Colombia: Residents mourn indigenous leaders killed in Cauca

Hanna Wallis. Al Jazeera. November 4, 2019

Tacueyo, Cauca, Colombia - More than 1,000 people gathered in Tacueyo, Cauca, a town in southwest Colombia, on Saturday to mourn the death of indigenous governor Cristina Bautista, who was killed last week along with four volunteer community guards in a massacre that has become a searing emblem of the state's unrelenting violence.

The number of indigenous people killed in the area has risen sharply as armed groups seek to seize control of the power vacuum left by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) after they demobilised as part of the 2016 peace deal.

The resulting power struggle has left the indigenous movement in Cauca, which defends land sovereignty, in the middle of violent efforts by armed groups to gain territorial control. The violence has been heightened further by the region's drug trade.

The UN has documented 52 murders of indigenous people in the northern part of Cauca this year alone.

Last week's killings come as the country faces a national epidemic of social leader assassinations. According to data from the Bogota-based conflict research organisation, INDEPAZ, between the beginning of 2016 and May this year, more than 700 leaders - 150 of whom were from Cauca - have been killed.

"They kill us if we keep quiet, and they kill us when we speak out," Bautista said in a speech during the funeral of two other indigenous people in August.

Bautista was an internationally recognised leader, who had represented indigenous women at the UN.

Why Cauca?
All of the victims of last Tuesday's attack belonged to a powerful indigenous movement in the state, which has long fought for land and autonomy rights.

Paramilitary groups have made dozens of death threats to indigenous leaders. Some of the most aggressively targeted people in Cauca are those who participate in the "Indigenous Guardians", or "Kiwe Thegnas" - land defenders, as they are called in the native Nasayuwe language. The Guardians are an unarmed community defence force that protects indigenous territory.

On the day of last week's attack, the Guardians were patrolling near Tacueyo when they discovered two vehicles carrying people who had been kidnapped.

Nora Elena Taquinas, another governor of Tacueyo who survived the attack, told local media that one of the indigenous authorities parked his car across the road to block the passage of the vehicle and rescue of the victims. He called for backup, she said. Upon arrival to the area, indigenous authorities, including Taquinas and Bautista, temporarily released the people tied up in the back seat, but realised that the perpetrators were heavily armed and had grenades. Gunfire sprayed down from the hills surrounding them, killing Bautista and four Guardians. At the site of the attack, the truck that had carried the governors has been incinerated to a charred skeleton.

Immediately following the incident, the national head of the Indigenous Guardians, Lucho Acosta, circulated an audio recording on WhatsApp.

"We will not get scared… in these moments, we stay in resistance, full of pain for the death of our friends, but we won't give in," he said.

No group has claimed responsibility, but state authorities blame a dissident faction of the FARC rebel group that calls itself Dagoberto Ramos for the attack.

President Ivan Duque made an emergency trip to the Cauca on Wednesday, and ordered 2,400 soldiers to be deployed in the region to strengthen security.

"I hope to make some important announcements about operational capacity in the region and the capacity we will have to face these threats," Duque reportedly said on the visit.

But indigenous authorities strongly oppose the militarisation of their territories.

"Every armed group, whether legal or illegal, has only brought us more war," said Giovanni Yule, a human rights leader from the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca.

"That has never made us safer," he told Al Jazeera. The Indigenous Guardians do not carry weapons out of a categorical rejection of armed violence.

'Genocide'
Instead, the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) has appealed to the Colombian government to follow through on implementing the 2016 peace accords, which put forth plans for illicit crop substitution and aimed to draw rebel members into civilian life.

Some experts attribute the explosion of armed groups to the government's failures in carrying out the agreement.

At a news conference last Wednesday, the day after the attack in Tacueyo, Aida Quilcue, the director of human rights at ONIC said Duque's right-wing government had done nothing to mitigate the indigenous "genocide" happening in Colombia. ONIC has documented about 120 indigenous assassinations in the country this year - one every 72 hours.

ONIC leaders have also appealed for international intervention to quell the bloodshed, citing lack of government support. They have urged the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples to visit Cauca and verify the conditions of "genocide".

UNHCR on Friday urged the authorities to "establish a prompt, thorough, independent and impartial investigation" of the killings.

