“Push the sky away”: struggles over genocide in contemporary Brazil

Abstract:

This article explores the uses of the concept of genocide in the parliamentary commission of inquiry established in Brazil to investigate the response to the Covid-19 pandemic (popularly known as CPI da Covid), situating these debates within a broader context of violations of Indigenous human rights. While the CPI rejected genocide accusations in favor of crimes against humanity, the discussion revealed enduring contradictions in how the former is understood: legally, as a narrow crime requiring intent; politically, as a broader framework for addressing systemic violence. The ongoing Yanomami humanitarian crisis, fueled by state neglect, land invasions, and illegal mining, not only exposes the limits of the concept of genocide, but also fosters renewed strategic uses of the same notion. The Brazilian case thus underscores how genocide remains both a vital rhetorical tool and an imperfect legal mechanism.

Keywords:
Genocide; CPI da Covid; Yanomami

Resumo:

Este artigo analisa os usos do conceito de genocídio na chamada CPI da Covid, situando seus debates em um quadro mais amplo de violações de direitos humanos dos povos indígenas. Embora a CPI tenha rejeitado as acusações por genocídio em favor daquelas por crimes contra a humanidade, a discussão revelou contradições persistentes que marcam a compreensão do primeiro termo: juridicamente, como um crime restrito que exige intenção específica; politicamente, como um marco conceitual mais amplo para lidar com a violência sistêmica. A atual crise humanitária Yanomami, alimentada por negligência estatal, invasões territoriais e garimpo ilegal, não apenas expõe os limites do conceito de genocídio, como também engendra usos estratégicos renovados da noção. O caso brasileiro demonstra, assim, como o genocídio permanece simultaneamente uma ferramenta retórica potente e um mecanismo jurídico imperfeito.

Palavras-chave:
Genocídio; CPI da Covid; Yanomami

Introduction

Look! Here comes the missionary

With his smallpox and flu

Saving them savages with his Higgs Boson Blues

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Higgs Boson Blues” (2013)

In October 2021, shortly after the official toll of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil had crossed the 600,000 deaths threshold - the real figures likely being higher, since testing was scarce, and denialism (Caponi, 2020; Valim; Avelar; Bevernage, 2021) constituted the dominant trait of federal policy -, expectations and controversy surrounded the publishing of the final report of a heavily mediatized Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry.¹ Officially called CPI da Pandemia, but better known as CPI da Covid, it had been established six months earlier to investigate the actions and omissions of the federal government in dealing with the global health crisis. President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies faced accusations of obstructing public access to information and disseminating misinformation, especially by promoting treatments scientifically proven to be ineffective and undermining confidence in vaccines (Brasil, 2021).

Among the key points of contention was the inclusion of accusations of genocide in the final report. Senator Renan Calheiros, who served as the CPI’s rapporteur, had produced an initial draft which read: “A whole set of aggressions, negligent oversights, and actions that rendered Indigenous peoples more vulnerable to the pandemic suggest that the crime of genocide occurred” (quoted by Prazeres, 2021, n.p.).² Omar Aziz, the CPI’s president, was among those who disagreed. He claimed that no genocide could have occurred, since “two [vaccine] doses per Indian [sic]” had been guaranteed (quoted by Prazeres, 2021, n.p.). Others raised doubts about technical aspects that might halter such legal framing, especially the ever-sensitive question of proving specific intent.

As those debates took place, social media, which had played a pivotal role in Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign, had become a platform for widespread opposition to his government. The term “genocidal” became a rallying cry among critics, both online and in the streets (Phillips, 2021). While the CPI was still underway, the Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (Apib, Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil) - an association established in 2005 with the aim of bringing together movements scattered across the country - filed a complaint demanding that the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigate “the crimes committed by President Jair Bolsonaro against Indigenous peoples, since the start of his term in January 2019, with special attention to the period of the Covid-19 pandemic” (Inédito…, 2021, n.p.). The central charge was genocide but, echoing other initiatives that had been piling up in the wake of government-sponsored attacks on Indigenous rights, Apib’s lawyers also argued that crimes against humanity were underway (Cruz, 2022, p. 75-107).

The final report of the CPI came to an anticlimactic conclusion on the matter:

There are reasons why the high death toll among Brazilians, in general, cannot technically be described as genocide, while other elements support the plausibility of the occurrence of crimes against humanity against Indigenous peoples - in a strictly legal sense, and not a rhetorical one (Brasil, 2021, p. 581-582, emphasis added).

