question: Why does the President of Brazil want to wipe out the Indigenous population living in the Amazon rainforest?
comment: Jair Bolsonaro (the president of Brazil) strongly believes that Brazil should exploit its natural resources for maximum gain. Land in the Amazon rainforest is mineral-rich and can also be easily converted to plantations and ranches. However, this land is owned by indigenous Amazonian tribes who are protected under the constitution. The only way for him to get his way is to strip these groups of these protections. Because indigenous people are deeply connected to their land, losing these protections will effectively wipe them out as a culture.
passages: Section::::Indigenous violence.
  
  As deforestation companies move in to take advantage of the large area of space the Amazon offers, indigenous tribes that live in the forest are subject to violence. To protect their land, many indigenous people attack the new arrivals, who fight back, leading to violence and deaths.
   Aside from the threat to the climate, deforestation would directly impact Brazil’s indigenous communities. Since becoming President, Bolsonaro has worked to strip the indigenous agency FUNAI of its responsibility to identify and demarcate indigenous land. He has also defunded agencies responsible for law enforcement in the Amazon. Indigenous communities are facing direct threats. In 2019 an estimated 20,000 goldminers illegally invaded Yanomami Indigenous Territory, one of Brazil’s largest indigenous territories. Yanomami campaigners have accused the president of encouraging the invasion by stating that indigenous people had too much land and that large-scale mining and extensive monoculture should be allowed on indigenous territory.
   Since the 1980s there has been a boom in the exploitation of the Amazon Rainforest for mining, logging and cattle ranching, posing a severe threat to the region's indigenous population. Settlers illegally encroaching on indigenous land continue to destroy the environment necessary for indigenous peoples' traditional ways of life, provoke violent confrontations and spread disease. Peoples such as the Akuntsu and Kanoê have been brought to the brink of extinction within the last three decades. On 13 November 2012, the national indigenous peoples association from Brazil APIB submitted to the United Nation a human rights document with complaints about new proposed laws in Brazil that would further undermine their rights if approved.
   Section::::International reaction.
   On March 3, 2018, Simão Jatene, the governor of Pará, signed a document giving land titles for more than 220,000 hectares of Amazon forest to an isolated community populated by descendants of enslaved people who escaped centuries ago. However, with a new administration in office, it is likely that there will be changes to current policy regarding quilombolas. Brazil’s president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, has said: "They [quilombolas] don’t do anything! I don’t think they even serve for procreation anymore." In 2017, during a speech at the Hebraica club, Bolsonaro stated: "If I [become president], there won’t be any money for NGOs … You will not have a centimeter demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas."
   In 2005, two police officers working undercover on an investigation of cargo truck robberies near an MST homestead in Pernambuco were attacked by criminals. One was shot dead and the other tortured, amid suspicions of MST involvement.
   For many years, there has been a battle to conquer the territories that indigenous people live on in the Amazon, primarily from the Brazilian government. The demand for this land has originated partly from a desire to improve Brazil's economic status. Many people, including ranchers and land swindlers from the southeast, have wanted to claim the land for their own financial gain. As of the beginning of 2019, the new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has made an executive order that permits the agriculture ministry to regulate the land that tribal members inhabit in the Amazon. This act is essentially declaring war on the indigenous people in the fight for their territory.
   Opponents of indigenous territories also claim that they undermine national sovereignty. The promotion of indigenous rights by NGOs is seen as reflecting an "internationalisation of the Amazon" which is contrary to Brazil's economic interests. Elements in the military have also expressed concern that because many TIs occupy border regions they pose a threat to national security – although both the army and police are allowed full access.
   Regarding the Brazilian province of Amazonas, Herndon and Gibbon recorded that the Brazilian government continued to fear the power of the "tapuios" to revolt against "the foreigners," given their greater numbers as well as "the terrible revolution of the "Cabanos" (serfs, people who lived in cabins) in the years from 1836 to 1840, when many Portuguese were killed and expelled." As such, the President and government asserted "that laws must be made for the control and government of the sixty-thousand "tapuios", who so far outnumbered the property-holders, and who are always open to the influence of the designing, the ambitious, and the wicked." The population of the province was recorded at "thirty thousand inhabitants – whites and civilized Indians," yet Herndon and Gibbon admitted that "no estimate can be made of the number of "'Gentios",' or savages." The American lieutenants expressed their support for further colonizing the region, even advocating for United States slaveholders to do so:I presume that the Brazilian government would impose no obstacles to the settlement of this country by any of the citizens of the United States who would choose to go there and carry their slaves; and I know that the thinking people on the Amazon would be glad to see them. The President, who is laboring for the good of the province, and sending for the chiefs of the Indian tribes for the purpose of engaging them in settlement and systematic labor, said to me, at parting 'How much I wish you could bring me a thousand of your active, industrious, and intelligent population, to set and example of labor to these people;' and others told me that they had no doubt that Brazil would give titles to vacant lands to as many as came.
   Several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been formed due to the ongoing persecution of the indigenous peoples in Brazil, and international pressure has been brought to bear on the state after the release of the Figueiredo Report which documented massive human rights violations.
  