"We also urge the authorities to break the cycle of impunity relating to threats, harassment and killings targeting indigenous peoples," Marta Hurtado, a spokeswoman for UNHCR, said in a statement. "We urge the government to respond to this dramatic situation in a comprehensive and consultative manner, and not simply through increased military presence."

At a local level, the Indigenous Guardians in Cauca have refused to give up their autonomous processes to challenge the violence. In a muddy field outside of the stadium where Bautista's body was displayed on Saturday, dozens of Guardians reinforced their commitment to protect the community.

"Are we going to let them terrorise us for fear of death?" a coordinator of the guard shouted.

"No!" the row of Guardians replied.

They remembered Bautista's famous words: "I am convinced there are more of us who want peace than war."

Venezuela expels El Salvador's diplomats in 'reciprocal' move

Al Jazeera. November 4, 2019

Venezuela ordered El Salvador's diplomats to leave the country in reprisal for President Nayib Bukele's expulsion of officials representing the government in Caracas.

El Salvador does not recognise Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as legitimate and said on Saturday it would receive a new diplomatic corps representing opposition leader, Juan Guaido.

Guaido, who presides over the opposition-controlled National Assembly in January invoked the South American country's constitution to assume an interim presidency, arguing Maduro stole the 2018 election.

He has been recognised by dozens of countries, including the United States, Brazil, Colombia and Chile.

In response, the Venezuelan foreign ministry said in a statement on Sunday it declared each of the Salvadoran diplomatic staff in Caracas persona non grata and gave them 48 hours to leave.

"Salvadoran authorities are breathing oxygen into the failing US strategy of intervention and economic blockade against the people of Venezuela," the ministry said.

"Bukele is officially assuming the sad role of a pawn of US foreign policy."

The Salvadoran move came less than a week after the US government extended temporary protections for Salvadorans living in the US by an extra year.

The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was provided to citizens of the Central American country following two devastating earthquakes in 2001 that killed 8,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

US Ambassador Ronald Johnson reacted warmly to El Salvador's decision.

"We applaud the government of President Nayib Bukele for ensuring that El Salvador is on the right side of history," he said on Twitter.

Maduro calls Guaido a US puppet seeking to remove him in a coup, and blames US sanctions for a hyperinflationary economic collapse that has led to a humanitarian crisis in the once-prosperous OPEC nation, prompting millions to emigrate.

While most of Venezuela's neighbours recognise Guaido and have called on Maduro to step down, the Venezuelan leader has remained in power thanks to the backing of the armed forces and allies, including Russia, China and Cuba.

Conquistadors tumble as indigenous Chileans tear down statues

Laurence Blair. The Guardian. November 4, 2019

As peaceful protesters and rioters alike have thronged the streets of the Chilean capital of Santiago to protest against inequality and state repression, a string of no-less symbolic blows has also been struck some 650km (400 miles) to the south.

In the urban centre of Temuco, hooded demonstrators lassoed a statue of a 16th-century Spanish conquistador last week and yanked it to the ground.

Cheering bystanders – many wearing the traditional ponchos and headbands of the indigenous Mapuche people – stamped on the bronze effigy of Pedro de Valdivia and hammered it with wooden staffs.

In the city of Concepción – which Valdivia found in 1550 – a crowd toppled another bust of the Spanish coloniser, impaled it on a spike, and barbecued it at the feet of a statue of his historical nemesis, the Mapuche chieftain Lautaro.

In the nearby town of Collipulli, a bronze of General Cornelio Saavedra – notorious for leading the bloody 19th-century “pacification” of the Mapuche heartland – suffered a similar fate.

Most dramatically of all, a statue in Temuco of the Chilean founding father Diego Portales (1793-1837) was decapitated, and his head hung from the arm of a statue of the Mapuche warrior Caupolicán – now also holding the Mapuche flag, or Wenufoye.

The statues have been targeted amid the worst outbreak of political unrest in Chile since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, after what began as a protest over subway fares transformed into a nationwide uprising demanding dramatic changes to the country’s economic and political system.

The attacks on symbols of Spanish colonial rule have provoked a war of words recalling debates in the US over monuments to Confederate generals, or in the UK regarding prominent statues of slavers and imperialists.

Conservative Chilean commentators have branded them acts of vandalism and the work of “professional agitators”. Others describe an organic – if overexuberant – desire to challenge established historical narratives.