The disagreements that marked the CPI’s deliberations do not constitute an isolated case but rather express an enduring divide between legal precision and public perceptions of genocide. Ever since the term was coined by Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1943, it has been shrouded in controversy. Even if genocide is frequently invoked in historical and political discourse, most accusations fail to meet the strict legal criteria established by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - which is simultaneously hailed as one of the first international bills protecting human rights and accused of being overly restrictive, deliberately inapplicable, even (Graziosi; Sysyn, 2022; Moses, 2021; Clavero, 2018; Feierstein, 2016). This tension is evident in a United Nations (UN) fact sheet, which states: “Popular understandings of what constitutes genocide tend to be broader than the content of the norm under international law” (United Nations, n.d., n.p.). Dubbed “the crime of crimes,” genocide carries unparalleled moral gravity. For victims of state violence, having their suffering classified as crimes against humanity can feel like a diminishment of their claims, even if the legal consequences may be similar (Sands, 2016).

This article discusses the uses of the concept of genocide in contemporary Brazil, with a special emphasis on CPI da Covid’s final report and on the ongoing humanitarian crisis that affects the Yanomami people in the Amazon region. It explores the hypothesis that some of the main potentials of the debates surrounding genocide may lie in how demands for justice attached to various uses of the concept challenge the narrow legal definition established by the 1948 UN convention. Through a reexamination of the history of the concept, this analysis also sheds light on the role of Latin American countries in establishing the limited definition enshrined in the 1948 treaty and the tensions that may arise when applying it to attacks on Indigenous populations. Dirk Moses (2021, p. 31-32) underscores the absence of both genocide and human rights in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe series and in Raymond Williams’s Keywords. He attributes the latter absence to “a Western Eurocentrism concerned more with the legacy of capitalism than the piles of corpses produced by the war and subsequent decolonization struggles,” and the former to the academic and military involvement of some of the volume organizers with the Nazi regime. These telling omissions, alongside the plethora of contemporary uses of the term, suggest that, even when it appears to rely on a clear legal definition, genocide is far from a settled matter - and that might be precisely why it is such a powerful, even if deeply contradictory, political concept.

Genocide: on the tortuous history of a disputed concept

Unlike most concepts that came to acquire great political significance, genocide has easily traceable roots. At least as a single word denoting attacks on specific groups, its first use occurred in Raphael Lemkin’s (1944) Axis rule in occupied Europe.³ In that regard, it is clearly a neologism, in Koselleck’s (1985, p. 81-88) terms: a conceptual construction that emerges at a given moment, seeking to grapple with a situation perceived as unprecedented, at the same time aiming to bring about change. In fact, it seems to have been deliberately conceived as an innovation in and through language, as Lemkin (1944, p. 79) opens the chapter titled “Genocide” by stating: “new conceptions require new terms”. Precisely due to the performative force granted by genocide’s rapid elevation to the status of a legally codified category, it stands as a revealing example of a neologism that “[alters] with the linguistic arsenal of the entire political and social space of experience, and [establishes] new horizons of expectation” (Koselleck, 1985, p. 77).

In most of its formulations, genocide can be seen as both grounded in history - Lemkin resorted to extensive historical research while formulating the concept and advocating for it (Schaller; Zimmerer, 2009) - and prone to denying it. Ahistorical reasoning abounds in the literature on genocide, perhaps because the moral values that supposedly underpin its criminalization are often construed as universal. In this paradoxical relationship to temporality resides but one of the concept’s many ambiguities. The possibility of applying it to contexts prior to the twentieth century constitutes one of the most heated topics of discussion, with particularly delicate consequences for the assessment of colonial experiences (Clavero, 2018).

Axis rule can be read as both a history of the present and a pragmatic intervention aimed at the future. Its writing largely derived from an excavation of Nazi occupation decrees, which Lemkin had started collecting while in exile in Sweden (Lewis, 2014, p. 190). In his preface, Lemkin (1944, p. ix, emphasis added) stated that the book had stemmed from “a desire to give an analysis, based upon objective information and evidence, of the rule imposed upon the occupied countries of Europe.” Axis rule thus grounded its hopes of achieving reparations in a thorough critique of a corpus of laws that immediately acquired historical significance.

