Indigenous
Brazilians are demanding a missionary group based in Florida with deep ties to
far-right President Jair Bolsonaro stay off their lands.
The
novel coronavirus outbreak has intensified a decades-long battle between
indigenous tribes and evangelical Christian missionaries in the most remote
regions of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, as tribes warning of the virus’s
potential to cause their “genocide” have pushed to ban controversial religious
groups from entering their lands.
On
Thursday, a Brazilian judge granted the tribes’ wishes, barring missionaries
from entering the Javari Valley, a remote region along Brazil’s border with
Peru that is home to numerous indigenous tribes and at least 16 groups of isolated
peoples ― those who have no known contact with outside communities.
The
ruling specifically named three missionaries, as well as New Tribes Mission of
Brazil, a 67-year-old fundamentalist Christian organization that is affiliated
with a larger evangelical missionary group in the United States. New Tribes
also has deep ties to the right-wing government of President Jair Bolsonaro,
who in February tapped Ricardo Lopes Dias, a former New Tribes missionary, to
head the agency that is supposed to protect Brazil’s isolated peoples.
Read
full story here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coronavirus-indigenous-amazon-missionaries-bolsonaro_n_5e9cf173c5b635d25d6ec824?ncid=newsltushpmgtrackhate
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