  The abuses have been described as genocide, ethnocide and cultural genocide.
  
  Section::::Affected tribes.
   Palin continues his first visit to Brazil by travelling by river and plane from the northern border with Venezuela to the capital of Brasília. Along the way he visits the indigenous tribe Yanomami, accessible only by air, learning about the threat to their hunter-gatherer way of life. He moves on to the city of Manaus, population two million, watching a rehearsal by the Amazon Philharmonic Orchestra in the Manaus Opera House and then taking two ferries on the fourteen-hour journey to the remains of Henry Ford's unsuccessful attempt to build a vast rubber plantation at Fordlândia in the middle of the rainforest. In Belém music producer Priscilla explains why Amazonian women are such a powerful force in the country.
   The forest is one big thing; it has people, animals, and plants. There is no point saving the animals if the forest is burned down; there is no point saving the forest if the people and animals who live in it are killed or driven away. The groups trying to save the races of animals cannot win if the people trying to save the forest lose; the people trying to save the Indians cannot win if either of the others lose; the Indians cannot win without the support of these groups; but the groups cannot win wither without the support of the Indians, who know the forest and the animals and can tell what is happening to them. No one of us is strong enough to win alone; together, we can be strong enough to win.
   Dinaman Tuxá, an indigenous leader, has said that "Accords like this only raise the level of violence against indigenous people. We need to tell the EU that signing this free-trade agreement could lead to genocide in Brazil. If they sign this agreement, blood will be spilled.”
   As of January 2019, the president of Brazil – Jair Bolsonaro – has made an executive order that allows the agriculture ministry to oversee some of the land in the Amazon. Cattle ranchers and mining companies favor the president’s decision. The Brazilian economic policy is influencing the government to condone development on tribal territory in order to accumulate exports and increase economic growth. That has been criticized because taking away tribal land will endanger the indigenous people that live there now. The deforestation of the Amazon leads the acceleration of climate change.
  
  Section::::Causes of deforestation.
   BULLET::::- 1996: Renewed military presence seen in the Amazon region of Brazil, as a result of radar project and militarization of the borders against drug traffic (at US behest?). Secret project SIVAM is revealed.
  
  BULLET::::- 1996: On April 17, 1996, 19 landless farmers of the MST movement ("Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra") are shot by police at the "S" curve of highway PA-150 at Eldorado de Carajás, in Pará state. These people were part of a demonstration calling for the federal disappropriation of an unproductive ranch where the MST had mounted a camp called "Macaxeira" with almost 3000 families.
   In January 2019, the newly elected president Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro has stripped the indigenous affairs agency FUNAI of the responsibility to identify and demarcate indigenous lands. He argued that those territories have very tiny isolated populations and proposed to integrate them into the larger Brazilian society. According to the Survival International, "Taking responsibility for indigenous land demarcation away from FUNAI, the Indian affairs department, and giving it to the Agriculture Ministry is virtually a declaration of open warfare against Brazil’s tribal peoples."
  
