The step is slower, the gesture more measured and the fatigue is certain: at over 90 years old, the cacique Raoni Metuktire is recovering with difficulty, and from the Covid he contracted at the end of August 2020, and from the death of his wife on the 23rd. June. After six months spent in Colider, a town in Mato Grosso, a state in west-central Brazil, he decided to return to his aldeia (“Village”), Metuktire, at the beginning of January, where he receives us. The objective of the trip was to inform his family of yet another struggle he has undertaken. As in the 1990s, when he fought to delimit the Kayapo territories, as a decade later when he opposed the Belo Monte dam, in the middle of the Amazon, it is again towards the international scene that Raoni is now turning. ‘hui for help.
This time, the indigenous chief is embarking on an unprecedented legal adventure, both daring and risky: denouncing Jair Bolsonaro before the International Criminal Court – the complaint was filed on Friday January 22 in The Hague. He is well aware that this can only provoke the fury of those who support the president, large landowners and gold diggers in the lead, all close to the Kayapo territories. But he repeats that he has no choice: “Bolsonaro has always incited violence against us, I cannot accept the way he portrays us. “
Raoni remembers his meetings with all heads of state since the end of the military dictatorship (1964-1985). Some interviews were strained, in particular with former presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, who gave the green light to the construction of Belo Monte on the Xingu River. “But the dialogue has always been maintained”, adds the leader. Only Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro have never received it. The two presidents, supported by the so-called “ruralist” parliamentary group, which defends the interests of agribusiness, are at the origin of historic attacks against the rights of the natives, however enshrined in the Constitution. With Bolsonaro, it is also a demonstration of racism and contempt that we are entitled to, very regularly. Small anthology: “More and more, the Indian is becoming a human being like us”, he said in January 2020, or again in November 2020: “Is there illegal deforestation? Yes, there are Indians who exchange a tree trunk for a beer. “
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