A British warship arrives in Guyana as tensions heat up in border dispute with Venezuela
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — A British warship arrived in Guyana on Friday afternoon amid rising tensions from a border dispute between the former British colony and Venezuela.
The HMS Trent’s visit led Venezuela to begin military exercises a day earlier in the eastern Caribbean near its border with Guyana as the Venezuelan government presses its claim to a huge swath of its smaller neighbor.
Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed concern Friday about the situation and urged the two South American countries to return to dialogue. It said other nations should avoid “military activities” that support either side.
Brazil’s statement called on Guyana and Venezuela to stay true to the Argyle Declaration, an agreement signed earlier this month in which their leaders said they would solve the border dispute through nonviolent means.
The dispute is over Essequibo, a sparsely populated region that is the size of Florida and rich in oil and minerals. Venezuela has long claimed it was cheated out of the territory when Europeans and the U.S. set the border.
The U.K. Defense Ministry has said that the ship is visiting Guyana as part of a series of engagements in the region and that the vessel will conduct training exercises with Guyana’s military.
On its account on X, formerly Twitter, the ship posted photos of sailors welcoming Britain’s ambassador to Guyana and the chief of staff of Guyana’s Defense Force, Brig. Gen. Omar Khan. They were hosted at a formal lunch and provided with a tour of the ship’s capabilities.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Khan said such operations “remain an important part of the regional security spectrum of activities. It has been so in the past and will continue in the future.”
Officials have been tight-lipped on the nature of the exercises.
The warship is generally used to intercept pirates and drug smugglers, and it recently conducted joint exercises with the navies of several West African nations. It is equipped with cannons and a landing pad for helicopters and drones and can carry around 50 marines.
In a statement late Thursday, Guyanese President Irfaan Ali said Venezuela “had nothing to fear” from the ship’s activities in Guyanese waters.
“Guyana has long been engaged in partnerships with regional and international states aimed at enhancing internal security,” Ali said. “These partnerships pose a threat to no one and are in no way intended to be aggressive.”
But Venezuela on Thursday began military exercises involving 5,000 troops in the eastern Caribbean, citing the visit by the British patrol ship.
In a nationally televised speech, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accused Guyana of betraying the spirit of the Argyle Declaration.
“We will not let anyone push us around,” Maduro said, surrounded by military commanders. He described Britain’s decision to send a warship as a threat from a “decaying former empire.”
Guyana has controlled Essequibo for decades, but Venezuela revived its historical claim to the region earlier this month through a referendum in which voters were asked whether the territory should be turned into a Venezuelan state.
Critics of Maduro say the socialist leader has reignited the border dispute to draw attention from the nation’s internal problems as Venezuela prepares for a presidential election next year. Maduro intends to run for a third term.
Venezuela says it was the victim of a land theft conspiracy in 1899, when Guyana was a British colony and arbitrators from Britain, Russia and the United States decided the boundary.
Venezuelan officials also argue that an agreement among Venezuela, Britain and the then colony of British Guiana signed in 1966 to resolve the dispute effectively nullified the original arbitration.
Guyana maintains the initial accord is legal and binding and asked the United Nations’ top court in 2018 to rule it as such, but a decision is years away.
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Associated Press journalist Bert Wilkinson in Georgetown, Guyana, contributed to this report.
Backers blast halt to Brazil trials of Chinese-made vaccine
SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s health regulator has halted clinical trials of the potential coronavirus vaccine CoronaVac, citing an “adverse, serious event.”
Adversaries of President Jair Bolsonaro said they feared the decision — posted Monday night on Anvisa’s website — was motivated not by science but by the leader’s political hostility to the country and state involved in producing the vaccine candidate.
The potential vaccine is being developed by Chinese biopharmaceutical firm Sinovac and in Brazil would be mostly produced by Sao Paulo’s state-run Butantan Institute. About 10,000 volunteers are taking part in the phase three tests in one of the nations hardest hit by COVID-19.
Sao Paulo state health authorities said in a press conference on Tuesday that Anvisa sent a single email at 8:40 p.m. saying the tests should be halted. They also said the incident with one of the trial volunteers was unrelated to the trials.
“Such news coming the way it did causes our surprise, insecurity and, in our case, indignation,” said Dimas Covas, the head of the Butantan Institute.
He said it was “impossible” that the volunteer’s incident had any relation to the tests.
Anvisa did not describe the Oct. 29 event that prompted the halt. But its president, Antonio Barra Torres, a close ally of Bolsonaro, denied on Tuesday that politics was involved, calling it a “purely technical decision.”
“This no joke,” Torres said. “Clear, precise and complete documents need to be sent to us, which did not happen.”
He said trials will resume only after an independent international review of the case.
