Guajajara’s appointment was heralded, but after four years of Jair Bolsonaro, her task will be enormous. She insists she's up to the job.
was a month into her new job, and Sonia Guajajara’s plate was already full. Brazil’s first minister of Indigenous peoples was in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state, responding to a crisis she had called a “genocide.”She had visited a hospital where scores of Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, had been taken
Guajajara’s appointment was heralded, but the task she faces is enormous. Bolsonaro, a far-right populist, called the size of protected Indigenous lands “abusive” and effectively stopped demarcating them, suggested the people were less than human, and saw their Amazonian home as a resource to be pillaged, not protected. He gutted the agencies responsible for protecting the rainforest and its people.
Gustavo S. Azenha, executive director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University, said the creation of the ministry signals a “much more serious commitment” to Indigenous issues in the Lula government.But there are many “big, systemic issues” that will take longer to address or that fall outside the control of the executive branch, he said. He pointed to Indigenous land-rights cases, which can “drag on for years and years and years” in the courts.
Over time, food in the rainforest became more scarce. Animals such as tinamou, a bird the local Indigenous people consider sacred, even scarcer. And the once-swelling rivers began to run dry. She wanted to fight for her community. Indigenous groups here have long called for a ministry of Indigenous peoples and Lula pledged during last year’s presidential election campaign to establish one. Weeks after the October vote, his secretary asked Guajajara to come to the Meliá hotel.Advertisement
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