scientific method can ever recover. The notion of biocultural diversity highlights the connection between the protection of biodiversity and traditional knowledge.

The extent of traditional knowledge and biocultural diversity currently being lost in the Amazon is unquantifiable, and a loss from which humanity may not be able to recover.
On the one hand, this extreme situation confirms the notorious recklessness of the Bolsonaro regime in relation to all Brazilians independently of their race, class and other criteria, but disproportionately affecting lower income groups and racial minorities. On the other hand, we should recall that past colonial genocides occurred in the absence of a coordinating effort on the part of a central state. The intention to appropriate indigenous lands by exterminating its inhabitants was there, but without the rule of law.

Old protagonists now reappear along new ones: together with the government’s negligence and incompetence, missionaries, health workers, cattle ranchers and garimpeiros are all contributing to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic —also in the apparent absence of any sort of central coordination.

Furthermore, a recent UN Report as well as other research has shown how the increasing encroachment of human beings into natural habitats is one of the causes of the spill-over process that has engendered the COVID-19 pandemic in the first place.

We urgently need to understand how much of this is intentional or can be identified as such.

But some multinational corporations and their desire to appropriate indigenous territory are the major culprits. Intensive agriculture practices by soya and big meat producers is a consolidated reality: McDonald’s, KFC and several others are profiteering and benefiting from the chaos through illegal land clearances, land grabbing practices that have expanded over the past 20 years —yet Burger King’s consumers are not informed about the origins of the meat they are eating.

At a time of a global pandemic, with media attention clearly deflected elsewhere, these crimes appear to be carried out with unprecedented impunity and murderous intent.

Such radical devastation was already anticipated by the fires that destroyed the Amazon in 2019. Deforestation was an announcement of the current genocidal trend. Biopolitics thus appears in Brazil in its most extreme manifestation.

We, the undersigned, call all members of civil society, NGOs and state institutions to collaborate in order to halt the spread of coronavirus among Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon.

We also call for the start of an investigation to fully understand the gravity and the origins of the crimes outlined above and whether they can be considered to be intentional and deliberate


Prof. Daniele Conversi, Ikerbasque Foundation for Science, Bilbao (ISA RC56- Historical Sociology Board member).

Prof. A. Dirk Moses, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Editor, Journal of Genocide Studies)

Prof. Damien Short, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Prof. Helma Lutz, Sociologist, Goethe University Frankfurt (President of RC05, ISA - International Sociological Association).

Prof. Azril Bacal Roij, CIPAE-Puebla, México and Swedish Participatory Action-Research Association (SPARC), Mällardalen University

Danilo Ignacio de Urzedo, The University of Sydney

Prof. Mark Levene, Dept of History, University of Southampton (Emeritus Fellow)

Professor Karim Murji, University of West London, UK.

Prof. Natividad Gutierrez Chong, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

Prof. Maria de Lourdes Beldi de Alcantara, Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Sao Paulo-FMUSP