Covas said on TV Cultura late Monday that a volunteer had died, but on Tuesday he said he had just been giving a hypothetical example and could not confirm details about the case for ethical reasons.
Sinovac issued a short statement in China on Tuesday saying it was in touch with Brazilian authorities and insisted, “The clinical study in Brazil is strictly carried out in accordance with GCP requirements and we are confident in the safety of the vaccine,” referring to Good Clinical Practice, a set of international standards for ethics and data quality in clinical research.
Temporary halts of drug and vaccine testing are relatively common. In research involving thousands of participants, some are likely to fall ill. Pausing a study allows researchers to investigate whether an illness is a side effect or a coincidence. Last month, two drugmakers resumed testing of their prospective coronavirus vaccines in the U.S. after they were halted earlier.
Sao Paulo health authorities said they met with Anvisa leaders on Tuesday, but received no feedback on when the tests will be allowed to continue.
“This is unpleasant news; it worries all volunteers that enrolled to take the shot,” Covas said. “This might raise doubts among those that still planned to volunteer.”
The CoronaVac shot has already stirred controversy in Brazil, where President Bolsonaro has cast doubt on its prospective effectiveness. He publicly rejected it last month, saying Brazilians would not be used as guinea pigs. The declaration followed news that his health minister, Eduardo Pazuello, had agreed to purchase CoronaVac doses produced locally by Butantan.
Bolsonaro has often expressed mistrust of China, particularly on the campaign trail in 2018, although he has softened his rhetoric somewhat in office. And the governor of the state producing the vaccine, Sao Paulo’s. João Doria, is a political rival and an outspoken critic of the president’s pandemic response.
Bolsonaro took another jab at the Sinovac shot on Tuesday.
“Death, invalidity, anomaly. This is the vaccine that Doria wanted to force all in Sao Paulo to take,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “The president said the vaccine should never be mandatory. Another one that Jair Bolsonaro wins.”
João Gabbardo, the executive-secretary of Sao Paulo’s COVID-19 committee and until months ago the No. 2 at Brazil’s Health Ministry, criticized Bolsonaro’s statement without mentioning him.
“What shocks us is that while everyone is rushing, doing what is possible so we have this vaccine available to the population, some people are betting on the opposite, coincidentally on the same day that the Sao Paulo government announces the arrival of the first doses of the vaccine,” he said.
“Some people celebrate the fact that a death appeared to create this mess and try to denigrate a vaccine that is being produced in this partnership with the Chinese lab. It is very sad that I have to answer in such way.”
Former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, one of the leaders of Gov. Doria’s center-right party, said Anvisa’s decision appeared to be unscientific.
“What is happenning is regrettable; the politization of the vaccine that will rid us of the coronavirus…,” Cardoso said on Twitter. “Anvisa needs to explain. And quick.”
CoronaVac is being tested in seven Brazilian states, plus the federal district where the capital Brasilia lies.
Following the imbroglio last month surrounding the CoronaVac shot, Anvisa authorized the import from China of 6 million doses. The potential vaccine cannot be administered to Brazilians as it isn’t yet approved locally, the agency said at the time.
Earlier Monday, Sao Paulo state’s health secretary, Jean Gorinchteyn, said the first 120,000 CoronaVac shots would arrive at Sao Paulo’s international airport Nov. 20, though he said, “They will only be taken to the public after a final authorization from Brazil’s health regulator.”
The secretary added that nearly all of the volunteers who were given two doses of the vaccine produced antibodies thought to protect people from the virus.
Sao Paulo is also importing raw material to produce40 million CoronaVac shots, which is due to start arriving Nov. 27.
APNewsBreak: Informant in top Venezuela case lied to feds
MEDELLIN, Colombia (AP) — A key informant against one of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s closest aides has been accused of lying to his law enforcement handlers in a case involving millions of dollars transported on private jets in violation of U.S. sanctions, The Associated Press has learned.
The development could hurt the case against Oil Minister Tareck El Aissami, who the U.S. considers one of Venezuela’s most corrupt power brokers, giving oxygen to claims by the nation’s socialist elite that the U.S. is resorting to trumped-up charges to pursue its goal of regime change.
It also follows embarrassing revelations in another sanctions case in which a federal judge excoriated the same unit of Manhattan prosecutors targeting El Aissami for withholding exculpatory information about an Iranian businessman seen as a nexus in growing ties between the Islamic republic and Venezuela.
Alejandro Marin, a Venezuelan-born pilot and businessman, was arrested Sept. 19 in Miami on three counts of knowingly making false statements to U.S. federal agents, according to court filings.
A sworn affidavit accompanying the Sept. 4 arrest order doesn’t mention Venezuela or El Aissami.
But it accuses Marin of lying about the equivalent of $140,000 that went missing from a package of 1.3 million euros in cash that he transported by private jet to the U.S. in July 2018 at the direction of federal law enforcement.
