Brazil, Amazon, World: Crimes Against Humanity
OCTOBER 15, 2021
BY JEAN WYLLYS – JULIE WARK
Photograph Source: Ibama from Brasil – Operação Hymenaea, Julho/2016 – CC BY 2.0
Every day brings new horrors with news of the climate catastrophe but, since this is an inseparable part of the Totentanz phase of capitalism, it’s difficult to see around a much-promoted Apocalyptic vision that suggests that our whole species is responsible and therefore we can’t do anything about it. In this murder of the political imagination (and hence of the future), we’re at best cocooned in lies like the greening of oil companies and probably too worn down to howl in rage at the bloody cynicism. It’s evidently not in the nature of the neoliberal system to abound in organizations that protect human rights but the ones we have might be the best chance there is to do something, however imperfect they are, precisely because human rights are both universal and a legitimate claim. Maybe we should be digging around in laws and constitutions to find out what rights are enshrined in them, learn how our governments, toadying servants of the masters of capitalism, are stripping them from us, and then begin the clawback?
Take Article 10 of the Bill of Rights of the New Hampshire Constitution (1784) for starters: “The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good happiness of mankind”. Then, the Grundgesetz, the constitutional law of Germany (1949), recognises in Article 20 (4) the “right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available.” We have come to this. We’re in an almost full-blown form of fascism that has taken the whole planet to the brink of extinction. There is no “other remedy” or notable institutional effort to counter the erosion of constitutional rights. Surely unity based on upholding principles of justice has to be stronger than the veneer of unity derived from submission to authority. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stresses that human beings are endowed with “reason and conscience”. If we don’t uphold human rights, “reason and conscience” are empty words. But they can also be our strength because, as Thomas Paine knew a long time ago, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”.
We can claim our rights, and the rights of all those who haven’t got voices to claim them. And also start to deal with the evildoers. Some of today’s worst crimes are happening in Brazil, perpetrated by the world’s worst (genocidal and ecocidal) criminals. With impunity. Some progress to protect the Amazon and its peoples was made in Brazil after the dictatorships when the new Constitution (1988) codified Indigenous rights, including the right to tribal homelands. Since so much of the Amazon is Indigenous territory and, owing to the people’s understanding of the inseparable relations of human and natural existence, Indigenous sovereignty became an essential part of Brazilian environmental policy. Indigenous people represent about 5% of the world’s population. Fighting for their ancestral lands, they are also trying to protect some 85% of the planet’s biodiversity. Hence, the crimes of ethnocide and ecocide are closely linked. And the rise of fascistoid forms of power should tell us—if only we are able to look carefully enough—that the rights and wellbeing of any one person critically depend on the rights and wellbeing of others.
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Needless to say, attacks on the rainforest entail systematic attacks on the Amazon’s Indigenous peoples. There are many reports of these crimes committed by the Bolsonaro government and its henchmen (including the “bible, bullet, and beef caucus”, militiamen, wildcat miners, and through “infrastructure development, murder of Indigenous leaders, and “assimilation” plans for Indigenous peoples, for example). By 2016, some 34,000 square miles of the Brazilian Amazon had lost its previously protected status or seen protections reduced but the worst attacks began after 2016 when the Bolsonaro government radicalised the crimes that had begun with Michel Temer, who usurped the presidency from Dilma Rousseff, in what Temer himself admitted was a “coup”. Since January 2019, the Bolsonaro government has cut funds for the enforcement of Brazil’s strict environmental laws. Indigenous groups are fighting for their land and lives and are in great danger doing so. The current government encourages land grabbers and environmental corruption, which intensifies assaults on Indigenous communities. Illegal land grabbing has resulted in around half of the region’s deforestation.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/15/brazil-amazon-world-crimes-against-humanity/
