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The Javari River Valley, which draws the border between Brazil and Peru, is home to the largest number of uncontacted Indians in the world, is a huge piece of Amazon rainforest with almost 7,000 natives who, for the most part, never had contact with man White. When they did it was to make it clear that they wanted to stay alone.

The way in which Brazil has dealt with these communities has changed over time, but in the late 1980s, with the return of democracy, it was agreed that their will would be respected, ending decades of integration and assimilation policies. Now, the people of Javari live in a huge protected area. Although they suffer continuous invasions of illegal loggers, on paper, no one can enter their territory.

But things are changing. A few days ago, the Government of Jair Bolsonaro placed missionary Ricardo Lopes Dias at the head of the Department for the Isolated Indigenous of the National Indian Foundation (Funai), the state body that takes care of the indigenous issue. In order to appoint him, the Funai presidency altered the internal regulations, withdrawing the requirement that the isolated indigenous area coordinator be a career officer.

The Indians soon demonstrated against a possible evangelization: "The missionary activities in the villages have been as harmful as the diseases, because it causes ethnic, social and cultural disorganization of the indigenous peoples. In the Javari Valley, the missionaries they divided between those who were of God and those who were of the Devil, and that, for the asylees, means complete extinction. " Those who speak are representatives of the Univaja, an entity that brings together the indigenous people of the Javari who were contacted in the past: the Matsés, Marubo, Matis, Kanamary, Kulina, Korubo and Tsohom-Djapá.

These peoples already know the work of the evangelizing missions, which arrived in the region in the 60s, especially from the hand of US NGOs. In one of them, in fact, the new star signing of the Government worked.

Lopes Dias was part of the New Tribes Mission of Brazil (MNTB) for 10 years as part of a dissertation work on the Matsés Indians. It was proposed "to identify the needs and opportunities among those who nothing or little heard Christ". Lopes Dias studied the local language to generate teaching material that they could understand and encouraged them to build their own churches. As it happens today in hundreds of villages in other territories.

Exploitation of the Amazon

"This is not now, it is always. The innovative thing is that now Funai is part of this process," a spokeswoman for Associated Indigenists, an association of workers of this state agency who declined to identify for fear of fear of retaliation. "Where the State fails, these proselytizing groups have open space. They impose their religion but at the same time they carry food, clothing, water ... and over time they start to condition those benefits to participation in that new faith," he adds.

The presence of missionaries is common in many communities. The Terena, in the state of Mato Grosso and the Baniwa, in the state of Amazonas, for example, are already predominantly evangelical. In other areas the Catholic presence is stronger, because of the missions installed over the centuries, but these have lost ground in recent decades, following the new guidelines of the Catholic Church in favor of non-imposition.

Brazilian law only expressly prohibits the entry of evangelizers (and all kinds of people) in villages of uncontacted villages, precisely the department that will now manage Lopes Dias.

The Prosecutor's Office presented this week an appeal to stop the appointment , alleging an obvious conflict of interest. In addition, the attorneys stressed that the data that this new coordinator can have after passing through the Javari Valley is extremely sensitive: "Missionaries' access to them can place people at risk of genocide and ethnocide," they warned.

The indigenous people often argue that the entry of these religious groups is part of a strategy to assimilate the native populations to the urban centers, in order to clear their lands in favor of the interests of the agricultural and livestock sector. On the same days when the controversy over the missionary's appointment resounded, Bolsonaro presented a law that opened the door to all kinds of economic activities within indigenous lands, from mines and gas and oil well to hydroelectric dams. .

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