“These are actions of a very potent symbolism, in rejecting an official version that has falsified and grossly airbrushed our history,” said Pedro Cayuqueo, a Mapuche writer and historian. “There’s something far deeper going on.”

The toppling of statues also reflects deep modern-day grievances felt by the Mapuche, who were absorbed into the Chilean state at gunpoint 150 years ago.

Chile’s largest native people – comprising 10% of the national population of 17 million – has chafed under a far-off central government ever since.

Unequal land ownership, deforestation, pollution and limited political representation were entrenched by the brutal 1973-90 Pinochet regime.

“We Mapuche have been questioning the economic model and social contract inherited from the dictatorship since the day after the return to democracy,” Cayuqueo added.

This discontent regularly spills over into violence. Radical Mapuche groups have firebombed more than 900 targets, often ranches and timber trucks, since 2011, claiming 20 lives.

Chile’s militarised police force, have killed about 15 Mapuche since 1990. The fatal police shooting of an unarmed Mapuche farmer named Camilo Catrillanca, a year ago – and the attempted cover-up that followed – provoked widespread, lingering fury.

Demonstrators in the capital have carried Catrillanca’s image and waved the Wenufoye, but it is unclear how much the average protester relates to indigenous issues.

“The Mapuche flag cannot only be seen as symbol in favour of the Mapuche cause,” said Kenneth Bunker, a Chilean political scientist, “but also as an anti-system emblem.”

Working-class Chileans share Mapuche scorn for a distant economic and political elite, but are mainly angered by low wages and pensions, poor public healthcare and high school fees, Bunker added.

Still, Mapuche activist groups – who marched together in Temuco last week – are hoping that near-unanimous support for rewriting Chile’s Pinochet-era constitution will provide a window of opportunity.

Chief among their objectives is for Chile to become a “plurinational state” like neighbouring Bolivia, granting native peoples greater political autonomy, and their languages and customs official status.

Such demands are shared by smaller aboriginal groups like the Diaguita, an Andean desert people with some 90,000 self-identified descendants. Protesters in the northern city of La Serena likewise felled and burned a statue of the conquistador Francisco de Aguirre in late October, replacing it with an image of “Milanka”, a Diaguita woman.

‘Chile Woke Up’: Dictatorship’s Legacy of Inequality Triggers Mass Protests

Amanda Taub. New York Times. November 3, 2019

SANTIAGO, Chile — The suddenness of the protests, the anger that spilled onto the streets every day, might have been surprising anywhere. But in the country often lauded as Latin America’s great economic success story, it has shocked the world.

For three weeks, Chile has been in upheaval. One day alone, more than a million people took to the streets of Santiago, the capital.

Perhaps the only people not shocked are Chileans. In the chaos, they see a reckoning. The promise that political leaders from the left as well as right have made for decades — that free markets would lead to prosperity, and prosperity would take care of other problems — has failed them.

“Chile woke up,” thousands of protesters chanted one recent Sunday afternoon in Santiago’s O’Higgins Park.

For a while, the promise seemed to be working. The country moved from dictatorship to democracy in 1990, and decades of economic growth and democracy followed, with one government peacefully replacing another.

But that growth did not reach all Chileans.

Inequality is still deeply entrenched. Chile’s middle class is struggling with high prices, low wages, and a privatized retirement system that leaves many older people in bitter poverty. And a series of corruption and tax-evasion scandals have eroded faith in the country’s political and corporate elite.

“This is a sort of legitimacy crisis,” said Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, a political scientist at Diego Portales University in Santiago. “People start to say, ‘O.K., why is it we have to pay that, and the very rich are not paying their fair share?”

“And at the same time, we have a political class that’s totally out of touch,” Mr. Kaltwasser added.

In an attempt to restore order, President Sebastián Piñera scrapped the four-cent subway fare increase that set off the initial demonstrations. Then he deployed the military in Chile’s streets for the first time since the country’s transition to democracy.

When that didn’t quell the protests, Mr. Piñera went on television to ask for forgiveness and promise higher pensions, better health coverage, higher taxes for the rich and pay cuts for politicians. Later, he asked his cabinet to resign.

But demonstrators were not convinced.

At the protest in O’Higgins park, that was certainly the view of Luis Ochoa Pérez, who was selling flags near the entrance.