Marin, 46, runs a chartered flight business out of Miami’s Opa Locka executive airport. He was signed up as a confidential source to help investigate then Vice President El Aissami and his alleged frontman, businessman Samark Lopez, according to an individual familiar with the case speaking anonymously to discuss the ongoing probe.
The Trump administration sanctioned both men as drug kingpins in 2017, seizing hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. bank accounts, two yachts, a private plane and Miami real estate it said were the illegal proceeds of cocaine shipments to Mexican cartels coordinated at the highest levels of Venezuela’s government and military.
It later charged them with violating those same sanctions by allegedly using U.S.-based charter companies to arrange private flights on American-registered aircraft to Russia, Turkey and inside Venezuela during Maduro’s 2018 presidential campaign, which the opposition boycotted amid allegations of fraud and vote-rigging.
Both men are on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 10 most wanted fugitives list. Both have denied any wrongdoing and Lopez even appealed unsuccessfully to the U.S. Supreme Court to try and block kidnapping victims of Colombian rebels from taking a $318 million chunk of assets frozen in the U.S. following his designation as a “drug kingpin” by the U.S. Treasury Department.
A former student activist schooled in radical politics by his father, a Druse Syrian-Lebanese immigrant, the 45-year-old El Aissami has risen steadily through the ranks of Venezuela’s red-shirted revolution. Along the way he’s earned a reputation for ruthlessness but also pragmatism that stands in sharp contrast to his anti-imperialist sloganeering.
Perhaps more than any other of the dozens of Venezuelan officials under investigation, he’s been a thorn in the side of U.S. law enforcement, which has spent much of the past decade looking for evidence tying him to Colombia’s cartels and Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
But neither he nor Lopez have been charged for drug trafficking even as prosecutors in March added Maduro and others to sweeping narcoterrorist conspiracy charges effectively accusing Venezuela’s government of being a criminal enterprise at the service of drug traffickers and terrorist groups.
Christian Dunham, a federal public defender representing Marin, declined to comment but said his client is expected to appear in court for a pre-trial detention hearing on Sept. 30.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.
According to the arrest order, approximately $140,000 of the cash owed to the U.S. government was removed from the packages Marin helped transport on orders of a foreign associate identified only as “Individual 1.” U.S investigators instructed Marin to try and recover the missing funds by having them wired to an account under the control of Homeland Security Investigations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is the lead agency for financial crimes stretching beyond U.S. borders.
After two wire transfers were rejected, the money was finally deposited months later to a company controlled by Marin, who never told investigators. About $90,000 came from an organization affiliated with an unnamed foreign soccer team associated with “Individual 1,” according to the testimony of HSI Special Agent Timothy McCann.
Two years later, federal officials in August 2020 asked Marin about the funds that went missing from the package labeled “Marin.” In a series of phone calls with U.S. attorneys and in a subsequent meeting in Manhattan he reiterated that he didn’t recover any of the missing cash.
However, on Aug. 28, he changed his story and said that after further consultation with his accountant he recalled that he had in fact received $130,000 from “Individual-1,” part of which came from the organization associated with the soccer club.
McCann didn’t name the soccer club in his testimony. El Aissami, a huge soccer fan, in 2015 was added to the roster for a first-division Venezuelan soccer team from the state of Aragua, which he governed from 2012 to 2017. A spokeswoman for the soccer team wouldn’t comment.
It’s not clear what impact, if any, the new revelations will have on the sanctions-busting case against El Aissami, Lopez and three co-defendants who are currently in U.S. federal custody. Only one of them, Victor Mones, owner of the Florida-registered American Charter Services, has pleaded guilty.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Houle in a hearing this week for one of the co-defendants asked Judge Alvin Hellerstein for more time to produce evidence it is required to hand over to defendants that may help them prove their innocence.
“Your Honor, given the developing situation with the confidential source, I don’t want to rule out the possibility that additional information could be collected in the next two weeks,” she said, without mentioning any arrest or referring to the source by name.
Judge Hellerstein, responding to complaints by the defendant’s attorney that the government has been dragging its feet for more than a year, gave the government a final 30-day extension, expressing disgust that it hadn’t already collected all information.
“After that, there may be repercussions,” he said.
Bonnie Klapper, a former federal prosecutor in New York, said the charges against a government informant for lying “is obviously detrimental to the government’s case but it’s not a death knell.”
She likened the development to what happened in another high profile Venezuela case, the narcotics trial of First Lady Cilia Flores’ nephews, where the government had to tear up mid-way a cooperation agreement with a father-son informant team who were also found lying to the government. The case nonetheless proceeded, and the two so-called “narco nephews” were convicted by a jury and sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2017.