Lemkin’s (1944, p. 84-85) original formulation of genocide included attacks on culture. Among the techniques of destruction, he listed measures such as the prohibition of the use of a group’s language, the control over artistic expression, the exclusion from liberal arts education, or the burning of books. He counted “treasures of art, and historical archives” alongside “human life” among the irreparable losses that would come about if violations committed during wartime were dealt with only at the “moment of liberation” (Lemkin, 1944, p. 95). After his advocacy for genocide to be recognized as an international crime led Lemkin to assume a prominent role in the making of the UN convention, the exclusion of the clause on “cultural genocide” has been interpreted as his “most painful sacrifice” (Irvin-Erickson, 2017, p. 158-182). Earlier drafts had defined “cultural genocide” as acts intended to destroy a group’s “language, religion, or culture” based on national, racial, or religious identity. Such acts included forced schooling, banning publications, or restricting access to cultural institutions like libraries, museums, and places of worship (Abtahi; Webb, 2008, p. 1156).

Throughout the drafting process, the definition of genocide was indeed much narrowed. Nonetheless, some of the shortcomings of the concept’s original formulation are worth noting. In Axis rule, Lemkin (1944) invariably describes genocide as violence directed towards a nation or an ethnic group, sometimes mentioning racial or religious aspects, and placing great emphasis on biology and reproduction. He does not include political groups as possible targets, although political measures, particularly the destruction of “local institutions of self-government” (Lemkin, 1944, p. 82), constitute the first part of his description of the techniques of genocide. Daniel Feierstein’s (2016, p. 15) remarks about how genocide moves away from “the realm of oppression to that of irrationality,” fostering a depoliticized conception of racism rather than one marked by the workings of power, may thus apply not only to the 1948 convention, but also to the genesis of the term. Lemkin’s often essentialist-leaning appeals to the “national spirit” suggest that he, too, partook in what Joan Scott (2020a, 2020b) identifies as the gravest contradiction of the Nuremberg trials. By leaving untouched the conception that the nation-state constituted the telos of history, such trials “protected ethno-nationalism (and, indeed, imperialism)” from critical scrutiny, “guaranteeing not its extinction, but the possibility for its recurrence” (Scott, 2020a, p. 30).⁴

The restricted definition of genocide that prevailed in the UN convention is usually described as the outcome of concerns of imperial powers such as the United Kingdom or racially segregated nations like the United States with possible questioning of their inner workings, or of the Soviet bloc’s concerns with the persecution of political groups being framed as genocide (Weiss-Wendt, 2022). However, other studies have shown that Latin American countries played a non-negligeable role in bringing about some of the treaty’s limitations (Jones, 2011, p. 14-15; Moses, 2021, p. 226-231). For instance, Venezuela’s suggestion of replacing a proposed list of motives for the destruction of groups with the phrase “as such” was instrumental in depoliticizing genocide, establishing identity as the key drive of punishable attacks (Moses, 2021, p. 230).

After an initial acceptance, Brazil was among the countries that opposed protecting political groups (Abtahi; Webb, 2008, p. 1865). Gilberto Amado (in Abtahi; Webb, 2008, p. 1507), the Brazilian representative during the negotiation of the 1948 treaty, was also against the inclusion of attacks on culture in the definition of genocide:

Given the historical evolution of civilizations, sometimes through differentiation, sometimes through the amalgamation of local cultures, a State might be justified in its endeavour to achieve by legal means a certain degree of homogeneity and culture within its boundaries.

The cultural protection of the group could be sufficiently organized within the international framework of the protection of human rights and of minorities […]. Cultural genocide was as yet too indefinite a concept to be included in a convention.

His reference to the “historical evolution of civilizations” leads us to infer that the Brazilian representative was seeking to shield his country from condemnation of its treatment of native populations. In fact, even if it failed to find a place in the 1948 UN convention, “cultural genocide” continues to be invoked above all by Indigenous movements that seek to denounce forced assimilation and cultural erasure - sometimes preferring the term ethnocide. In Lemkin’s (1944, p. 79) original formulation, the replacement of the Greek root genos (“race, tribe”) with ethnos (“nation”) appeared as a prosaic possibility for obtaining a synonym for genocide. Over time, and particularly following Pierre Clastres’s (2004, p. 81-92) influential (albeit historically inaccurate)⁵ anthropological reflection, ethnocide came to constitute one of the key theoretical and political tools to denounce the limitations of the concept of genocide, especially in its narrow legal definition. In the Brazilian context, the concept of ethnocide has been applied to emphasize not only attempts at the physical elimination of Indigenous peoples, but also the systematic dismantling of their distinct ways of life. A key measure to achieve this has been the denial of the right to self-determination and self-expression (Castro, 2020).

