The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on indigenous peoples, along with the context of violence and territorial dispossession to their detriment, forces us to think of solutions from the most varied legal and political spheres. On the occasion of the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, celebrated on August 9, this essay summarizes the way in which international law has addressed self-determination, with an emphasis on the need to strengthen its application to indigenous peoples. This is because of the imperative to preserve the existence of such peoples and their cultures, and the need to mitigate the effects of environmental crises of which the exposure to pathogens displaced from their natural habitat – such as SARS-COVID-2 – is only one manifestation.
Context
2020 has been a particularly tragic year for indigenous peoples around the world, notably in the Amazon region. There, the expansion of COVID-19 has occurred in parallel with the opportunistic action of loggers, illegal miners, landowners, as well as governments willing to relax the concession of extractive mega-projects under the argument that it is necessary to promote investment in this region as a response to the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. This reality has been described by jurists, civil society organizations and the affected communities themselves through expressions such as genocide or ethnocide, usually employed in contexts of ethnic cleansing by repressive regimes or in the framework of armed conflicts. On the other hand, the ongoing environmental devastation in the region has often been described as "ecocide". To date, over 70,000 indigenous people have been infected by COVID-19 in the Americas, of which 23,000 are located in the Amazon basin and 15,000 in Brazil.
In Brazil, the tragedy faced by indigenous peoples is a direct result of government acquiescence in the destruction of natural and indigenous reservations, and the dismantling of what still remains of socio-environmental institutions.
