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Brazil: President’s Assault on Indigenous Rights Threatens Amazon

HeadlineJan 04, 2019

Brazil’s newly inaugurated far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, held his first-ever Cabinet meeting on Thursday, as defenders of the Amazon warned his administration is moving to hand vast swaths of rainforest over to Brazil’s powerful agribusiness sector. Just hours after taking the oath of office, Bolsonaro transferred decision-making over the regulation and creation of indigenous land claims from the Justice Ministry to the Agriculture Ministry. The move threatens indigenous groups who live on 13 percent of Brazilian territory. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro has dropped LGBTQ protections from the mandate of his Human Rights Ministry. He’s pledged to speed the privatization of publicly owned industries, to roll back pension benefits while raising the retirement age, and he’s seeking to toughen prison sentencing guidelines.

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