“The abuses haven’t stopped,” he said, “so we have to go into the streets.”

His best-selling flag, of his own design, demanded Mr. Piñera’s resignation.

Minutes later, it sold out.

‘It’s Not 30 Pesos, It’s 30 Years’
Javiera López Layana, 24, an activist and student at the University of Chile who helped organize the protest, was buzzing with excitement.

Many of the speakers had used the term “el pueblo” when describing the Chilean people, she pointed out. To an outsider, it seemed like a tiny detail. But that term, which in Latin America is associated with the left, had been taboo in Chile for as long as Ms. López could remember. Its resurgence seemed as if it could be a harbinger of more significant change.

The end of the Pinochet dictatorship, in 1990, came with an implicit caveat: Military rule would end, but the socialist policies of Salvador Allende, the leftist president Gen. Augusto Pinochet had deposed in a coup, would not return. Subsequent governments preserved the extreme laissez-faire economic system imposed in the 1970s and 1980s.

But today, widespread public anger over the inequality and economic precarity that many Chileans see as a consequence of that system means that conservative economic policies may be more of a threat to political stability than a means of ensuring it.

“It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years” has become one of the slogans of the protests — a reference to the proposed metro fare increase that set off the crisis and to the three decades since military rule ended.

The country’s median salary is now about $540 per month — below the poverty line for a family of four, said Marco Kremerman, an economist with the Fundación Sol, a left-leaning think tank in Santiago. Median payments in the national private pension program, the only safety net for retirees, are about $200 per month.

There is broad agreement, among protesters and experts alike, that the country needs structural reforms. Replacing the current Constitution, which was adopted under the dictatorship, would also signify that Chile is emerging from the 30-year shadow of the Pinochet regime.

“When we’re in debt, living in misery and impoverished, we don’t necessarily think of the Constitution,” Ms. López said. “But in the end, we need to make changes.”

Generation Fearless
That evening, Ms. López and her family gathered around the kitchen table at their home in Lo Espejo, a working-class municipality far from the city center, and discussed the protest movement.

Seeing the military once again patrolling the streets had brought painful memories, long repressed, to the surface.

Ms. López’s grandfather revealed to her, for the first time, that he had been arrested during the military regime, and his sister killed by the government, because they had hidden a leftist politician and his family, then helped them escape to safety abroad.

Her father described how dictatorship had divided Lo Espejo in his youth. One neighbor, who still lived nearby, was interrogated and tortured by a man they had both grown up with. Another had a sister who worked for DINA, the feared secret police.

In part because of those experiences, they have been cautious about joining the protests, even if they support the goals.

“Javiera’s generation, they grew up without fear of the dictatorship,” said Ms. López’s mother, Pamela Inés Layana Guendelman. “She’s fearless.”

“I’m not afraid,” Ms. López said.

“But it enrages me” she said, as tears welled in her eyes. “Every time I go to a protest in Plaza Italia, or a protest in La Alameda, I have to come back here, to Lo Espejo, and see the same crap, the same misery, that has been there for many governments. And nothing has changed at all.”

In many ways, Ms. López personifies the contradictions of Chile’s political crisis.

Her parents and grandfather strained to send her to private schools, she was the first in her family to go to college, and she now hopes to attend graduate school. At least on paper, Ms. López seems to be a success story, proof of the benefits that hard work is supposed to bring under Chile’s free-market system.

But when she reached the University of Chile, she said, she confronted an educational system that seemed designed to keep her in Lo Espejo forever. Though a scholarship covered much of her tuition, she has still had to borrow money to complete her degree. Getting a master’s will mean borrowing even more.

“Education was supposed to be our ladder out of poverty,” she said. “But the debt turns out to be a heavy backpack.” Her background may also dilute the value of her degree: Employers are widely believed to discriminate against candidates from poorer social classes.

Families like hers have become a new constituency in Chile, one that has sacrificed to succeed in a supposedly meritocratic system, only to find that they are still excluded from its benefits.

“There is this discourse of merit, of striving, of how ‘you should get up earlier,’” she said. “But even if we get up early, nothing is going to change.”

The Larger Conflict
One recent day, at the near-shuttered University of Chile, as clouds of tear gas billowed outside, student leaders scrolled through Instagram and Twitter posts announcing demonstrations.