A panoply of other neologisms followed (Clavero, 2008, p. 103-142). Given the current climate crisis, ecocide has acquired a particularly prominent status. In 2021, an expert commission proposed a draft definition for its criminalization under international law: “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts” (quoted in Siddique, 2021, n.p.).

As the shifting parallel with ethnocide and the proliferation of competing -cides show, genocide needs to be understood as part of an unstable constellation of concepts, which included, from the outset, categories with a longer history, such as war crimes (Lewis, 2014, p. 14-63), and others that emerged at a similar juncture, most notably crimes against humanity. Gaining traction in the wake of World War I (Lewis, 2014, p. 65), the latter expression was theorized as a legal instrument mainly by Hersch Lauterpacht - a jurist who, like Lemkin, had Jewish roots, was born in Eastern Europe, and developed the most important part of his career in exile (Sands, 2016). Lauterpacht’s advocacy was crucial for the inclusion of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg charter (UN, 1945) - a feat that Lemkin was unable to achieve with genocide (Moses, 2021, p. 13), having to make do with a brief mention of his creation in the indictment (Sands, 2016, p. 55).

Crimes against humanity would count on a new moment of recognition after the passing of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which listed 11 hypotheses for the occurrence of such violations. These include situations not explicitly covered by the convention on genocide, such as “enslavement,” “torture,” or “rape.” The item that refers to the persecution of groups is not limited to “national, ethnical, racial or religious” collectivities (the possible targets of genocide), but adds “political” and “gender” ones. There is, however, a crucial caveat: deeds can only be framed as crimes against humanity if they are “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population” (ICC, 2021, p. 3-4).

In his critique of the perception of genocide as “the crime of crimes,” Sands (2016) makes explicit his preference for the notion of crimes against humanity, claiming that, because of its emphasis on the individual, it is better suited to protect human rights than genocide. Moses (2021, p. 218) argues, however, that both concepts “were advanced to perform the same work,” namely “cover the persecution of Jews before and during the war, and […] link it to non-Jewish experiences.” Clavero (2018, p. 685-686) further adds that legal scholars’ resistance to genocide - his key example is Sands’s book - and the failure to define as such certain situations, especially attacks on Indigenous populations in the Americas, may be a sign of a limited political imagination, one that fails to see beyond individuals and states, thus being unable to take into account sprawling forms of cultural pluralism.

Over the past few decades, the United Nations has been advancing the concept of atrocity crimes as an encompassing category, meant to suggest that every violation that falls within this definition is equally condemnable under international law. It thus seems to brush aside the hierarchy that places genocide at the summit of criminal offences. In a 2014 document tailored to serve as a framework for avoiding the occurrence of such crimes - and used by the CPI to assess “risk factors” and “preparatory acts” in the Brazilian case (Brasil, 2021, p. 603-605) -, the UN states that they “are considered to be the most serious crimes against humankind,” whose status is “based on the belief that the acts associated with them affect the core dignity of human beings” (United Nations, 2014, n.p.). This moral definition is followed by a more strictly legal one. The category refers to three international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The 2005 World Summit decided that atrocity crimes would include “ethnic cleansing,” “which, while not defined as an independent crime under international law,” comprised serious violations of human rights (United Nations, 2014, p. 1).

Finally, genocide is inseparable from an interrelated concept that arose from the Holocaust’s aftermath: denialism. Modern genocides are usually accompanied by their denial, though this relationship is neither linear nor purely reactive. In the case of the Shoah, the mechanisms of erasure were woven into the crime’s very execution. Himmler’s 1943 speech on the “Final solution,” for example, framed the present as an “unwritten page” that “should never be written” in German history (Dawidowicz, 1975, p. 191-192). Such rhetoric was part of a broader strategy that relied on euphemisms (e.g., “resettlement” for deportation), enforced secrecy, sought to erase the target group or even their bodies to conceal the crime, but also to prevent the future articulation of its memory. Lemkin’s (1944) concern with documenting the legal structure and the occupation techniques of the Axis powers can be interpreted as part of a struggle against this will to oblivion.