She said it’s likely the terrorism and international narcotics unit in the southern district of New York is acting aggressively to disclose the misconduct in light of criticism it tried to bury evidence in the case against Ali Sadr Hshemi Nejad. Prosecutors in June abruptly dropped charges against the Iranian businessman after he had been convicted over what it described as “disclosure-related issues” that would’ve altered his defense.
“The government did the right thing by disclosing this,” Klapper said about Marin. “Too often this sort of stuff gets buried under the rug.”
Virus disrupting Rio's Carnival for first time in a century
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — A cloud of uncertainty that has hung over Rio de Janeiro throughout the coronavirus pandemic has been lifted, but gloom remains — the annual Carnival parade of flamboyant samba schools won’t be held in February.
And while the decision is being characterized as a postponement of the event, no new date has been set.
Rio’s League of Samba Schools, LIESA, announced Thursday night that the spread of the coronavirus has made it impossible to safely hold the traditional parades that are a cultural mainstay and, for many, a source of livelihood.
“Carnival is a party upon which many humble workers depend. The samba schools are community institutions, and the parades are just one detail of all that,” Luiz Antonio Simas, a historian who specializes in Rio’s Carnival, said in an interview. “An entire cultural and productive chain was disrupted by COVID.”
Rio’s City Hall has yet to announce a decision about the Carnival street parties that also take place across the city. But its tourism promotion agency said in a statement to The Associated Press on Sept. 17 that without a coronavirus vaccine, it is uncertain when large public events can resume.
Brazil’s first confirmed coronavirus case was Feb. 26, one day after this year’s Carnival ended. As the number of infections grew, the samba schools that participate in the glitzy annual parade halted preparations for the 2021 event.
Nearly all of Rio’s samba schools are closely linked to working class communities. Their processions include elaborate floats accompanied by tireless drummers and costumed dancers who sing at the top of their lungs to impress a panel of judges. Tens of thousands of spectators pack the bleachers of the arena, known as the Sambadrome, while tens of millions watch on television.
Before the schools began competing in the 1930s, Carnival was celebrated in dance halls and haphazardly on the streets, Simas said. The parades entered the Sambadrome in the 1980s, and have become Rio’s quintessential Carnival display.
The immense labor required for each show was already stymied by restrictions on gatherings that Rio’s governor imposed in March. Even with those measures, Rio’s metropolitan region, home to 13 million people, so far has recorded more than 15,000 deaths from COVID-19.
Beneath the Sambadrome’s bleachers, the city created a homeless shelter for the vulnerable population during the pandemic.
Samba schools suspended float construction, costume sewing, dance rehearsals, and also social projects. The Mangueira school’s program in the favela near downtown Rio that teaches music to children — keeping them away from crime, and cultivating the school’s future drummers — hasn’t held classes since March.
The pulse of entire suburban Rio cities like Nilopolis, whose population of 160,000 cheers the Beija-Flor samba school, has faded, Simas said.
Some performers resorted to odd jobs and gigs. Diogo Jesús, the lead dancer referred to as “master of ceremonies” in the Mocidade school, couldn’t make rent without his income from private events. He started driving for Uber and sewing facemasks to sell at a fair.
“It was a blow. We live Carnival all year round, and many people when they realized everything would stop wound up getting sick or depressed,” Jesus said in an interview inside his house in Madureira, a neighborhood in northern Rio. “Carnival is our life.”
The last year Rio’s Carnival was suspended was 1912, following the death of the foreign relations minister. The mayor of Rio, at the time Brazil’s capital, postponed by two months all licenses for the popular dance associations’ Carnival parties, according to Luís Cláudio Villafañe, a diplomat and author of the book “The Day They Delayed Carnival.” The mayor also voiced opposition to unregulated celebrations, but many Rio residents partied in the streets anyway.
Revelers were undeterred during World War II. And they poured into the street every year during more than two decades of military dictatorship, until 1985, with government censors reviewing costumes, floats and song lyrics.
Then came coronavirus.
“We must await the coming months for definition about if there will be a vaccine or not, and when there will be immunization,” LIESA’s president, Jorge Castanheira, told reporters in Rio on Thursday. “We don’t have the safety conditions to set a date.”
The 2020 coronavirus already forced Rio’s City Hall to scrap traditional plans for its second-biggest party, New Year’s Eve, which draws millions of people to Copacabana beach for dazzling fireworks. Earlier this month, the city’s tourism promotion agency Riotur announced that main tourist spots will instead display light and music shows to be broadcast over the internet.
Delay of the Carnival parade will deprive Rio state of much needed tourism revenue. In 2020, Carnival drew 2.1 million visitors and generated 4 billion reais ($725 million) in economic activity, according to Riotur. A statement from the agency Thursday provided no further clarity on the fate of the Carnival street parties.
