One afternoon last month, several vehicles descended on a village in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where Avelin Buniacá Kambiwá and other members of some 20 Indigenous families were building their homes. Emerging from one of the cars, a man known only by his nickname, Piauí, shouted to his companions and anyone else within earshot, “Feathers are going to fly!”
He was referring to the feathered headdresses of the local Indigenous people. He was outraged, and he wanted them gone.
Piauí is what Brazilians call a grileiro, a land-grabber — someone who invades Indigenous or public land, or land that simply does not belong to them, before claiming it as their own. They frequently use fake documentation to carry out activities such as illegal logging, mining and real estate speculation.
Two years earlier, some members of the Pataxó and Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe peoples had lost their homes along the Paraopeba River after a tailings dam at a major iron ore mine collapsed. The Brumadinho dam disaster killed 270 people, spewed millions of tons of toxic waste into the river and surrounding communities, and left hundreds of Indigenous people homeless.
Source: Land Grabbers: The Growing Assault on Brazil’s Indigenous Areas – Yale E360
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