Apib’s denunciation of the Bolsonaro government before the International Criminal Court resorted to a similar strategy, presenting a compilation of the normative acts that entailed threats to the rights of Indigenous populations as a central part of its argument (Cruz, 2022, p. 96-97). In a related effort to document the intentionality to destroy, Joênia Wapichana - a lawyer, former member of the Brazilian parliament, and the first woman to preside over the Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas (Funai, National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples)⁶ - was part of a group that delivered a dossier to Senator Omar Aziz for consideration within the CPI da Covid. The document presented evidence to support an investigation into the crime of genocide against Brazil’s Indigenous populations (Spezia; Apel, 2021). Indigenous leaders such as Dinamam Tuxá denounced that, solid as it was, this report was all but ignored (Barbosa; Avila, 2021).

When it comes to violence perpetrated in Latin America, there is evidence to suggest that selective forgetfulness was part of the drive behind the region’s representatives’ actions throughout the drafting of the 1948 UN Convention. While opposing the inclusion of political groups as possible targets of genocide, Amado (in Abtahi; Webb, 2008, p. 1354-1355) painted a fact-bending account of conflicts in the region, claiming that

in those countries there did not exist that deep-rooted hatred which in due course led to genocide. Political struggle in Latin America was sometimes violent, sometimes emotional, but it was above all ephemeral. […] political movements were always short --lived whereas the crime of genocide was by its very nature dependent on a profound concentration of racial or religious hatred. Such hatred could never grow out of the political movements current in Latin America.

In no other domain would this failure to acknowledge “deep-rooted hatred” or “political animosity” be more lasting nor more consequential than regarding the original inhabitants of the continent.

Indigenous peoples and claims of genocide in contemporary Brazil

Under a subheading devoted to the “persecution of Indigenous peoples before the pandemic” (mainly directed towards Bolsonaro’s attacks on Indigenous rights that predated the outbreak of the health crisis⁷), the final report of the CPI da Covid supported its claims with long-term historical reasoning:

Since the arrival of the Europeans, the original peoples have lost land, been enslaved, exterminated, and culturally assimilated. These processes were, and still are, anchored in the colonial mentality, which saw Africans and Indigenous people as barbarians, and it was up to the Europeans to redeem them from their supposed cultural and religious backwardness by integrating them into their civilization as slaves or subordinates, almost as if this were a favor to them (Brasil, 2021, p. 588).

This connection between past and present attacks is rendered more meaningful if read against the backdrop of the lasting historiographical and legal debates about whether colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in the Americas constitutes genocide. Scholars like Tzvetan Todorov (1984) unequivocally apply the term to the catastrophic population decline following European conquest. David Stannard (1992, p. x) goes further, calling it “the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.” However, critics of this framing often emphasize that the majority of Indigenous deaths resulted from epidemics rather than deliberate mass killings (Cook, 1998), thus failing to meet the requirements of the UN convention. Historians such as David J. Weber (1992, p. 336) challenge the genocide classification by noting the absence of a centralized extermination policy or what he calls “a consistency of purpose.” Regarding Brazil, Stuart B. Schwartz (1985, p. 40-42) similarly acknowledges the extreme violence of Portuguese colonization, including Indigenous enslavement, but contends that its primary aim was economic exploitation, not annihilation. Yet Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014, p. 42) argues that negligence toward deaths caused by disease or forced assimilation still meets genocide criteria.

In the Brazilian case, various assimilationist campaigns conducted both before and after the 1948 convention may fall under the definition of cultural genocide the country had opposed during the UN debates. The geopolitical strategy of regional integration had been developing for decades, with the so-called March to the West during the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945) constituting a key milestone. During Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (1964-1985) the state implemented aggressive policies of demographic occupation and economic development - most notably in the Amazon region. The Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV, National Truth Commission) established in 2012 to investigate human rights violations during the latter period found evidence of genocide against Indigenous populations. While the report could not fully determine the scale of crimes committed (Brasil, 2014, p. 204), it concluded that the state was responsible - through action or omission - for the deaths of at least 8,350 Indigenous individuals. In some cases, Brazilian courts have recognized state accountability for these violations. In 1998, the Panará people received compensation for their forced displacement in the 1970s. Similarly, the Akrãtikatejê people were removed from their lands during the same decade to make way for the Tucuruí hydroelectric dam, another case where legal redress was later pursued in 2002 (Brasil, 2014).

