Luiz Henrique Eloy Amado is an Indigenous attorney from the Terena Peoples’ village of Ipegue, Brazil. Eloy Terena, as he is commonly known, has first-hand knowledge on the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest and an extensive experience on defending criminalized Indigenous grass-root leaders and representing Indigenous communities in land rights cases before Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court.
Since August 2019, thousands of fires have raged through the amazon, devastating many Indigenous communities and lands. So far in 2019, Brazil reported 83,000 fires, a 77% increase from the same period last year.
In this interview, Cultural Survival’s Bi’ani Lopez speaks with Eloy Terena on how the Amazon fires and the policies of the Bolsonaro administration have affected his people, and about his testimony at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington DC, a delegation that was organized by the Indian Law Resource Centre. Translation was conducted by Miranda Carman, with additional translation by Armstrong Wiggins, both from the Indian Law Resource Center.
Producer: Shaldon Ferris
Research and Script: Bi'ani Lopez
Interviewee: Elroy Terena
Translation: Armstrong Wiggins and Miranda Carman
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