Some parties are small — for example one including a few dozen dog owners exhibiting their pets wearing wigs or funny hats. But most feature amps blasting music to throngs of thousands who dance, kiss and swill booze in a crush of celebration. The biggest one boasts more than two million partygoers.
Rita Fernandes, president of Os Blocos da Sebastiana, said her association already canceled its 11 street parties that together draw 1.5 million revelers. Most others groups will follow, she said.
“We cannot be irresponsible and bring the multitudes to the street,” she said, pointing to Europe’s second wave of contagion.
After several weeks of declining daily infections, Rio authorities have begun expressing concern about an uptick. Public spaces such as beaches have been crowded in violation of pandemic restrictions.
A drummer in Mangueira’s samba school, Laudo Braz Neto, said the children he instructed before the pandemic are listless, and he knows there is no way to put on Carnival without being able to safely gather.
“Carnival will only really happen when the whole world can travel. It’s a spectacle the world watches, brings income and movement here,” he said. “I have no hope for 2021.”
by AP
Peru's Indigenous turn to ancestral remedies to fight virus
PUCALLPA, Peru (AP) — As COVID-19 spread quickly through Peru’s Amazon, the Indigenous Shipibo community decided to turn to the wisdom of their ancestors.
Hospitals were far away, short on doctors and running out of beds. Even if they could get in, many of the ill were too fearful to go, convinced that stepping foot in a hospital would only lead to death.
So Mery Fasabi gathered herbs, steeped them in boiling water and instructed her loved ones to breathe in the vapors. She also made syrups of onion and ginger to help clear congested airways.
“We had knowledge about these plants, but we didn’t know if they’d really help treat COVID,” the teacher said. “With the pandemic we are discovering new things.”
The coronavirus pandemic’s ruthless march through Peru — the country with the world’s highest per-population confirmed COVID-19 mortality rate — has compelled many Indigenous groups to find their own remedies. Decades of under-investment in public health care, combined with skepticism of modern medicine, mean many are not getting standard treatments like oxygen therapy to treat severe virus cases.
In the Ucayali region, government rapid response teams deployed to a handful of Indigenous communities have found infection rates as high as 80% through antibody testing. Food and medicine donations have reached only a fraction of the population. Many say the only state presence they have seen is from a group responsible for collecting bodies of the dead.
At a spot known as “Kilometer 20” near the city of Pucallpa, a new cemetery has sprung to life with the remains of about 400 people.
“We’ve always been forgotten,” said Roberto Wikleff, 49, a Shipibo man who turned to Fasabi’s treatments to help treat his COVID-19. “We don’t exist for them.”
Peru is home to one of Latin America’s largest Indigenous populations, whose ancestors lived in the Andean country before the arrival of Spanish colonists. Entire tribes were wiped out by infectious diseases introduced by the Europeans. Today many live and work in urban areas, but others reside in remote parts of the Amazon that have few doctors, let alone the capacity to do complex molecular testing or treatment for the virus.
Wikleff said the 10 doctors, nurses and aides who usually staff a nearby clinic abandoned their posts when the coronavirus arrived. The Shipibo had tried to prevent COVID-19’s entrance by blocking roads and isolating themselves. But in May, he and others nonetheless came down with fevers, coughs, difficulty breathing and headaches.
A month later, he was still feeling ill and turned to Fasabi, who along with 15 other volunteers had set up a makeshift treatment center.
“I was taken there in agony,” he recalled.
The Shipibo highlight the use of a plant known locally as “matico.” The buddleja globosa plant has green leaves and a tangerine-colored flower. Fasabi said that by no means are the remedies a cure, but their holistic approach is proving effective. Unlike in hospitals, volunteers equipped in masks get close to patients, giving them words of encouragement and touching them through massage.
“We are giving tranquility to our patients,” she said.
Juan Carlos Salas, director of Ucayali’s regional health agency, said efforts to expand hospital capacity have proven only marginally successful. The region of about a half million people located along a winding river had just 18 ICU beds at the start of the pandemic and today has around 28. A shortage of specialists means they have not been able to staff all the beds.
At the peak of the outbreak in May and June, around 15 people were dying a day, he said. Overall, about 14,000 cases have been diagnosed, likely a vast undercount.
“We didn’t have a way of tending to patients,” he said. “We couldn’t accept more.”
He said transportation is one of the biggest hurdles in treating Indigenous groups, some of which can only be reached by helicopter or an eight-hour boat ride. Pucallpa’s bustling port where wood, bananas and other fruit are loaded onto ships for export is believed to be one main source of contagion.
Of about 59,000 rapid antibody tests, some 2,500 were administered to Indigenous groups.
“We were surprised,” Salas said. “The majority had been infected.”
