The loggers and ranchers are closing in but still Brazil's Kawahiva people wait for protection

"In 2024, agents of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai) walked more than 60 miles through rainforest on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon on a mission to monitor and help protect a group of Indigenous people who had no contact with the modern world. What they found was a small basket freshly woven from leaves, a child's footprints on the bank of a creek, and tree trunks hacked open hours before to extract honey."

"A year later, the Brazilian government continues to ignore directives by the country's supreme court approving a plan of measures to protect the isolated Indigenous community, including accelerating the demarcation of their territory and explaining how it would reduce deforestation. Bureaucratic delays, funding shortages and violent conflicts over land including attacks by self-proclaimed leaders linked to loggers have blocked the process. Without physical boundaries, loggers and ranchers continue to encroach, leaving the Kawahiva vulnerable to genocide and cultural erasure."

Funai agents tracked signs of the Pardo River Kawahiva on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon, finding a freshly woven basket, a child's footprints, hacked tree trunks for honey, sinking huts abandoned a year earlier, and brazil nut pods around old campfires. The Kawahiva's proposed 400,000-hectare reserve remains without full constitutional protection and continues to be the largest unprotected forest containing uncontacted Indigenous people in Brazil. The federal government has not implemented supreme court directives to accelerate demarcation and explain how protections would reduce deforestation. Bureaucratic delays, funding shortages and violent land conflicts including attacks linked to loggers have blocked protection, and encroachment by loggers and ranchers leaves the Kawahiva vulnerable to violence, cultural erasure and potential genocide.

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