Funai president Marcelo Xavier was forced to leave an event in Madrid after being attacked by groups that questioned his existence at an international meeting on the plight of locals.
Ricardo Rao, a former Funai employee, used the incident to denounce Xavier’s presence and claimed he had no reason to be in that room. The head of Funai left the venue in embarrassment.
“This man doesn’t belong here,” Rao shouted, pointing his finger at the organization’s president. “This man is a murderer, this man is a militia,” he said.
He concluded by saying, “He’s responsible for the deaths of Bruno (Pereira) and Dom Phillips. You’re a militia, you’re a thug,” and he left the room. HE UOL Called Funai and is waiting for a position from the entity. Bruno, also a former Funai employee, and British journalist Dom were killed in Vale do Javari last month.
The event took place at the 15th General Assembly of FILAC, the Latin American and Caribbean Indigenous Peoples Development Fund. The mechanism is meeting this week at the headquarters of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was unclear whether the Funai president had returned to the room or some other event.
FILAC is not a UN agency (United Nations). In the early 1990s, to mark a new relationship between states and indigenous peoples, the Ibero-American Summit established the mechanism that celebrates its 30th anniversary this week. At that moment, Brazil’s accession was signed by then-President Fernando Collor de Mello.
more protests
Survival International, with several representatives of indigenous communities and indigenous peoples present, plans to hold a formal protest against Xavier’s presence in front of the Spanish prime minister’s office in the coming hours.
According to them, this is because of the Xavier administration’s denial and complicity in “the ongoing indigenous genocide in Brazil and the murders of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips”.
Protesters said he went into exile to avoid being killed
In November 2019, Ricardo Rao decided that he could no longer stay in Brazil after receiving repeated death threats, seeing his comrades killed and even having a gun pointed at his head. He was serving as a Funai agent in Maranhão at the time. But he didn’t just have to face environmental criminals to do his job. It was also the target of militia and administrative processes, which, according to the agent, became tools to silence and embarrass employees deemed undesirable.
Rao joined Funai at the same time as Bruno Pereira, who was killed in Vale do Javari (AM) in 2010. He lives in Rome today, after spending two years in temporary exile status in Norway. According to the report, Funai did not respond to requests for clarification on the case.
“The militia controls Funai today,” said a local journalist. UOL. “We always get threats. Bruno took it, I got it, even my mother took it. Now the difference is that threats are made. Those who make the threat think they can kill. After all, Bolsonaro said it. It didn’t happen,” he said.
It’s about a dismembered organ at the hands of Bolsonaro and a region controlled by threats, militias and deaths. Even before the government began, the mere prospect of Bolsonarista victory and his hate speech translated into the largest number of indigenous dead.
But few imagined that the script would spoil so quickly. Distrusting the local police authorities, he decided to go to Brasília and submit a report containing all this information to the Human Rights Council of the House of Representatives.
Two days later, on 28 November 2019, she went to Oslo, where she applied for asylum due to the threats she faced. His claim was also supported by letters sent by the deputies to the King of Norway, the Prime Minister and the Parliament.
Rao was granted temporary asylum status and hosted at the home of Lutheran priests while his case was being considered.
However, as he also holds Italian citizenship, his request for permanent asylum may be denied, and two years after disembarking in Norway, Rao chose to settle in Rome, where he would continue his exile.
“I want to go back someday. But I don’t know how. I tried to make noise before. Bruno stayed and died”, completing the nativist angrily.
source: Noticias
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