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Current government’s Bolsonaro has brought death to indigenous people

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

                                                      Leonardo Boff

The contempt that the current president shows towards the indigenous people is notorious. He considers them sub-people and on December 1, 2018 he stated quite clearly: “our project for the Indio is to make them equal to us”. And he advanced further: “there is not going to be a centimeter demarcated for indigenous reserve or for quilombolas”.

The most perverse thing was not to approve the Proposal of Constitutional Amendment (PEC) that should bring them drinking water, the basic inputs against the Covid-19. It is a purpose of death. Days ago, in this month of June, in a peaceful demonstration of several ethnic groups, they were received in Brasilia with repression, rubber bullets and tear gas. There is a total abandonment of them, to the point that 163 villages of different ethnicities have been contaminated and there have been 1,070 deaths.

A connoisseur of the history of the Amazon, Evaristo Miranda, whose title is a revelation: Cuando el Amazonas corría hacia el Pacífico, (Vozes 2007) tells us: “one thing is certain: the oldest and most permanent human presence in Brazil is in the Amazon. Some 400 generations ago diverse human groups occupied, disputed, explored and transformed the Amazonian territories and their food resources” (op.cit.p.47). They developed a great management of the forest, respecting its uniqueness, while modifying its habitat to stimulate those plants useful for human use. The indigenous and the forest evolved together in a profound reciprocity.

The anthropologist Viveiros de Castro said it well: “The Amazon we see today is the result of centuries of social intervention, just as the societies that live there are the result of centuries of coexistence with the Amazon” (in Tempo e Presença 1992, p.26).

It is also relevant to note that in the interior of the jungle, with its hundreds of ethnic groups, an immense space (almost an empire) of the Tupi-Guarani tribe was formed from 1100, before the arrival of the Portuguese invaders. It occupied territories ranging from the Andean foothills, forming the Amazon River, to the basins of the Paraguay and Paraná rivers, some of them reaching as far as the Gaucho pampas and the Brazilian northeast. “In this way,” states Miranda, “practically all of jungle Brazil was conquered by Tupi-Guarani peoples” (op.cit.92-93).

In pre-Cabralian Brazil there were about 1,400 tribes, 60% of them in the Amazonian part. They spoke languages of 40 trunks subdivided into 94 different families, which led anthropologist Berta Ribeiro to affirm “that nowhere on Earth has a linguistic variety similar to that observed in tropical South America been found” (Amazônia urgente, 1990 p.75). Today, unfortunately, given the decimation of indigenous peoples perpetrated in the course of history and recently by garimpeiros, miners, extractivists (mostly illegal), there are only 274 languages left. This means that more than a thousand languages have been lost (85%) and with them ancestral knowledge, worldviews and unique communications. It has been an irreparable impoverishment for the cultural heritage of humanity.

Among the many tragedies that led to the disappearance of entire ethnic groups, it is worth remembering one that few know about. Don Juan VI, admired by some, in a royal letter of May 13, 1808, ordered an official war against the Krenak Indians of the Rio Dulce Valley, in the states of Minas and Espírito Santo. To the military commanders he ordered “an offensive war that will have no end but when you have the happiness of lording it over their habitations and making them feel the superiority of my weapons… until the total reduction of a similar and atrocious anthropophagous race” (L.Boff, O casamento do céu com a terra, 2014, p.140).

Why do we remember all this? So that we realize that these exterminating actions continue even today, and we must resist, criticize and fight the criminal policies of the current government, genocidal of indigenous people and of the Brazilian people itself, which has left more than 510 thousand people to die.

The main perpetrators and their accomplices will hardly escape facing the International Tribunal for Crimes against Humanity in The Hague. The outcry is not only Brazilian but international. For such crimes there is no time limit. Wherever they are and at whatever time, they will not escape their severity, zealous, as they have proven to be, of the sacred dignity of the human being.

