“Stop Brazil’s Genocide! Olympic Games 2016”, 19 April 2016

Brazil: it conjures Carnival, Copacabana and the 2016 Olympic Games...Its stadiums and arenas are built on Indian land, and much of its wealth comes from the dispossession of the Indians and the theft of their lands...Brazil is planning a new assault on its first peoples: targeting the lands they have managed to keep...When the first Europeans arrived in Brazil in 1500 it was home to over 10 million Indians…[M]urder, torture, disease and exploitation ravaged this population, and by the 1950s their population had plummeted to an all time low of about 100,000...Almost 1,500 tribes are believed to have become extinct since 1500. Others are…reduced…[to]…fewer than the 11 people in a football team…The audience…[of Maracanã Stadium]...will be significantly greater than Brazil’s largest tribe, the Guarani…just 50 km from Rio…Maracanã…is an indigenous Tupi word meaning parrot…When rebuilding work started for the 2014 World Cup, a group of 70 Indians from 17 different tribes who were occupying an abandoned 19th-century mansion by the stadium were evicted, and their home destroyed, to make way for a giant car park and the construction of a football museum. The Indians wanted the building to be preserved as an Indigenous Cultural Centre…Belo Horizonte stadium…[There is]…is an indigenous territory called ‘Fazenda Guarani’, inhabited by Krenak and Pataxó Indians…[who]…suffered huge losses as they tried to resist the expanding colonial frontier…Manaus stadium Manaus…is the only Amazon city to host the Olympics. The stadium is built in the style of an indigenous basket…[100]…kilometers from Manaus is the land of the Waimiri Atroari Indians…2,650…[of them]…were killed between 1960 and 1980, under the…military dictatorship…Brazil has racked up a bill of over US$10 billion to pay for the Olympics…[which]…would pay the annual budget of Brazil’s cash-strapped Indian Affairs Department (FUNAI) at least 73 times over…The Olympics website makes no mention of Indians…Brazil’s Indians have their own versions of Olympic sports… Give the Kawahiva a future… Say NO to “PEC 215”!...