By AFP - Agence France Presse
Brazilian Indigenous leader warns the world about the fate of the Amazon.
Facundo FERNÁNDEZ BARRIO
As the COP29 climate talks got underway on Monday in Azerbaijan, an indigenous leader half a world away is towering over Brazil with a warning about the fate of the Amazon rainforest.
“Stop the destruction,” commands - in English - a giant-sized mural by Alessandra Korap Munduruku painted on the side of a building in São Paulo, with the tag #keepyourpromise.
The work by Brazilian street artist Mundano, 30 meters high and 48 meters wide, highlights the deforestation of the Amazon, whose situation has worsened in recent months due to a record drought.
Korap, who visited São Paulo last week to see the mural, said she was “worried” about Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's intention to extract oil from the Amazon.
“There's no point in the government demarcating some indigenous lands if, at the same time, it wants to approve oil prospecting in the Amazon,” she told AFP.
Her comments were made at a time when Brazil is evaluating the granting of licenses to explore potentially huge oil reserves on the seabed, 500 kilometers from the mouth of the Amazon River.
Lula said that he and his government “want to do everything legally and respect the environment, but we will not waste any opportunity for growth.”
Korap is a member of the Munduruku ethnic group from the state of Pará in Brazil. Four years ago, she won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award from the United States for her work trying to stop illegal logging in the Amazon and helping to define indigenous lands.
The 39-year-old activist said she didn't expect much from the COP29 conference in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, nor from COP30 to be held next year in her home state of Pará - “because we've had 30 years of COPs and nothing has been resolved”.
But she said she hoped that the leaders of the world's biggest economies, who will meet in Rio de Janeiro next week for a G20 summit, would “listen to the indigenous population” when it comes to discussing sustainability.
“We indigenous peoples will not negotiate our lands,” she said.
ffb/rmb/mlm
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