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The Genocide of Brazil’s Indians

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL — On April 30, a group of ranchers armed with rifles and machetes attacked a settlement of about 400 families from the #Gamela tribe, in the state of #Maranhão, in northeastern Brazil. According to the Indigenous Missionary Council, an advocacy group, 22 Indians were wounded, including three children. Many were shot in the back or had their wrists chopped.
Soon after the attack, the Ministry of Justice announced on its website that it would investigate “the incident between small farmers and alleged indigenous people.” (Minutes later, the word “alleged” was removed.)
According to the census, there are around 900,000 Indians left from the original estimated three to five million who inhabited the country when the Portuguese settlers arrived in 1500. Diseases imported from Europe wiped out millions during the first century of contact. Later the Indians were enslaved on plantations. But the genocide didn’t end then. Over the past century, tens of thousands of indigenous people have been victims of rape, torture and mass murder, perpetrated with the help of a governmental agency, the Indian Protection Service. Some tribes were completely eliminated. Today, only 12.5 percent of Brazilian land remains in the possession of indigenous people.

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