“We are the generation for whom the joy never came,” said one of them, Nicole Martínez, 26. Her words were a bitter twist on “joy is coming,” the slogan from the campaign that ended military rule.

But the Chilean political crisis is not unique to Chile. It carries unmistakable echoes of a problem that is at the center of political conflict all over the developed world.

As free trade, new technologies, the rise of China, and other seismic changes have reshaped the world’s economies, political divisions have emerged between those who gain from the current system and those who do not.

In much of Europe and the United States, onetime industrial towns declined as economic growth accrued to large, globally connected cities, instead. For many, even those who have seen modest objective improvements in their own standards of living, watching others surge ahead while they struggle has left them feeling angry and disillusioned. In many countries, trust in institutions is falling, surveys show.

The same economic changes have shattered longstanding political coalitions, weakening mainstream parties. Far-right populists and other outsider politicians have moved to fill the vacuum left behind.

And with no effective channels for public anger, mass frustration has erupted into protest movements like France’s Yellow Vests and the demonstrations in Chile.

The Chilean movement, like the Yellow-Vest movement, has no clear leaders, said Ms. Martínez, with information mostly spreading through people’s social networks.

“It is a social explosion,” she said.

How Venezuela could influence Argentina's IMF talks

Patrick Gillespie. Bloomberg. November 4, 2019

Argentine President-elect Alberto Fernandez's stance on Venezuela may pose another challenge to his ability to renegotiate the terms of an aid package from the International Monetary Fund.

An imposing debt load and uncertainty about his economic policies already limit Fernandez's room for a renegotiation of the record credit line, but his views on the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro are also softer than those of outgoing Mauricio Macri.

A more sympathetic approach toward Maduro could hurt Argentina's standing with President Donald Trump, who has put Venezuela among his priorities in Latin America. The U.S. holds the most influence at the IMF as its biggest shareholder and was key in the approval of the $56 billion package given to Macri last year amid a sharp currency crisis.

"Whatever policy the new government decides to do with Venezuela will have repercussions in the bilateral relationship with the U.S.," said Hector Torres, a former IMF executive director from Argentina who represented South American countries. "Argentina depends heavily on the IMF and the U.S. has a lot of interest in Venezuela right now."

During the campaign, Fernandez suggested Argentina could leave the Lima Group, an ad-hoc outfit created in 2017 by nations seeking free elections in Venezuela, and align with Mexico and Uruguay, which have taken a less confrontational approach. He's also demurred on calling Venezuela a dictatorship -- a term Macri has repeatedly used. A week after beating Macri in the election, Fernandez has yet to comment specifically on his policy for the country stricken by a deep humanitarian and economic crisis.

Fernandez's campaign didn't provide comment for this story. A U.S. State Department spokesperson for Western Hemisphere Affairs said "the crisis in Venezuela has already formed part of the discussion with the new Argentine team, and we hope to work together to help Venezuelans recover the democracy and rule of law they are being denied."

A spokesperson for the Fund said "the decision to support a country's economic program with IMF lending is a prerogative of the IMF's Executive Board which represents the 189 members of the Fund."

Mexico Visit
Fernandez may start to show his foreign policy cards in Mexico, where he makes his first international trip as president-elect in a wink to the leftists governments of the region. He'll meet on Monday with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leader who has tried hard to keep a distance from the Lima Group, calling for a peaceful resolution in Venezuela without labeling Maduro a dictator.

If Fernandez adopts a similar middle-ground stance, it wouldn't go well with the U.S., said Benjamin Gedan, a former White House National Security Council director for South America in the Barack Obama administration.

"It would likely provoke a negative response from the Trump administration, and potentially jeopardize U.S. support, including at the IMF," he said from Washington. "That's particularly because President Trump is a very transactional leader."

Gedan points out that Argentina's relationship with the U.S. doesn't hinge on many other issues beyond the IMF and Venezuela. That leaves Fernandez, who swears in on Dec. 10, with few alternatives to appease the U.S.

On Friday, Trump called Fernandez to congratulate him and said he asked the IMF to work with the incoming government. Fernandez told Trump he hoped they'll have a "cordial" relationship, according to a statement distributed by the president-elect press team in Argentina. The White House readout of the call made no mention of the IMF.