Lizardo Cauper, president of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest, said that of about 500,000 Indigenous people living in the Amazon, his group estimates that 147,000 have been infected by the virus and 3,000 have died.
While the lucky recover with ancestral remedies, the less fortunate often die at home. A government team travels from one spartan, thatch-roofed home to the next, plucking the dead from the beds and chairs where they took their last breaths. The poor are taken to the COVID-19 cemetery and interred in the burnt-orange dirt.
Rider Sol Sol, 48, said he and a crew of gravediggers buried up to 30 people a day at the height of the pandemic. The father of four had been out of work before getting this gravedigger’s job.
“I give thanks to God that I have a job,” he said.
These days, with the death count lower, he is the only man working most days. Alone amidst rows of white crosses, he tries not to let his mind drift toward the what ifs. The bodies come with a name and a number and he does not ponder their stories.
He keeps his mask on, digs into the earth and drinks from a bottle with matico.
Amazon Indigenous group patrols to expel invading loggers
ALTO RIO GUAMA INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil (AP) — A bit after sunrise, dozens of Indigenous Tembé men began preparing for the important day ahead. They danced, chanted and donned matching black T-shirts before setting off on motorbikes into Brazil’s Amazon forest.
Self-declared “forest guardians,” their aim was to find and expel illegal loggers and miners within their territory on the eastern edge of Brazil’s Para state. Emblazoned on their T-shirts was their group’s name — Ka’Azar, which in their language means “Owners of the Forest.”
“For a long time, since I was born, I heard my father and the elders talk about the need to fight the loggers in our lands,” said Ronaldo Tembé, a 21-year-old member of the 40-man patrol. “We are trying to combat deforestation within our reserve, which is becoming increasingly precarious.”
The Tembé began these patrols last year as increasing encroachment on their territory and lax enforcement during President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration prompted them to take matters into their own hands. Put on hold during the pandemic, the patrols resumed last week.
“We created the guardians, so these young men can inspect the land, to show where the invasions and illegal loggers are,” said village leader Sérgio Tembé, adding that Bolsonaro’s staunch support for Amazon development has emboldened the illegal activity.
Accompanied by an Associated Press photographer, the men rode for four hours before they heard barking dogs in the distance. Leaving their motorbikes, they walked along a trail until they found a wiry man in shorts and sandals near a huge felled tree.
Altemir Freitas Mota, 52, claimed the destruction wasn’t his doing, and that he was merely gathering vines to make brooms and chairs. But he conceded that he had seen the loggers and, surrounded by the Tembé men brandishing rifles and machetes, agreed to guide them to their camp.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region may have reached a 14-year high in the 12 months through July, according to preliminary data published last month by the country’s space agency. It calculated the Brazilian Amazon lost 9,216 square kilometers (3,558 square miles) of vegetation in that period.
Bolsonaro has repeatedly said he believes it is folly for relatively small Indigenous populations to control vast swaths of rain forest. The Tembé people’s Alto Rio Guama territory spans some 2,800 square kilometers (1,080 square miles), nearly the size of Rhode Island, and has about 1,700 residents, according to the advocacy group Socio-Environmental Institute. The Tembé are the western branch of the Tenetehara Indigenous group.
“No one is against giving due protection and land to our Indian brothers, but in the way it was done, and today it reflects 14% of national territory demarcated as Indigenous land, it is rather abusive,” Bolsonaro said earlier this year.
He has also blasted Brazil’s environmental regulator, IBAMA, for seizing lawbreakers’ logging equipment or setting it afire, which is permitted under law. His administration’s recently submitted 2021 budget proposal for IBAMA’s environmental control and monitoring is down 25% from 2018, the final year of the prior administration.
Sérgio Tembé, the village leader, told the AP that Bolsonaro’s stance has motivated criminals in the region to exploit their lands. Then he offered a plea to Bolsonaro.
“Our land is invaded, President, because you gave incentives for the loggers, the land grabbers to invade,” he said. “So stop it, President. You need to have respect for us.”
Initially, the Tembé destroyed the trespassers’ tractors and other heavy equipment too, but doing so brought death threats and attempted ambushes. Last September, public prosecutors issued an official request for the Federal Police to conduct an urgent operation to protect the Tembé from loggers’ attacks. They also recommended that the Tembé patrols limit their activities to monitoring and recording invasions, then alerting prosecutors, who can work to force action from federal authorities.
But even patrolling can be dangerous for the Tembé in a place where public oversight is scant, and where killing is an all-too-common recourse for lawbreakers. Several of the Guajajara Indigenous people, whose forest guardians defend their own land in neighboring Maranhao state, have been killed in the past year.