  Section::::Campaigns.
   Green hunting in Paraguay funds jaguar relocation projects.
  
  Section::::Controversies.
   In January 2019, the newly elected Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro has stripped the indigenous affairs agency FUNAI of the responsibility to identify and demarcate indigenous lands. He argued that those territories have very tiny isolated populations and proposed to integrate them into the larger Brazilian society. Critics feared that such integration would lead the Brazilian natives to suffer cultural assimilation.
  
  Section::::Indigenous Rights Movements.
  
  Section::::Indigenous Rights Movements.:Urban Rights Movement.
   Section::::Agrarian violence and oppression.
  
  The agrarian struggle in Brazil is manifold, touching on the topics of deforestation, dam building, eviction, squatting, and wildlife smuggling. The enormous Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil involves large and migrating landless populations. Landowners resort policemen to drive and intimidate landless populations from their properties.
   In the 1940s Brazil began a program of national development in the Amazon Basin. President Getúlio Vargas declared emphatically that:
   Section::::Effects.:Indigenous people.
  
  Forest removal affects the social and economic lives of the indigenous people who live in the forests and whose families have lived there in relative isolation for many centuries. These indigenous peoples, like the Kayapo, have an intimate understanding of the ecology of the Amazon. The subsequent loss of these people may also prove to be a loss of knowledge. The rainforest is their home, and a fundamental source of food, shelter, fuel, nourishment cultural heritage and recreation.
  
  Section::::Effects.:Land degradation.
   Early in April 2016 the Munduruku composed a letter to the government at their 26th Assembly in which they expressed concern over the energy policies of presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff and said they would not accept construction of five hydroelectric plants of the Tapajós and Jamanxin Rivers.
  
  They pointed to the example of the inhabitants of the Tocantins River, who were still waiting for compensation more than 30 years after being expelled so the Tucuruí Dam could be built.
  
  Section::::Recognition process.:Publication.
   The process that has been described as the genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil began with the Portuguese colonization of the Americas, when Pedro Álvares Cabral made landfall in what is now the country of Brazil in 1500. This started the process that led to the depopulation of the indigenous peoples in Brazil, because of disease and violent treatment by European settlers, and their gradual replacement with colonists from Europe and Africa. This process has been described as a genocide, and continues into the modern era with the ongoing destruction of indigenous peoples of the Amazonian region.
   Details of the massacre were included in the landmark Figueiredo Report of 1967, which led to the replacement of the SPI with the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI).
  
  The indigenous rights campaign group Survival International was founded in response to the report, two years after its original release by public prosecutor Jader de Figueiredo Correia. More recently, Survival International used this massacre as an example of why disconnected tribes avoid contact with the outside world, in an article titled 'Why do they hide?'
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- List of massacres in Brazil
  
  BULLET::::- Genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil
   Section::::Indigenous assimilation.:Brazil.
  
  In January 2019, newly elected Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro has stripped the indigenous affairs agency FUNAI of the responsibility to identify and demarcate indigenous lands. He argued that those territories have very tiny isolated populations and proposed to integrate them into the larger Brazilian society. According to the Survival International, "Taking responsibility for indigenous land demarcation away from FUNAI, the Indian affairs department, and giving it to the Agriculture Ministry is virtually a declaration of open warfare against Brazil’s tribal peoples."
  
  Section::::Immigrant assimilation.
  
raw_presuppositions: The president of Brazil wants to wipe out the Indigenous population living in the Amazon. The president of Brazil wants to kill indigenous people.
raw_corrections: The president of Brazil does not want to wipe out the Indigenous population living in the Amazon, however the President of Brazil does want land belonging to the Indigenous people. The president of Brazil wants the indigenous peoples' land.