The Aborigines of the Amazon have seen their homelands ravaged by illegal deforestation, industrial farming, mining, oil exploration and unlawful occupation of their ancestral territories.
The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified their plight, just as the forest fires are raging once more.
The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, is a vital resource in the race to curb climate change — it spans more than 7.4 million square kilometers. It covers 40 percent of the surface area of South America, stretching across nine countries and territories: Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.
Illustration: June Hsu
About 3 million Aborigines — members of 400 communities — live there, the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization said. About 60 of those communities live in total isolation.
The following is a look at how the novel coronavirus spread through the Amazon jungle and how those communities are handling the crisis.
VULNERABLE
In mid-March, panic struck Carauari, in western Brazil. Carauari is home to one of the most isolated communities in the world and is only accessible by a week-long boat ride from Manaus, the nearest major city.
At first, the virus was seen as a threat that was well removed from the multi-colored houses on stilts that overlook the Jurua River, a tributary of the Amazon, but the announcement of the first case in Manaus, the regional capital of Amazonas State, quickly sowed panic in the community.
No one in Carauari had forgotten how diseases brought by European colonizers ripped through the Aboriginal populations of the Americas, nearly eliminating them altogether due to their lack of immunity.
“We’re praying to God not to bring this epidemic here. We’re doing everything we can — washing our hands often, like they tell us on TV,” said Jose Barbosa das Gracas, 52.
The first confirmed case among Brazil’s Aboriginal population was confirmed in early April: a 20-year-old healthcare worker from the Kokama community who lived near the Colombian border.
She had worked with a doctor who also tested positive for COVID-19.
Sensing the mounting threat, community leaders and celebrities sounded the alarm, warning that, without help, Aboriginal communities in the Amazon could face annihilation.
“There are no doctors in our communities. There is no protective gear to aid prevention,” Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, the elected leader of the collective of Amazon Aboriginal organizations, said in late April.
“Falling ill here is always scary, but now we’re more afraid than ever,” said Yohana Pantevis, 34, who lives in Leticia in Colombia’s Amazonas State.
Brazilian-born photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado, 76, known for his work on the Amazon, said that there is a “huge risk of a real catastrophe.”
“If the virus gets into the forest, we don’t have a way to get help to them. The distances are so huge. The indigenous people will be abandoned,” Salgado said.
“I call that genocide — the elimination of an ethnic group and its culture,” he said, accusing the government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro of policies against the Aborigines.
In early June, iconic Aboriginal leader Raoni Metuktire accused Bolsonaro of wanting “to take advantage of this disease.”
“He’s saying: ‘Indians have to die — we have to finish them off,’” he said in an interview.
RUNNING SCARED
In mid-June, the little Aboriginal village of Cruzeirinho in Brazil left its wooden huts practically deserted as most inhabitants — fearing COVID-19 infection — fled into the jungle.
They “preferred to take everything they had with them into the forest and avoid contact with others,” said resident Bene Mayuruna, who was among the few who stayed.
The Brazilian Army deployed a team of healthcare workers to Cruzeirinho to provide treatment for the remaining members of the local community.
A week’s journey by boat from Cruzeirinho, the inhabitants of the Umariacu community adopted a different strategy: They blocked all outsiders from their villages.
A hand-painted sign next to a roadblock at the entrance to their territory read: “Attention: indigenous land. Closed for 15 days.”
The area covers 5,000 hectares in northern Brazil, near the Peruvian and Colombian borders, and is home to about 7,000 people.
To avoid any dependence on the often maxed-out Brazilian public health system, Aboriginal communities often turn to their ancestral traditions.
In mid-May, members of the Satere Mawe community, wearing colorful feather and leaf headdresses, scoured the river in search of medicinal plants.
“We’ve been treating our symptoms with our own traditional remedies, the way our ancestors taught us,” said community leader Andre Satere Mawe, who lives in a rural area on the outskirts of Manaus.
The Satere Mawe remedies include teas made from the bark of the carapanauba tree, which has anti-inflammatory properties, or the saracuramira tree, an anti-malarial.
In Manaus, Maria Nunes Sinimbu saw five members of her family die of COVID-19 in less than a month, including three of her 12 children.
VIRUS TAKES HOLD
“My daughter didn’t believe this illness was so serious. She kept working and traveling normally, without taking any precautions,” the retired school teacher, 76, said.
The Pan-Amazonian Church Network this month said that more than 27,500 Aborigines belonging to 190 communities have been infected on the continent, with more than 1,100 deaths.
Among the victims have been important community leaders, such as Paulinho Paiakan and Aritana Yawalapiti in Brazil and Peru’s Santiago Manuin.
For many Aborigines living deep in the rainforest, the health crisis has left them with a cruel choice: stay in their villages with limited medical resources or head into bigger towns where they might not be able to practice ancestral funeral rites.
Brazilian Lucita Sanoma lost her two-month-old baby on May 25. The boy was buried, without her knowledge, 300km from her home village after dying in a hospital in Boa Vista.
The burial followed government health guidelines, but ran counter to the traditions of her Yanomami community, which dictates that the deceased must be left in the open air in the forest before their bones are collected and cremated.
The ashes are kept in an urn for a long time before eventually being buried in an additional ceremony.
In Colombia, Ticuna chief Remberto Cahuamari spoke in early June of his concern that the loss of the older generation to COVID-19 would spell the end of ancestral wisdom being passed down.
“We’d be left with our young, who in the future won’t know anything about our cultures and our customs. That’s what scares us,” he said.
Added to that is the threat of isolation as riverside villages become cut off when authorities suspend boat traffic in a bid to curb the virus’ spread.
For the Yanomami community, illegal gold miners are the main problem in their territory, a vast swathe on Brazil’s border with Venezuela that is home to about 27,000 people.
“Without that, we would be fine,” said community leader Mauricio Yekuana, whose white mask contrasts with his black face paint.
According to non-governmental organizations, about 20,000 gold miners make regular incursions into Aboriginal land, encouraged by Bolsonaro, who wants to “integrate” those areas with “modernity.”
However, Greenpeace Brazil has said that gold miners are “potential transmitters” of COVID-19.
A study conducted by Minas Gerais University showed that as many as 40 percent of Yanomami living close to mining areas risked becoming infected with the virus if nothing is done.
While the world’s attention is laser-focused on the coronavirus, forest fires continue to ravage the Amazon, after last year was already a challenge.
Land grabbers in Brazil want to accelerate deforestation to make way for soybean plantations or pasture land for cattle — two key exports. The resumption of fires is no accident.
DEFORESTATION
“What I saw in the places I went to was that the trees had already been cut down — they just hadn’t yet been burned,” Erika Berenguer, a researcher at Oxford and Lancaster universities, said in June.
She feared that “breathing problems caused by the fires” could make things worse for those who contract COVID-19.
Authorities have a limited ability to prevent deforestation — and sometimes are found to be complicit in the operations.
The latest figures make for some grim reading: Amazonian deforestation in the first half of this year was 25 percent higher than the same period last year, which was already a record, the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research said.
Experts fear that this month will be particularly devastating.
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.” Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101. The death of
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
RSS