Mota, the man who said he’d seen the loggers and knew where their camp was, told the Tembé patrol that those at the camp were unarmed. Still, the Tembé kept their rifles at the ready as they walked an hour through the forest. They paused to discuss strategy as they drew near, and some painted their faces red with oil from the seeds of achiote pods.
They came upon a clearing where two large tarps were propped up with branches over a makeshift kitchen and sleeping area. There they found six loggers, a female cook and her son. Mota took a seat beside them.
The Tembé men explained to the loggers how felling trees harms both the environment and their people, while using their cellphones to record the exchange. Then they demanded the loggers leave their territory.
“We just ask you to leave from what is ours, and we stay in peace, no trouble with no one,” one of the Tembé men told the logging camp’s leader, Zeca Pilão, who stood shirtless with his arms crossed.
The Tembé will return and give one further warning, said Sérgio Tembé. If the loggers fail to comply, they will burn the loggers’ equipment and camp, and hold the government responsible, he added.
“Up until now, we don’t have support and we will never stop protecting our forest,” said Ronaldo Tembé. “We will never stop doing what’s right, never stop allowing our forest to breathe.”
Brazil Indigenous group celebrates 6 months without COVID-19
ALTO RIO GUAMA INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil (AP) — A group of Tembé men armed with bows and shotguns arrived on motorcycles at the wooden gate blocking access to their villages in Brazil’s Amazon. One of them removed the padlock and slipped the chain off the gate.
“You are invited,” 33-year-old Regis Tufo Moreira Tembé said to a visitor. “What we are doing is for everyone, and for our good.”
The gate has seldom swung open since March, which helps to explain why the Tembé have gone six months without a single confirmed coronavirus infection. To celebrate that milestone, they were preparing a festival and invited an Associated Press photographer to observe.
The Tembé are the western branch of the Tenetehara ethnicity, located in the Alto Rio Guama Indigenous territory on the western edge of Para state. The virus has infiltrated the lands of dozens of Indigenous groups after they came to nearby cities to trade, buy staples and collect emergency welfare payments from the government.
The hundreds of Tembé people of the Cajueiro, Tekohaw and Canindé villages locked their gate and allowed people out only in case of emergency, while restricting entry to agents from the federal Indigenous health care provider, SESAI. Now, after the number of daily COVID-19 cases and deaths in Para has finally plunged, the Tembé have begun believing they will emerge from the pandemic unscathed.
“We didn’t go to the city, we didn’t go to other villages. We remained in quarantine. We got through, we are still getting through,” said Sérgio Muxi Tembé, the leader of the Tekohow village. “We are doing a small commemoration because of that, and it’s because of that we are happy that today we do not have any cases.”
Late afternoon on Sept. 9, the women of Tekohow gathered inside the communal kitchen to prepare a feast with giant pots of manioc and rice, plus roasted tucunare fish wrapped in banana leaves. At the very start of the epidemic, women from the three villages formed councils and visited residents at their board-and-batten homes to educate them about the peril of COVID-19 and how it is transmitted.
“We decided to create the group to give more orientation to the families because, even with the speech from the health technicians, people continued leaving,” Sandra Tembé, a 48-year-old teacher of the native language, said in an interview. “At the start, it was very difficult for us because there were families who we arrived to orient who didn’t want to agree, and said, ‘Why are you saying that? Why stay in isolation?’ That moment was very critical.”
She is thankful they listened, and that her people haven’t suffered like other ethnicities. The tally from Indigenous organization APIB, which includes health ministry figures and information from local leaders, shows there have been 31,306 confirmed coronavirus infections and 793 deaths among Indigenous people. It has infected members from 158 ethnicities, 60% of those found in Brazil, according to the Socio-Environmental Institute, an Indigenous advocacy group.
The Tembé also relied on a traditional herbal brew to shore up the health of the weak and elderly, according to Paulo Sergio Tembé, 50. Inside his home, he withdrew from a handmade basket the ingredients for the concoction and displayed them one by one.
As the sun went down, Tekohaw’s leader, Sérgio Muxi, stood chanting with an elder by two bonfires in front of the thatch-roofed meeting house; they cheered the Tembé resilience in the face of COVID-19 and offered their thanks in the native language, Sérgio Muxi explained later. Eventually, other members of the village joined in the singing, with others dancing. A line of children paraded with their hands on each others’ shoulders.
The next morning, the people awoke and began donning traditional feather headdresses and painting their bodies. Two marching groups converged at the site of the prior night’s bonfire, where they danced to the rhythm of traditional maracas played by the village’s leader and elders. The celebration continued for two hours before finally quieting, and the villagers returned to their homes, fields and forest to resume their daily lives.
Battle on to save Brazil's tropical wetlands from flames
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — A vast swath of a vital wetlands is burning in Brazil, sweeping across several national parks and obscuring the sun behind dense smoke.