While none of the legal convictions were established under accusations of genocide, Brazilian authorities and historical records recognize genocidal practices against Indigenous peoples during the military dictatorship. Produced in 1967 by prosecutor Jader de Figueiredo Correia, the 7,000-page document known as Figueiredo Report meticulously documented systematic crimes that align with the UN Genocide Convention’s definition (1948). These included mass killings, torture, bacteriological warfare, slavery, and sexual violence perpetrated by landowners and employees of the now-defunct Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI, Indian Protection Service) (Figueiredo, 1967). The report’s impact extended globally: in 1969, journalist Norman Lewis (1969, p. 4) cited it in his Sunday Times article “Genocide”, exposing how Indigenous tribes were “virtually exterminated, not despite all the efforts of the Indian Protection Service, but with its connivance - often its ardent co-operation.” This catalyzed the founding of Survival International, an Indigenous rights organization. The SPI’s dissolution and its replacement by Funai further underscored the report’s role in institutional reform (Beltrão, 2022).

Thus far, there have only been two cases of conviction for genocide against Indigenous peoples in Brazil. The Massacre of Boca do Capacete or Massacre of the Tikunas happened in the Amazon district of Benjamin Constant in 1988, when 16 people were murdered, nine disappeared, and others were injured and even died afterwards.⁸ The formal complaint for the crime of genocide states that “the massacre demonstrated the desire to destroy part of a national ethnic group” and that it had its origins “in the fact that they were from the Tikuna ethnic group, holders of the usufruct of the area traditionally occupied and inhabited by them on a permanent basis”⁹ (Brasil, 1991, p. 2). The chief Prosecutor of the case, Carlos Frederico Santos, published a book about what he termed a “paradigm change” in the interpretation of the massacre of Indigenous peoples in Brazil. For him,

The genocide was evident, as the peculiar circumstances surrounding the crime’s execution left no doubt about the intent to destroy part of a national and ethnic group. The perpetrators seized an unparalleled opportunity - the gathering of Indigenous people from the same ethnicity and four different communities - held outside their lands in an area not officially designated as Indigenous (though they aspired to claim it as such). This provided the perfect opening for those who, driven by grievances and other vile motives, sought to slaughter as many as possible (Santos, 2017, p. 135).

One of the most recurrent and controversial cases involving accusations of genocide against Indigenous peoples in Brazil is that of the Yanomami - the largest relatively isolated Indigenous group in South America, inhabiting the rainforests and mountains of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. The second conviction for genocide in Brazil involved the Yanomami of Roraima. The Haximu Massacre, which occurred in 1993, resulted in the deaths of 16 individuals, including women, elders, and children. Five garimpeiros (illegal gold miners) operating in mineral extraction sites near the Brazil-Venezuela border were convicted of genocide under the allegation that they,

with the intention of destroying the Yanomami Indigenous community of Hwaximeutheri, [caused] the violent death of women, children and men; [caused] serious harm to the physical integrity of children and adults; and intentionally [subjected] the group to conditions of existence capable of causing its physical destruction (Brasil, 1993, p. 1).

While the current legal definition allowed for some reckoning in these two cases, a multiplicity of actions aimed at destroying the bases of survival of a group as a group fall outside its scope - allowing violence to reproduce itself over time. The final report of the CPI da Covid starkly illustrates the legal system’s limitations: “Pedro Emiliano Garcia,¹⁰ convicted in the Haximu Massacre case, was once again detained by the Federal Police […] for engaging in illegal mining in the same region where, 25 years earlier, he had committed the crime of genocide” (Brasil, 2021, p. 619).

Was the (mis)conduction of the pandemic in Brazil genocidal?

Spanning almost 1,300 pages, the final report of the CPI da Covid is a complex, often contradictory, document. Several shifts in tone and emphasis suggest that many hands crafted it; the omnipresent revision oversights bear witness to the urgency and the immensity of the task. A statement that is simultaneously political and legal, it can also be read as an intervention on memory. An archive of sorts - albeit a more official (and therefore constrained) one than the manifold grassroots initiatives that sprung up in various latitudes in the wake of the pandemic (Marino, 2025) -, the report is concerned with establishing a thorough account of the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Brazil.

