Images of skeletal children in Africa or Asia are not lacking in the charitable campaigns of the powerful churches of the Brazilian Christian right. But the lurid photos of the indigenous Yanomami people, published on the front page of all Brazilian newspapers this week, will not be so easily exploited by the "Bible bench" in Congress, nor by former evangelical ministers in the government of Jair Bolsonaro.
Fully incorporated into government power and the National Indian Foundation (Funai) during the Bolsonaro presidency, there are many indications that they themselves are responsible for the death of hundreds of children and that thousands more are in a state of severe malnutrition. .
The new government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has not missed the opportunity to accuse Bolsonarismo for the death of 570 children in the enormous Yanomami territory of 10 million hectares in the Amazon state of Roraima.
The new Minister of Justice, Flavio Dino, denounced "strong indications of genocide" and cited former ministers and directors of organizations such as Funai as possible perpetrators. "More than a humanitarian crisis, what I saw in Roraima was a genocide, a premeditated crime against the Yanomami," Lula tweeted after a visit last Saturday to Boa Vista, the capital of the same state.
One of the Bolsonaristas who is in the spotlight of the investigation is the former minister of women, family and human rights, Damares Alves, an evangelical pastor, and a close ally of Bolsonaro and his neo-Baptist wife Michelle.
According to a complaint filed by representatives of the Workers' Party (PT) against Bolsonaro and Alves and General Augusto Heleno, the former minister had direct responsibility for the well-being of the almost 30,000 inhabitants of Yanomami land.
One in three of the 570 children killed were victims of pneumonia. Others of malaria and viral diseases. But what raised the lethality was malnutrition. “Any infection in a malnourished person is much more serious,” said pediatrician Renato Kouri, interviewed in Folha de Sao Paulo. In some communities of the Yanomami indigenous land, malnutrition touched 80% of the children.
Alves, a Bolsonaro idol who was elected senator on October 30, described the problem of hunger among indigenous peoples as a “historical dilemma (…) The root of the problem must be faced. I have always questioned the policy of isolation in the (indigenous) communities,” she said.
But the Yanomami's humanitarian crisis is not a problem of isolation, quite the contrary. Hunger and disease came with the invasion of the territory by tens of thousands of illegal gold miners armed, as in previous centuries, with rifles, germs and some Bible from the Assembly of God church.
But the deadliest weapon this time is the mercury used to separate the gold from the rock. After the contamination of the rivers, fishing, the main source of livelihood for the majority of peoples in the Amazon, is increasingly unviable.
It is not just a Yanomami problem. "The cause of hunger and malnutrition comes through the garimpo [illegal mining], they bring mercury, devastation, contamination," chief Humanar, from the Apurina community in Boca do Acre, said in an interview this week. the other end of the Amazon.
The Bolsonaro government is largely to blame. When the former president - whose father Percy was a garimpeiro in the grim Serra Pelada mine - visited Roraima during the electoral campaign, he stopped at an illegal mine not to denounce it but to praise the garimpeiros.
For his part, General Heleno, former Bolsonaro minister, took advantage of the last days of power in December to authorize mining activities in an area adjacent to the Yanomami reserve.
Meanwhile, the organizations for the protection of the environment, health and indigenous rights were politicized and lost budget. Funai "was filled with soldiers and missionaries," said a member of Lula's indigenous policy team.
Alves participated in the decision to hire an evangelical NGO, Misión Caiuá, which pocketed more than one hundred million euros, the largest part of the budget for indigenous health in Yanomami land, privatizing the work of the Secretariat of Indigenous Health (SESAI). ). The corporate motto of Misión Caiuá is: “To be at the service of the Indian for the Glory of God”.
With the Presbyterians of Misión Caiuá in command of Yanonami health policies, "everything was spent on helicopters and planes (...) there was nothing left for medicines." There was not even paracetamol to treat malaria.
Of course, the outsourcing of indigenous health to this evangelical NGO dates back many years before Bolsonaro. He signed juicy contracts with the government of Michel Temer with the intervention of the powerful senator from Roraima Romero Juca, president of Funai between 1986 and 1988, when he allowed the entry of thousands of gold prospectors into the Yanomami reserve, a memory that no atrocity is new in the Brazilian Amazon.
Lula's new government has put the indigenous Joenia Wapichawa from Roraima at the head of Funai and has promised to put an end to illegal mining in the Amazon. “Lula is going to send a working group that will design an operation to force the withdrawal of the garimpeiros; with the federal government, Ibama (institute for media protection) and Funai and other government agencies,” said Marcio Meira, former president of Funai in a telephone interview.
Although no one wants to give details so as not to lose the surprise factor, everything indicates that in the coming weeks there will be a major police operation against the miners that will include the arrest of gold diggers and the destruction of machinery.
While acting against the garimpeiros, it is intended to demand responsibilities at all levels of the administration. 43 directors of Funai, many of them in the military, have been dismissed.
Alves – who adopted an indigenous girl in the state of Mato Grosso more than 20 years ago – is the target of another police investigation related to the NGO Atina Voice for Life, which the senator created with a group of US neo-Pentecostals. According to the indictment, he is responsible for the kidnapping of several indigenous children in Mato Grosso.
Few forget that Alves promoted the decision to appoint former missionary Ricardo Lopes Dias, from the American NGO Nuevas Tribes, as head of the isolated towns in Funai.
But perhaps the most striking example that Alves was the fox in charge of the chicken coop in his responsibilities with indigenous children was the declaration in the middle of the electoral campaign that dozens of children on the Island of Marajó, in Roraima, were victims of a network of pedophiles linked to the PT. “It was a conspiracy theory, fake news that served as a smokescreen to hide the real crimes against indigenous children,” Meira said. When a twelve-year-old Yanomami girl died after being raped by garimpeiros, Alves limited himself to saying: "It happens every day."