These native peoples are our masters and doctors when it comes to the relationship with nature of which they feel part and great caretakers. Now that with Covid-19 we are perplexed and lost, not knowing how to move forward, we must consult them. As an indigenous leader, survivor of the criminal war of Don Juan VI, Ailton Krenak, says, they will help us to avert or postpone the end of the world

If we follow the path of destruction of our common home, exploiting it limitlessly and without any scruple, that destiny could be the tragedy of the human species. But we have the hope that made the indigenous people survive to this day. We also hope to survive, transformed by the lessons that Mother Earth has been giving us.

*Leonardo Boff has written El casamiento del cielo y la tierra: cuentos de los pueblos indígenas de Brasil, Mar de Ideias, Rio de Janeiro 2014; El doloroso parto de la Madre Tierra: una sociedad de fraternidad sin fronteras y de amistad social, Vozes 2020.

The principle of compassion and the Covid-19

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                                            Leonardo Boff

Through Covdi-19 Mother Earth is moving a counterattack against humanity as a reaction to the overwhelming attack it has been suffering for centuries. It is simply defending itself. Covif-19 is also a sign and a warning to us: we cannot wage war on her as we have done up to now, for she is destroying the biological basis that sustains her and all other life forms, especially human life. We have to change, otherwise it might send us even more lethal viruses, perhaps even an indefensible one against which we could do nothing. Then we would be as a species seriously endangered. It is not without reason that Covid-19 has struck only humans, as a warning and a lesson. It has already led millions to their deaths, leaving a via-sacra of suffering to millions more, and a lethal threat that could strike everyone else.

The cold numbers hide a sea of suffering for lives lost, loves broken, and projects destroyed. There are not enough tissues to wipe away the tears of the dear relatives or friends who have died and who have not been able to say a final goodbye, or even to celebrate their mourning and accompany them to the grave.

As if the suffering produced for a great part of humanity by the prevailing capitalist and neoliberal system, fiercely competitive and uncooperative, was not enough. It has allowed the richest 1% to personally own 45% of all global wealth, while the poorest 50% get less than 1%, according to a recent report by Crédit Suisse. Let’s listen to the person who best understands capitalism in the 21st century, the Frenchman Thomas Piketty, referring to the Brazilian case. Here, he says, we have the highest concentration of income in the world; the Brazilian millionaires, among the richest 1%, are ahead of the oil millionaires of the Middle East. No wonder the millions of marginalized and excluded that this disastrous inequality produces.

Again the cold numbers cannot hide the hunger, the misery, the high mortality of children and the devastation of nature, especially in the Amazon and other biomes, implicated in this process of plundering natural wealth.

But at this moment, by the intrusion of the coronavirus, humanity is crucified and we hardly know how to take it down from the cross. It is then that we must activate in all of us one of the most sacred virtues of the human being: compassion. It is attested in all peoples and cultures: the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to share their pain and thus alleviate it. 

The greatest Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas, points out in his Summa Theologica that compassion is the highest of all virtues, because it not only opens the person to the other person, but it opens the person to the weakest and most in need of help. In this sense, he concluded, it is an essential characteristic of God.

translatorWe refer to the principle of compassion and not simply to compassion. The principle, in a deeper (philosophical) sense, means an original and essential disposition, generating a permanent attitude that is translated into acts but is never exhausted in them.It is always open to new acts. In other words, the principle has to do with something belonging to human nature. For this is how the English economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) could put it in his book on the Theory of Ethical Sentiments: even the most brutal and anti-communitarian person is not immune to the power of compassion.

Modern reflection has helped us to rescue the principle of compassion. It has become increasingly clear to critical thinking that the human being is not only structured on intellectual-analytical reason, which is necessary to account for the complexity of our world. There is something deeper and more ancestral in us, which appeared more than 200 million years ago when mammals burst into the evolution: the sensitive and cordial reason, which means the capacity to feel, to affect and be affected, to have empathy, sensitivity, and love.