Preliminary figures from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, based on satellite images, indicate that nearly 5,800 square miles (1.5 million hectares) have burned in the Pantanal region since the start of August — an expanse comparable to the area consumed by the historic blazes now afflicting California. It’s also well beyond the previous fire season record from 2005.
Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, whose satellites monitor the fires, said the number of Panantal fires in the first 12 days of September was nearly triple the figure for the same period last year. From January through August, the number of fires more than tripled, topping 10,000.
Fernando Tortato, who has been working and living near the Encontro Das Aguas reserve since 2008, said he’s never seen the fires as bad as this year.
“It is an immense area that has been burned and consumed by the fire. And we still have another two, three or four weeks without rain” ahead, he said.
Firefighters, troops and volunteers have been scrambling to find and rescue jaguars and other animals before they are overtaken by the flames, which have been exacerbated by the worst drought in 47 years, strong winds and temperatures exceeding 40 degrees centigrade (104 fahrenheit).
While illegal logging, mining and faming operations have been blamed for most of the fires in the Amazon region to the north, a spokesman for Mato Grosso state’s firefighters, Lt. Col. Sheila Sebalhos,said one of the causes of this year’s Pantanal fires is the practice of burning roots to smoke wild bees from their hives to extract honey.
The Pantanal holds thousands of plant and animal species, including 159 mammals, and it abounds with jaguars, according to the World Wildlife Fund. During the rainy season, rivers overflow their banks flood the land, making most of it accessible only by boat and plane. In the dry season, wildlife enthusiasts flock to see the normally furtive jaguars lounging on riverbanks, along with macaws, caimans and capybaras.
About 200 jaguars in the area already have been injured, killed or forced from their territories by thew fires, according to Panthera, an international wild cat conservation organization.
Firefighters and the Mato Grosso environment ministry have created a center for rescued animals.
“We feel a little discouraged, but we try to have hope to rescue the few animals we can,” said veterinarian Karen Ribeiro, 26, who was treating an injured bird on Friday.
The same day, Brazil’s navy used a helicopter to rescue a burned jaguar cub and take it to a veterinary hospital.
In Peru, virus erodes centuries-old burial traditions
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Every day Joselyn García lights two red candles before a marble urn that holds her mother’s ashes in the living room of her wooden home in the north of Peru’s capital.
She tells her mother how much everyone misses her, and recounts the latest goings-on in the family — the state of García’s online clothing business and how people are handling the lockdown.
“It’s such a relief,” says García, 25, the only daughter of María Cochachín, who worked cleaning offices in Peru’s Economy Ministry before she contracted the novel coronavirus.
Burial was a tradition for both Peru’s indigenous Inca culture and the Spanish who colonized the country. And millions of Peruvians would visit their loved ones’ graves at least once a year, many more frequently, to eat and drink and pay tribute to the deceased on the Day of the Dead every November.
With the arrival of the pandemic, that tradition has taken a blow. To prevent infection and save space in the capital’s overstretched cemeteries, people have begun to cremate the dead, fundamentally changing the rites and traditions that surround death in the country.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Christopher Heaney, a history professor and expert on Inca funeral rites at Penn State University.
The Day of the Dead tradition is replicating itself, in tiny ways across Lima, in the shrines people are building inside their homes, said Adam Warren, an expert on medicine in Peru at the University of Washington.
At least 4,686 coronavirus victims were cremated in Peru between March and mid-August, according to Health Ministry officials. That’s nearly 20% of the 25,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths in the country.
In March, Peru ordered the cremation of all coronavirus victims, one of the strictest rules in the region, in order to prevent people from being infected by contact with bodies. Other countries including Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Ecuador allowed burials, and at the end of April, Peru softened the rule somewhat, allowing funerals, but with no more than five mourners.
Still, many families complained that hospitals were insisting on cremation anyway.
When Cochachín died May 24, García said, hospital officials said cremation was mandatory to avoid infection of the living.
Her mother’s ashes were delivered several weeks later. García remains convinced that she could have buried her mother as she wanted, in a white coffin.
She said she dreams regularly of her mother bemoaning her cremation.
Along with cremations, burials have continued, with nearly 200 deaths daily due to a rate of infection that continues to be among the world’s highest. Many families must hunt down spots in economical and far-flung cemeteries on the outskirts of Lima.
Rolando Yarlequé has put the urn holding the ashes of his wife, María Carmen, 68, next to his bed in the tiny room the two rented together in the City of God neighborhood in southeast Lima.
Yarlequé, a 62-year-old evangelical Christian, says he is saving up the $200 he will need to bury her ashes someday because he believes it will be necessary for her resurrection.
“One day the earth will give back the dead,” he says, ‘’And the Bible doesn’t talk about cremation.”