The Right to Live in Voluntary Isolation: Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon in the Age of Covid-19
While many uncertainties remain about the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), its geographic scope is undoubtedly boundaryless. On 9 April 2020, the Brazilian Minister of Health reported the death of a fifteen-year-old adolescent belonging to the Yanomami tribe as a result of Covid-19 infection. With approximately 35,000 members living in a zone of the Amazon rainforest located between Northern Brazil and Southern Venezuela, the Yanomamis are the largest isolated Indigenous tribe in the Americas.
The disappearance of this young man has raised many concerns for the already-threatened survival of Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation and initial contact in the Amazon Basin and Gran Chaco region. While it is difficult to number and locate these peoples with certainty due to their remoteness, it is estimated that approximately 200 tribes (about 10,000 individuals) still live in total or relative isolation, principally in areas of the Amazon region - or, from a state-centered perspective, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. In particular, Brazil is the country with the highest number of Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, as 114 tribes have been identified by the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and the existence of other isolated bands remains to be confirmed.
Article written by Laura Cahier*
In spite of their considerable diversity and historical presence, the survival of these peoples is threatened, insofar as they experience situations of extreme vulnerability - sanitary, political, sociocultural and demographic. In particular, the perils triggered by the current Covid-19 pandemic are of utmost concern, since these tribes are particularly vulnerable to contagious foreign diseases against which they often have no immune defense. Stafford Lightman, professor of medicine at the University of Bristol, explains that "[t]he consequences of an infection that affects an entire community is that very few people will be spared. […] Consequently, not only will they be sick, but nobody will be able to care for them or feed them, with the serious consequences that this will have on the group's ability to continue to survive without outside help.”
The current Covid-19 pandemic is certainly reminiscent of many infectious diseases that have threatened and decimated Indigenous peoples throughout the successive waves of forced contact with the protagonists of the "White Border” in the region. Among other infectious diseases, malaria, measles, and respiratory infections are said to have killed more than half of the peoples into which they were imported. In addition, Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation and initial contact cannot count on effective health care systems. In other words, while their immunological vulnerability is maximum, the response capacity of health services is minimal, underlines agroecologist Wilmar Bahamon. In a report published in 2019, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights expressed great concerns about the high risk of extinction of certain Peoples, such as the Nükak, due to epidemics, famines, environmental degradation, or the loss of their rites and languages. In these times of pandemic, the risk of ethnocide is, once again, exacerbated for the Peoples of the Amazon who live in voluntary isolation or initial contact.
Indeed, despite the delimitation of their lands as protected and intangible areas as well as the creation of buffer zones in most States of the Amazon region, one of the main threats to the survival of isolated peoples is the invasion of their lands by outsiders. In the current era of neo-colonialism, the region suffers from planned occupation and the installation of major development projects, which have justified multiple scientific, technical and military missions into their territories. Illegal loggers and miners, as well as agribusiness magnates have also been invading the areas which are home to Indigenous peoples