Evizda

Indigenous leaders in Brazil on Friday vowed to stop President Jair Bolsonaro’s assault on their land and people, filing a lawsuit against the president for his latest racist statements about the country’s Indigenous population.

In a video posted to social media Thursday, Bolsonaro said Indigenous people in Brazil are “evolving and becoming more and more, a human being like us.”

“What we want is to integrate him into society so he can own his land,” Bolsonaro added.

“We Indigenous peoples, who are native to this land, demand respect! Bolsonaro once again tears the Constitution by denying our existence as human beings.”
—Sonia Guajajara, APIB

The Association of Indigenous Peoples (APIB) announced shortly after the video’s publication that it would file suit against the president for the crime of racism, which can carry a sentence of up to five years in Brazil.

“We Indigenous peoples, who are native to this land, demand respect!” wrote Sonia Guajajara on Twitter. “Bolsonaro once again tears the Constitution by denying our existence as human beings.”

Brazil’s approximately 900,000-strong Indigenous population mainly lives on reservations that make up about 12% of Brazilian land. Bolsonaro has sought to roll back that land even further, suggesting that he would place reservation boundaries under review.

Last year, human rights and green groups blamed Bolsonaro’s pro-deforestation policies for the burning of millions of acres of the Amazon rainforest, where Indigenous tribes have lived for millennia, as the administration encouraged loggers and ranchers to burn the forest to make way for their business interests.