We are rational but essentially sensitive beings. In fact, we build the world on emotional ties that make people and situations precious and valuable. We do not only inhabit the world through work, but through empathy, care and love. This is the place of compassion.

The one who has worked better than us Westerners is Buddhism. Compassion (Karuná) is articulated in two distinct and complementary movements: total detachment and essential care.detachment means letting the other be, not framing him, respecting his life and destiny. Caring for him implies never leaving him alone in his suffering, getting affectively involved with him so that he can live better by bearing his pain more lightly.

The terrible thing about suffering is not so much the suffering itself, but the loneliness in suffering. Compassion consists in not leaving the other alone. It means to be with him, to feel his suffering and anguish, to tell him words of comfort and to give him an affectionate hug.

Today, those who suffer, cry and are discouraged by the tragic fate of life need this compassion and this deep humanitarian sensitivity that is born of sensitive and cordial reason. The words spoken that seem so ordinary gain a new sound, reverberate inside the heart and bring serenity and raise a small ray of hope that everything will pass. The departure was tragic, but the arrival in God is blessed.

The Judeo-Christian tradition testifies to the greatness of compassion. The God of Jesus and Jesus himself show himself to be especially merciful, as revealed in the parables of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) and the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32).

More than ever before, in the face of the devastation wrought by Covid-19 on the entire population, without exception, it becomes urgent to live compassion with the suffering as our most human, sensitive and solidary side.

Leonardo Boff wrote with Werner Müller the book Compassion & Care Principle, Vozes 2009; Covid-19 Mother Earth Strikes Back at Humanity, Vozes 2020.

    &The reunion of the Eagle and the Condor

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                                           Leonardo Boff

Planet Earth, due to the systematic aggression of the last centuries, is in a clear and dangerous decline. The intrusion of Covid-19, directly affecting the entire planet and exclusively the human species, is one of the severe signs that the living Earth is sending us: our way of life is too destructive, leading to the death of millions of human beings and nature beings. We have to change our way of producing, consuming, and living in the only Common House, otherwise we may experience an ecological-social armageddon.

Curiously, in the opposite of this process that some see as the inauguration of a new geological era – the Anthropocene and the Necrocene – that is, the systematic destruction of lives perpetrated by the human being itself, the native peoples are emerging, bearers of a new consciousness and a vitality that has been repressed for centuries. They are biologically remaking themselves and emerging as historical subjects. Their way of relating amicably with nature and Mother Earth has become our masters and doctors. They feel so united to these realities that by defending them they are defending themselves.

The European invaders made a big mistake by calling them “Indians” as if they were inhabitants of a region in India that everyone was looking for, but in fact they called themselves by several names: Tawantinsuyo, Anauhuac, Pindorama, among others. The name Abya Yala prevailed, given by the Kuna people of northern Colombia and Panama, which meant “mature land, living land, land that flourishes”. There were peoples with their names such as Taínos, Tikunas, Zapotecs, Aztecs, Mayas, Olmecs, Toltecs, Mexicans, Aymara, Incas, Quechua Tapajos, Tupis, Guaranis, Mapuches, and hundreds of others.

The adoption of the common name Abya Yala is part of the construction of a common identity, in the diversity of their cultures and expression of the joints that unite them in an immense movement that goes from the north to the south of the American continent. In 2007 they created the Abya Yala Peoples’ Summit.

But over them weighs a vast shadow that was the extermination inflicted by the European invaders. One of the greatest genocides in history took place. About 70 million representatives of these peoples were killed by wars of extermination or by diseases brought by the whites against which they had no immunity, by forced labor and forced crossbreeding.

The most reliable data were gathered by sociologist and educator Moema Viezzer and Canadian sociologist and historian living in Brazil Marcelo Grondin. The book, with preface by Ailton Krenak, is entitled Abya Yala: genocide, resistance and survival of the original peoples of the Americas (Editora Bambual, Rio de Janeiro 2021). They collect the data on the genocide of the two Americas. We have given a short summary:                                                                                                 

In the Caribbean in 1492 when the colonizers arrived, there were four million indigenous people. Years later there were none left. They were all killed, especially in Haiti.