The report bears marks of the compromises that had to occur for it to pass the final vote, above all else in the last-minute choice to suppress all accusations of genocide, replacing them with those of crimes against humanity. Both types of violation are mainly dealt with in a chapter plainly titled “Indígenas” - a fact that may in and of itself be interpreted as a sign of moderation, as it excludes from the scope of atrocity crimes actions and omissions directed towards other sectors of the population. The chapter opened on a note of caution: “Reports of genocide against Indigenous peoples began to emerge in 2019, to the disbelief of many.” The fact that “hyperbole is often used in political disputes” was the reason given for such skepticism.¹¹ The report ascertained, however, that “new facts, documents, and opinions” had provided “strong indications that crimes against humanity were indeed underway” (Brasil, 2021, p. 571, emphasis added).

These remarks illustrate both the complex interplay between the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity and the unparalleled weight attributed to the former in political discourse. A telling example appears in one of the most direct blows at the then Brazilian president: “Far beyond contempt, Bolsonaro has, for years, harbored the intention to destroy Indigenous peoples as such, aiming to take their lands” (Brasil, 2021, p. 597, emphasis added) - a phrasing clearly tailored to support charges of genocide; a Freudian slip that exposes last-minute political compromises. The larger scope of crimes against humanity allowed, in any case, for reprimands about situations extending beyond Indigenous populations. While discussing the acute crisis that the capital of the state of Amazonas underwent in early 2021, where an oxygen shortage led to scenes of plain horror, the report suggested that then health minister Eduardo Pazuello and his subordinate Mayra Pinheiro had committed crimes against humanity for advancing the so-called “early treatment” (based on inefficient drugs) and “having turned Manaus into a human laboratory” (Brasil, 2021, p. 312).

Under the subheading “Persecution of indigenous populations before the pandemic”, the report established a thorough account of threats to those ethnic groups. Bolsonaro appears as a central figure for his declarations interspersed with ethnocentrism and assimilationist discourse, as well as for his concrete actions that rendered Indigenous territories more vulnerable to garimpeiros and other forms of land invasion (Brasil, 2021, p. 588-603). While justifying the proposed charges for crimes against humanity, the CPI established as one of its key conclusions that

the President of the Republic, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, [was] the ultimate authority responsible for intentional acts and omissions that subjected Indigenous peoples to living conditions - such as the deprivation of access to food or medicine - aimed at causing the destruction of this segment of the population, constituting acts of extermination (Brasil, 2021, p. 1107).

Even as it targeted the main authority in the country, this legal framing represents not a merely symbolic downgrade, but a proper juridical one. Genocide constitutes a crime under Brazilian law (Brasil, 1956), but crimes against humanity are only recognized through the ratification of the Rome Statute of the ICC. In other words, any prosecution based on the latter charges falls under the ever-uncertain aegis of international law (threatened as it is by respect for state sovereignty) or depends on Brazil’s willingness to enforce a multilateral treaty domestically. This was a danger foreseen in Axis rule, where Lemkin (1944, p. 93) stated: “Genocide being of such great importance, its repression must be based not only on international and constitutional law but also on the criminal law of the various countries.” To the best of our knowledge, neither the charges proposed by Indigenous movements (Inédito…, 2021) nor the formal communication of the CPI’s findings to the ICC (Mattos, 2022) has thus far resulted in a proper international lawsuit against Bolsonaro.¹²

The CPI’s final report expressed a commitment to preventing future violations from following the same path of likely impunity. It included a bill proposition that sought to define the crime of extermination, and another on genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the administration of justice by the International Criminal Court (Brasil, 2021, p. 1159-1199). Given the guarantee that prohibits retroactive application of criminal laws - set aside in the Nuremberg trials (Thomas, 2011, p. 270-271), but still a cornerstone of democratic legal systems -, even if these proposals are soon enforced, they will be unable to provide any form of reparation for the victims of the spread of misinformation and the inability of Brazilian state powers to care for its vulnerable populations.

This, too, can be seen as a recurring pattern in the country’s history, and the CPI itself seems to have thought so. “Since colonization,” the report reads, “diseases brought by Europeans have emptied Indigenous areas” (Brasil, 2021, p. 607). Elsewhere, the report expressed a certain consciousness of how the disproportionate toll of the pandemic on people of age was particularly tragic in the case of native Brazilians. After discussing data that suggest that a nearly twofold death rate occurred among elderly Indigenous persons, the report stated: “what the numbers don’t show is the loss of those who were living libraries of traditional knowledge, of the uses of plants, artisanal techniques, languages, rituals, and history - a loss for all of humanity” (Brasil, 2021, p. 576-577).

