Genocide of Indigenous peoples in Brazil

This process has been described as a genocide, and continues into the modern era with the ongoing destruction of indigenous peoples of the Amazonian region.

[5] In practice, however, Brazil's indigenous people still face a number of external threats and challenges to their continued existence and cultural heritage.

[7][8][6] Since the 1980s there has been an increase in the exploitation of the Amazon Rainforest for mining, logging and cattle ranching, posing a severe threat to the region's indigenous population.

[11] Several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been formed due to the ongoing persecution of the indigenous peoples in Brazil, and international pressure has been brought to bear on the state after the release of the Figueiredo Report which documented massive human rights violations.

[13] In the 1940s, the state and the Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, SPI) forcibly relocated the Aikanã, Kanôc, Kwazá and Salamái tribes to work on rubber plantations.

[15] The NGO Survival International has reported that throughout the 1980s up to 6000 thousand gold prospectors entered Yanomami territory bringing diseases the Yanomami had no immunity to, the prospectors shot them and destroyed entire villages, and Survival International estimates that up to twenty per cent of the people were dead within seven years.

The Observatory for the Human Rights of Uncontacted and recently contacted Peoples called for the territory to be permanently protected as a memorial to Indigenous Genocide.

Over the following decade the indigenous Tupí, Tapuya, Caeté, Goitacá and other tribes which lived along the coast suffered large depopulation due to disease and violence.

[2] The primary reason for depopulation was diseases such as smallpox that advanced far beyond movement of European settlers,[20] anthropologist and historian Darcy Ribeiro highlights how the majority of these deaths occurred initially due to European diseases spreading from the Portuguese colonisers to indigenous peoples, but that this was just a precursor to later, more horrendous, ethnocide and genocide.

[27] While the statute was being drafted, Brazil argued against the inclusion of cultural genocide, claiming that some minority groups may use it to oppose the "normal assimilation" which occurs in a new country.

The rediscovered documents were examined by the National Truth Commission, which was tasked with the investigations of human rights violations which occurred in the periods 1947 through to 1988.

The Truth Commission was of the opinion that entire tribes in Maranhão were completely eradicated and in Mato Grosso, an attack on thirty Cinturão Largo left only two survivors (the "Massacre at 11th Parallel").

[38] The World Bank has been subject to criticism over loans which have been used to help fund the dislocation of indigenous peoples and environmental destruction.

The Polonoreste project caused wholesale deforestation, ecological damage on a wide scale, as well as the forced relocation of indigenous communities.