In Mexico in 1500, there were 25 million indigenous people (Aztecs, Toltecs and others).

In the Andes in 1532 there were 15 million Indians, in a few years only one million remained.

In Central America in 1492 in Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama there were between 5.6-13 million indigenous people, of which 90% were killed.

In Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Paraguay, on average about one million Indians died, in some countries more, in others less.

In the Lesser Antilles such as in the Bahamas, Barbados, Curaçao, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Virgin Islands, they experienced the same almost total extermination.

In Brazil when the Portuguese arrived in these lands, there were about 6 million original peoples of dozens of ethnic groups with their languages. The violent mismatch reduced them to less than a million. Today, unfortunately, due to the carelessness of the authorities, this process of death continues, victims of the coronavirus. A wise man of the Yanomami nation, the shaman Davi Kopenawa Yanomamy relates in his book The Fall of Heaven what the shamans of his people are glimpsing: the race of humanity is heading toward its end.

In the United States of America there were about 18 million native peoples in 1607, and soon after only two million survived.

In Canada in 1492 there were two million native inhabitants, and in 1933 there were only 120,000.

The book tells not only of the immeasurable tragedy, but especially of the resistance and, in modern times, of the various organized summits between these native peoples, from the south and the north of the Americas. In doing so, they reinforce each other, rescue the ancestral wisdom of the shamans, the traditions, and the memories.

A legend-prophecy expresses the reunion of these peoples: the one between the Eagle, representing North America, and the Condor, representing South America. Both were generated by the Sun and the Moon. They lived happily flying together. But fate separated them. The Eagle dominated the spaces and almost led to the Condor’s extermination.

However, this same destiny willed that in the 1990s, when the great summits began to take place between the different native peoples, from the south and the north, the Condor and the Eagle met again and began to fly together. From their love was born the Central American Quetzal, one of the most beautiful birds in nature, a bird from the Mayan cosmovision that expresses the union of heart and mind, art and science, masculine and feminine. It is the beginning of a new time, of the great reconciliation of human beings with each other, as brothers and sisters, caretakers in nature, united by the same beating heart and dwelling in the same generous Pachamama, Mother Earth.

Who knows, in the midst of the tribulations of the present time in which our culture has found its insurmountable limits and feels urged to change course, this prophecy may be the anticipation of a good end for us all. We will still fly together, the Eagle of the North with the Condor of the South under the beneficent light of the Sun that will show us the best path.

Leonardo Boff wrote The Marriage between Heaven and Earth: tales of the indigenous peoples of Brazil, Mar de Ideias, Rio de Janeiro 2014.

In the midst of the pandemic: the urgency of the Spirit of Life

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                           Leonardo Boff

In the midst of the pandemic with thousands of deaths every day, we celebrate the feast of Pentecost, of the life-giving and healing Spirit. His action with all those who are on the front lines in the fight against Covid-19 is urgent to keep them alive, protected, and with the heroic spirit to continue in their mission of saving lives, putting their own at risk.

The liturgical hymn of today’s feast speaks of him being the “great comforter and the sweet refresher”.More than ever he must show himself with these gifts to all who work in hospitals.

Let us reflect for a moment on the nature of the Holy Spirit and his relevance to life and to the present dramatic moment.

First of all it is important to say that the Spirit was the first to come into this world and is still coming. He came and pitched his tent on Mary of Nazareth. That is to say, he fixed his permanent dwelling place in her (Lk 1:35) and raised the feminine to the height of the Divine.

