Brazil’s genocidal maniac President, Jair Bolsonaro, has escaped charges of genocide against his people, the indigenous of the Amazon rainforest. Brazil’s senate decided not to charge him for genocide for his deliberate efforts to infect as many tribes as possible since the beginning of the Covid pandemic and illegal resource extraction from their land that has resulted in many deaths. The final senates report recommends crimes against humanity in its stead.
In an interview with NPR’s Sara McMannon, Philip Reeves of Byline notes the behavior of Bolsonaro that led to the charges.
Well, they concern quite a few aspects of his behavior and that of his government - his frequent refusal to wear masks, the way he initially dismissed the virus as in significant, delays last year acquiring vaccines, his defiance of science and continued promotion of ineffective treatments, including hydroxychloroquine. And the inquiry concluded that if you piece everything together, this amounts to a deliberate attempt to seek herd immunity in Brazil and that this then led to the needless loss of many, many lives. So they're recommending that Bolsonaro be indicted on counts that include inciting a pandemic with the loss of life, encouraging people to commit crimes, misusing funds, charlatanism and crimes against humanity, which is a kind of catchall that also encompasses negligent treatment of Indigenous people.
The report and charges have been formally sent to the prosecutor general, who gets to decide whether to pursue the demands on his multiple crimes. Bolsonaro appointed the prosecutor, so this is like Bill Barr receiving the Mueller report for comparison's sake. Nothing will come of it.
The charges of crimes against humanity specifically have been referred to the International Criminal Court. That court moves very slowly, so Bolsonaro escapes justice for now.
McMannon asks Reeves if this was all a waste of time. Reeves replies:
No, I don't think it means that. Because this inquiry - you know, it lasted six months. The panel comprised 11 senators, seven of them Bolsonaro opponents. And day after day, Brazilians watched live on TV as they laid out the whole tragic story of Brazil's pandemic and the government's response to it. The public heard about the catastrophe in the city of Manaus, where the health system totally collapsed and oxygen ran out, so people suffocated in their beds. They heard about alleged attempts by government middlemen to skim off money from vaccine purchases in the middle of the pandemic. And of course, they had an awful lot about Bolsonaro's conduct.
So these findings are really an important historic record that's been secured through the application of democracy in a nation where some fear democracy is under threat. They also have political implications. Brazil has a presidential election next year, and this could well damage Bolsonaro's re-election chances.
Monga Bay reports on the charges of genocide by the people of the Amazon rainforest. That includes the Quilambo’s populated by the descendants of runaway slaves that escaped into the forest and found freedom.
The call for a genocide charge — the alleged attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group — was replaced in the final report by accusations of crimes against humanity. This is a broader category that, under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which Brazil has ratified, constitutes “an attack, widespread or systematic, against any civilian population.” The inquiry also accused Bolsonaro of eight other crimes, including “epidemic with resultant death” and “incitement to crime.”
That “incitement,” Indigenous rights activists say, is responsible to a large degree for the escalating illegal invasions of Indigenous territories across Brazil. Among the most affected areas is the Yanomami Indigenous Reserve, the country’s largest — stretching across an area the size of Portugal and straddling the states of Roraima and Amazonas, on the border with Venezuela. The territory is also home to seven other Indigenous groups, six of them living in voluntary isolation from the outside world. Yet the growing influx of invaders means that, today, there are nearly as many illegal gold miners, or garimpeiros, as there are Indigenous inhabitants: 20,000 against 26,780, according to recent estimates. “They are coming by the river, the roads, and the air. There are more than 100 planes and helicopters flying over our territory every day,” Hekurari Yanomami, who heads the Condisi-YY council that’s responsible for supervising Indigenous health care in the Yanomami reserve, told Mongabay in a phone interview.
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In July 2020, a federal appeals court in Brasília, the capital, ordered the Bolsonaro administration to present a plan to expel the illegal miners from the Yanomami reserve, arguing they posed a threat of infecting the Indigenous population during the pandemic. After several legal back and forth due to appeals by the federal government, the order was upheld in March 2021 by a federal court in Roraima. On that occasion, Judge Felipe Bouzada Flores Viana underscored that the massive presence of invaders makes it “very difficult to rule out the [possibility] of genocide” in the Yanomami reserve.
For Roraima federal prosecutor Alisson Marugal, genocide is already underway among some communities that have been entirely dominated by the garimpeiros. In these places, he said, the Yanomami’s traditional way of life has given way to alcohol and drug abuse, and prostitution. “It is a socioenvironmental disaster, which is happening silently and daily, and involves Yanomami culture and society,” Marugal told Mongabay by phone. “So the word genocide can refer to some communities as the result of the omission of the state to guarantee territorial protection.”
Monga Bay reports that the International Criminal Court has already denounced his genocide a couple of times.
Inside Climate News writes on the pleas to the ICC from the tribes in the rainforest. They note that Bolsanaro policies targeted them specifically with Covid infection so mining and agricultural lands could steal their land. The charges will create the crime of ecocide if the ICC agrees.
On Monday, an Indigenous organization filed what’s known as an Article 15 Communication with the International Criminal Court, asking the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, to investigate whether the far-right leader’s actions constitute genocide and crimes against humanity.
The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, known as APIB, alleges that Bolsonaro’s policies and public statements have caused the killings of Indigenous leaders, violent conflicts between Indigenous peoples and wildcat miners, the intentional spread of Covid-19 among Indigenous populations and the ruination of Indigenous occupied land.
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In recent years, the confluence of environmental destruction and human rights violations has come sharply into focus as ecological crises like climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution intensify, primarily affecting people who are least able to adapt to the changes and least responsible for them.
Those crises have catalyzed a global movement to create a new international crime of ecocide, which generally would outlaw acts that cause severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment. For now, the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction is limited to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggression.
In its communication to the International Criminal Court, APIB said that the alleged crimes against humanity were “perpetrated through massive destruction of the environment” and implied that Bolsonaro’s actions would constitute ecocide if it were an international crime. Suruí and Metuktire’s communication also accused Bolsonaro of committing ecocide. For now, the ecocide accusations are symbolic, but according to legal experts, they illustrate the need for a new international crime to address current realities, namely, the ability of individuals to commit mass acts of environmental destruction that have consequences for humanity at large.