1. Support strongly the cry of the World Assembly for the Amazon ( https://bit.ly/AssembleiaMundialAmazonia ) beginning on July 18 and 19, 2020.
It is in the Brazilian Amazon that the killing of indigenous people who protect forest life and life in the forest is being perpetrated with impunity. And with it we are also witnessing a “genocide” of the nature – if it is possible to use that word in a broader sense – with devastating deforestation and predatory mining.
This barbaric action of Bolsonaro takes advantage of the Covid 19’s drama, as clearly stated, in a government meeting made public, its Minister of the Environment: everyone is concerned about the pandemic; it is a good moment to change rules and simplify standards.
The removal of this Minister is being demanded in Brazil and in the world.
The World Assembly for the Amazon is being promoted by COICA: Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Cuenca, by REPAM: Ecclesial Network of the Pan Amazonia; by FOSPA: Pan Amazonian Social Forum; and by COIAB: Brazilian Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin.
And a first concrete proposal for action will already be discussed on July 19: a World Campaign to boycott products, companies, inversions, government policies, trade agreements and extractivisms that destroy the Amazon.
2. Multiply the denunciations, at the International Criminal Court, of crimes against Humanity committed by Bolsonaro, demonstrating the intentionality of his acts. In all countries there are a large number of jurists extremely qualified to prepare such denunciations, in accordance with the principles of action of this Court.
At the same time, this same legal effort could be made so that justice in each country prevents the entry caused by Covid 19.
We are intensely engaged in resisting to the ongoing destruction of institutions, laws, norms, services and rights hard won after the fall of the military regime implemented in the 1960s or exit of the Brazilian President, for the crimes still unpunished that he has been committing, as well as each of his ministers, for complicity in his criminal action.
3. According to an image created by the director of one of the Institutes responsible in São Paulo for testing vaccines against covid 19, the number of daily deaths in the richest state of the country is the same caused by one explosion per day of a Boeing 747, which can be repeated until the end of the year. In Brazil as a whole there is now one death per minute. In this macabre statistic, the country will probably soon move ahead of every other countries
My third suggestion I make to my friends of other countries is of another type: help us not to not accept, as if it were “normal”, the number of deaths.
We are intensely engaged in resistance to the ongoing destruction of institutions, laws, norms, services and rights hard won after the fall of the military regime implemented in the 1960s. We consequently run the risk of getting used to the news, which comes to us every day, of the deaths of the previous day. It was the “naturalization” that we made of black slavery for centuries that today makes us “adapted” to the racism and to the scandalous social inequality that characterizes our country, victimizing mostly the descendants of these slaves.
We call for worldwide indignation so that don’t get cold, in our hearts and minds, our indignation at every new preventable death that occurs. We cannot allow spurious summit agreements to keep those responsible for the ongoing genocide in power, indefinitely unpunished.
Foto: Paulo Desana/Dabakuri/Amazônia Real/09/05/2020