From this presence, the holy humanity of the Son of God originated. The Word pitched his tent (Jn 1:14) in the man Jesus, begotten by Mary. At one moment in history, she, the simple woman of Nazareth, is the temple of the living God: Two divine Persons dwell in her: the Spirit who makes her “blessed among all women” (Lk 1:42) and the Son of God, growing within her, whose mother she truly is.     

Then the Spirit descended on Jesus at the baptism by John the Baptist and inflamed him for his liberating mission. He descended on the first community gathered in Jerusalem on the feast of Pentecost that we now celebrate, giving birth to the Church. He continued to come down, regardless of whether the people were Christians and baptized or not, as happened to the Roman official Cornelius, still a pagan (Acts 11:45).

And throughout history He has always come before the missionaries, making sure that in the hearts of the people love prevailed, justice was cultivated, and compassion was lived out. Once he entered history, he never left it. He takes what belongs to Jesus, passes it on, but also “announces new things to come” (Jn 16:13).

It is by the Spirit that prophets burst forth, poets sing, artists are created, and people practice what is good, just and true. From the Spirit are shaped the saints, especially those who give their lives for the lives of others, like now those who work, almost to the point of exhaustion, in the hospitals of Brazil and the world.

It is also by the Spirit that old and crepuscular institutions suddenly renew themselves and provide needed service to communities as Pope Francis is doing and also other Christian churches.

The world is pregnant with the Spirit even as the spirit of iniquity perseveres in its work, hostile to life and all that is sacred and divine. This is happening in our country with a government that is friendlier to death than to life.

The poor feel most penalized at this moment, without an adequate house to live in, without knowing what they will eat the next day, without a job and without any security against the attacks of the lethal virus.

Today there are millions of them. The poor cry out. And God is the God of the cry, that is, the one who listens to the cry of the oppressed. He leaves his transcendence and comes down to listen to them and to free them, as in the case of the captivity in Egypt (Cf. Ex 4:3). It is the Spirit who makes us cry out Abba, dear Father (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). That is why the Spirit is the father and the godfather of the poor (pater pauperum), as the Church sings today on this feast.

He certainly does not do it miraculously, but he gives them courage and resistance, the will to fight and to conquer. He does not let his arms go down. He sent the light to the hearts of the poor to discover the right initiatives, to persist, and in fact to come alive until today; if the indigenous people could not be totally exterminated and now, because of the negligence of the oficial authorities, are at serious risk, if the Afro-descendants could not succumb to the weight of slavery, it was because inside them there was an energy of resistance and liberation, what the hymn calls the gifts and light of hearts: the Holy Spirit, no matter what name we give it.

To the desperate He shows Himself as a comforter without equal. He doesn’t assist them from outside. He has come to dwell within them as a guest to help and advise them, for this is His mission. In the great difficulties and crises, He announces Himself as a reference of peace, of calm: a refresher, for so says the Pentecost hymn that I am quoting verbatim.

He appears as the great comforter. How often, in these dark times of epidemics, the hardships of life make us fill our eyes with tears. When we lose a loved one without saying good-bye and without doing the necessary mourning, or when we experience deep frustrations, affective or professional, or when we are unemployed, we seem to fall into an abyss. It is in these moments that we must plead: “Come Spirit, be our comfort; wipe away our tears and cool our sobs.

The Holy Spirit came once and keeps coming permanently. But in dramatic moments like ours, under Covid-19 we must cry out, “Come Holy Spirit and renew the face of the earth and save our country and the world.

If the Spirit doesn’t come, we will be condemned to see the landscape described by the prophet Ezekiel (c.37): the earth covered with corpses and bones everywhere. But when he comes, the corpses are clothed with life and the desert becomes a vergel. The poor will receive his justice, the sick will gain health, and the sinners, which are all of us, will receive forgiveness and grace.

This is our faith and even more, our undying hope, united with a deep solidarity with all the victims of Covid-19 around the world.

Leonardo Boff is a theologian who wrote The Holy Spirit: inner fire, giver of life, and father of the poor, Vozes 2013, Orbis Books 2014..