Economic Policies
To be sure, the IMF will negotiate with Argentina through the prism of economic policies, not foreign policy, said Claudio Loser, an Argentine who served as the Fund's western hemisphere director between 1994 and 2002. Closer ties with Venezuela would increase tensions in case Fernandez comes up with a "very undisciplined" economic program, but wouldn't be enough to derail the program, he said.

"The Argentines will have to go beyond just having closer relations with Venezuela for the IMF to withhold their help," Loser said.

Sticking to Macri's Venezuela policy isn't much easier for Fernandez. His running mate, former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was one of Venezuela's top allies when she governed for eight years until 2015, at one point even giving Maduro the country's top honor. Maintaining Macri's confrontational policy would reflect on Fernandez's judgment as president and likely anger her noisy radical left base.

Torres, the former IMF official, says there is a chance Fernandez's strategy may embody a phrase made famous by Juan Peron, Argentina's three-time president last century and founder of the political movement Peronism: Put your left turn signal on, but then go right.

"Part of what Alberto Fernandez is doing in visiting AMLO and giving signs that the Lima Group isn't his favorite -- that's putting on the left turn signal, but he may turn the steering wheel to the right," said Torres. "I'm optimistic that Fernandez is pragmatic."

Brazilian president's son suggests using dictatorship-era tactics on leftist foes

Tom Phillips. The Guardian. November 4, 2019

Voices from across Brazil’s political spectrum have condemned the son of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, after he suggested hardline dictatorship-era tactics might be needed to crush his father’s leftist foes.

Eduardo Bolsonaro made the incendiary remarks – which many observers suspect were a deliberate distraction from renewed media speculation over the family’s links to organized crime – during a softball YouTube interview broadcast on Thursday.

In the interview the 35-year-old congressman claimed – without offering evidence – that the recent wave of Latin American protests and the left’s return to power in Argentina were part of a Cuba-funded conspiracy to bring “revolution” to Latin America.

“If the left radicalizes to this extent [in Brazil] we will need to respond, and that response could come via a new AI-5,” said Bolsonaro, who is the regional representative of Steve Bannon’s far-right group “The Movement”.

That was a reference to one of the most traumatic events in recent Brazilian history – December 1968’s Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5) - when Brazil’s military rulers moved to extinguish growing political unrest by indefinitely outlawing freedom of expression and assembly and closing congress.

“The AI-5 was an instrument intended to intimidate people … It allowed the dictatorship to repress all opposition and dissent,” the historians Lilia Schwarz and Heloisa M Starling wrote in their recent “biography” of Brazil.

As a new era of suppression began and dissidents fled into exile, one newspaper tried to skirt the censors with a now famous front page weather forecast that announced: “Stormy weather. Suffocating temperature. Air unbreathable. The country is being swept by strong winds.”

“AI-5 was such a symbolic moment because it signalled the intensification of the military movement’s authoritarianism,” Schwarz said.


In a country still grappling with the legacy of those grim days of authoritarian rule, Bolsonaro’s provocation – for which he later offered a partial apology – sparked outrage, from left to right.

“Declarations such as those of Eduardo Bolsonaro are repugnant,” the speaker of Brazil’s lower house, Rodrigo Maia, tweeted.

“The AI-5 … suspended rights and introduced censorship: an authoritarian’s dream. The dream of the [Bolsonaro] clan,” tweeted Joice Hasselmann, a disaffected Bolsonaro ally. “We cannot allow this serious attack on democracy.”

Leftwing politicians vowed to seek the politician’s removal from office. “Eduardo is a spoiled brat bawling his authoritarian desires … We will not stand for it,” tweeted the progressive senator Randolfe Rodrigues, summoning Brazilians to a day of “anti-authoritarian” protests next Tuesday.

Schwarz called Bolsonaro’s remarks a Trumpian bid to distract from compromising media reports that undermined the Bolsonaro family’s “moral standing”.

“It’s a bit like Donald Trump’s tendency: every time you feel a scandal drawing near … you do something to draw attention away from that matter and put it somewhere else,” she said.

Foreign observers were also aghast. “I never thought I would … hear such nonsense out of Brazil,” one veteran ambassador told the Brazilian journalist Jamil Chade.

The controversy caps an anarchic week in Brazilian politics.

