LONDON, Aug 25 — Hundreds of people demonstrated outside the Brazilian embassy in London today, chanting “Bolsonaro out!” over President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies towards the country’s indigenous people.
Some carried placards reading “Stop the genocide in Brazil”, “Fight for life” and “No to the ‘marco temporal’,” referring to a draft law being pursued by the Brazilian government.
Indigenous people claim the law could take away their ancestral lands, and are holding a week of demonstrations against what they call Bolsonaro’s “anti-indigenous agenda”.
The protest came as a case was to open at Brazil’s Supreme Court on Wednesday on the issue of how indigenous lands are protected.
A commission of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies in June approved the draft bill that recognises ‘marco temporal’, the idea that Brazil’s constitutional protection of indigenous lands should only apply to those whose inhabitants were present in 1988.
The court will decide whether the ‘marco temporal’ applies to a reservation in the southern state of Santa Catarina, a decision that will affect dozens of other territories that have been under dispute for years.
“We are standing here in solidarity with the indigenous movement in Brasilia,” Sarah Shenker, 35, an activist with Survival International, told AFP.
“The ‘marco temporal’ is a genocidal proposal being pushed by the government and agrobusiness to steal indigenous people’s land.”
For Graham Gordon, 47, a member of the Catholic aid agency CAFOD, it is “also a climate issue”.
“The Amazon is destroyed to produce the food that we eat in the West,” he told AFP.
The environmental group Extinction Rebellion kicked off two weeks of action in London on Monday, calling on governments to take “urgent” action against climate change.
The activist network, formed in the UK in 2018, regularly uses civil disobedience to highlight government inaction on climate change. — AFP
