Painted and feathered Indians waving machetes and clubs slashed an official of Brazil’s national electric company on Tuesday during a protest over a proposed hydroelectric dam.
Mobs of Indians from different tribes surrounded Eletrobras engineer Paulo Fernando Rezende minutes after he gave a presentation to a gathering debating the impact of the Belo Monte dam on traditional communities living near this small, remote city in the Amazon region.
Rezende emerged shirtless, with a deep, bloody gash on his shoulder, but said “I’m OK, I’m OK,” as colleagues rushed him to a car.
PHOTO: AP
It was not immediately clear whether Rezende was intentionally slashed or received the cut inadvertently when he was surrounded and pushed to the floor. Police said they were still investigating and no one was in custody.
Tensions were running high at the meeting, where about 1,000 Amazon Indians met activists to protest the proposed dam on the Xingu River.
Environmentalists warn it could destroy the traditional fishing grounds of Indians living nearby and displace as many as 15,000 people.
“He’s lucky he’s still alive,” said Partyk Kayapo, whose uses his tribe’s name as his last. “They want to make a dam and now they know they shouldn’t,” he said.
Following the attack, Kayapo and dozens more members of his tribe danced in celebration with their machetes raised in the air, their faces painted red and wearing little more than shorts and shell necklaces.
The Brazilian government said the proposed US$6.7 billion hydroelectric dam on the Xingu River, which flows into the Amazon, would supply Brazil with an estimated 11,000 megawatts of power and is essential to meet growing energy demand.
Rezende, who was the top government official at the conference, said the dam’s impact would not be as bad as some environmentalists were making it out to be and that it was selected from a number of Xingu dam proposals as being the option that would least affect Indians.
Rezende was booed several times during his presentation, only to be followed by Roquivam Alves da Silva of the Movement of Dam Affected People, who roused the crowd by declaring: “We’ll go to war to defend the Xingu if we have to.”
Da Silva denied that he had incited the attack.
“It’s true it happened right after I spoke, but I don’t think I caused it,” he said. “Tensions were already simmering.”
Wilmar Soares, who heads Altamira’s association of business owners, said residents were demanding increased security at the weeklong protest, scheduled to end tomorrow.
“No one has the right to cut anyone. It was a surprise, but it was preventable,” he said.
Rezende was given stitches at a hospital and released. He then made a statement to authorities and left without speaking to reporters.
The attack recalls a similar meeting in 1989 when Indians held a machete to the face of another Eletrobras engineer during protests against a series of proposed hydroelectric dams on the Xingu river.
Following that incident, the World Bank canceled loans to Brazil for the dam.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the