In the early hours of Wednesday Brazil’s president launched a furious tirade against the “putrid” press from a hotel room in Saudi Arabia. That outburst came after Brazil’s top broadcaster revealed the investigation into the 2018 assassination of the leftist politician Marielle Franco suggested the suspects had met at Bolsonaro’s compound before the attack.

‘Guardian’ of the Amazon Killed in Brazil by Illegal Loggers

Manuela Andreoni and Letícia Casado. New York Times. November 4, 2019

In the months before an Indigenous leader was killed with a gunshot in the face in the Amazon reserve he had spent much of his life protecting, at least two efforts were made to warn Brazil’s government of the risks posed by illegal loggers in the region.

In April, members of the Guajajara Indigenous group went to the capital, Brasília, to plead for protection from loggers invading their land in the state of Maranhão. In August, the state’s head of human rights wrote to the federal police to say loggers were threatening the Guajajara in the Araribóia Indigenous Land.

But those warnings didn’t help Paulo Paulino Guajajara during a hunting trip with a friend in the Araribóia reserve on Friday, when they were ambushed by a group of five loggers working illegally in the area.

Laércio Guajajara, the friend, who was wounded has been released from the hospital. A logger was reported missing.

The murder is one of a string of losses for Brazil’s indigenous communities, as miners and loggers make more and bolder incursions into Indigenous territories and other protected areas. Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has said that Brazil’s Indigenous reserves should be opened up to commercial exploration.

“The Brazilian government is not following its constitutional duty of protecting them,” said Gilberto Vieira, an associate secretary at Brazil’s ‪Indigenous Missionary Council, which is connected to the Catholic Church.

In June, several dozen illegal miners had invaded the Wajapi Indigenous community, in the Brazilian Amazon, and stabbed and killed one of its leaders.

Mr. Guajajara, 26, left one child. He and Laércio Guajajara were members of the forest guardians, a group the Guajajara created to defend themselves and their land against miners, loggers and others interested in illegally taking resources from the reserve.

In a searing statement lamenting Mr. Guajajara’s death, the association of Brazilian Indigenous peoples said the Bolsonaro administration had “Indigenous blood” on its hands.

“The increased violence in indigenous territories is a direct reflection of their hate speech, as well as their measures against Indigenous peoples in Brazil,” they said in a statement posted on their website on Saturday. “Our lands are being invaded, our leaders murdered, attacked and criminalized, and the Brazilian state is abandoning Indigenous peoples to their fate with the ongoing dismantling of environmental and indigenous policies.”

Brazil’s minister of justice, Sérgio Moro, promised a thorough investigation of Mr. Guajajara’s death by the country’s federal police.

“We will spare no efforts to take those responsible for this serious crime to justice,” he said in a tweet.

The Indigenous Missionary Council had warned in a report published on Sept. 24 that the number of invasions of Indigenous lands by loggers, miners and land grabbers was rising. They documented 160 incursions through September of this year, compared to 109 during the whole of 2018.

The Guajajara people of the state of Maranhão knew they were in danger.

“All indigenous lands in Maranhão are under threat of invasion,” Indigenous leader Rosilene Guajajara said in an interview in April, when several of her community went to Brasília to ask the federal government for protection.

In September, Mr. Moro was warned by the government of Maranhão state of threats to Indigenous land near Araribóia, where Mr. Guajajara was killed, but no measures were taken to protect it or those living there, state officials said.

“In the face of the evident difficulty of federal government bodies to protect Indigenous lands, we will try to help,” Maranhão’s leftist governor, Flávio Dino, wrote on Twitter as he announced a statewide task force to protect Indigenous people.

The murder of Mr. Guajajara comes at a time when a spike in rainforest fires in the Brazilian Amazon drew a global outcry. As deforestation increases, the forest is approaching a tipping point at which it would begin to self-destruct, instead of self-sustain, which could frustrate worldwide efforts to fight climate change.

While a task force that included Brazilian military was able to reduce the number of fires in October to a record low, research shows Indigenous people are some of the most important agents of environmental protection in the forest.

Paulo Moutinho, a senior scientist at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, said that historically Indigenous lands have some of the lowest deforestation levels among conservation units in Brazil.

“If we want to preserve the great benefits the Amazon forest offers us, it is fundamental that we recognize these peoples’ right to land,” he said. “They are providing an invaluable service.”