The Yanomami case, or the limits of criminal justice

Global media attention would refocus on the Yanomami in January 2023, when images of malnourished children and elders circulated worldwide (Machado; Bedinelli; Brum, 2023). The crisis stemmed from hunger and preventable diseases exacerbated by garimpeiros, whose presence in the Yanomami Reserve surged to an estimated 20,000 by 2019 (Branford, 2019). The international outcry prompted then-Minister of Justice Flávio Dino to reiterate the assertion of “strong evidence of genocide” (Reuters, 2023, n.p.). To this date, the Yanomami’s plight persists with minimal improvement and no further convictions.

The recent accusations of genocide against the Yanomami and the federal government’s declaration of a public calamity to address their humanitarian crisis have revived an old conspiracy theory: the claim that the Yanomami “do not exist” as an Indigenous people (Soares, 2023). This denialist narrative traces back to A farsa Ianomâmi, authored by Colonel Menna Barreto (1995) and originally published under the auspices of the Brazilian Armed Forces. The book was written in reaction to the 1992 demarcation of Yanomami lands, which it frames as part of an international plot to “internationalize the Amazon” - either by ceding control to foreign powers or creating an independent Indigenous state, thereby threatening Brazilian sovereignty (Barreto, 1995, p. 29-35). Menna Barreto dismisses the Yanomami as “ignorant” people incapable of autonomously thinking about defending their territory (p. 85) and goes further to deny their very existence, labeling them “ghost people, artificially installed in a territory of such well-known wealth” (p. 140). His central thesis asserts that the Yanomami were “invented” in 1973¹³ to serve the interests of the “First World” (p. 29-35).

A second key text is Rear Admiral Gama e Silva’s (2008) Ianomami! Quem? He claims that, despite having grown up in the Amazon, he had “never heard” of the Yanomami during his childhood. Citing an alleged review of Brazilian military archives, he concludes that the Yanomami “did not exist and do not exist, except in the cunning minds of Brazil’s enemies” (Silva, 2023, p. 84). Even though it had been written at least a decade before, his three-page article was widely shared on Twitter during the 2023 crisis amid the resurgence of genocide accusations.

These claims falter on a fundamental point: they fail to account for early historical references to the group. The anthropological work that brought the Yanomami global recognition was published in 1968, Yanomamö: the fierce people. In this controversial book, Napoleon Chagnon describes the Yanomami as living in a state of “chronic warfare,” a characterization hotly debated among scholars (Open letter…, 2013). The global prominence of Chagnon’s depiction soon sparked a major controversy, not only over his findings but also over his research ethics. Patrick Tierney (2000) claimed that Chagnon and geneticist James Neel exacerbated violence by selectively distributing goods, fabricated data, and exploited the Yanomami for personal gain. Tierney even suggested - though this was not proved - that Neel’s 1960s measles vaccination campaign had worsened an epidemic.

However, the most consequential aspect of Chagnon’s “fierce people” narrative was its political uses. During Brazilian debates over the creation of a Yanomami reserve in the 1980s and 1990s, politicians cited Yanomami “violence” to argue against a large, unified territory, proposing instead fragmented reserves to “reduce conflict” (Albert, 1992). This portrayal ignored historical factors - such as displacement and resource scarcity caused by external encroachment - while naturalizing violence as an inherent trait. As Borofsky (2005, p. 8) states, “the plan, not coincidentally, would have allowed for more gold mining in the region.”

In the ongoing crisis, an elderly Yanomami woman’s severely malnourished body became a symbol of the devastation inflicted on the Amazon. The Urihi Associação Yanomami subsequently issued a statement urging the cessation of her image’s circulation, explaining that “after death, we do not speak the name of the person, we burn all of their belongings, and we do not allow photographs to continue being shared” (quoted by Veiga, 2023, n.p.). This happens because objects are believed to hold part of the person’s soul, entailing a complex relationship to the material traces of lives. As Albarenga (quoted by Almenara, 2023) observes, the Yanomami rarely consent to being photographed except to document emergencies, like shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa has been doing to expose threats since the 1980s gold rush (Kopenawa; Albert, 2013).

Consistent with these practices, Yanomami funeral rites exclude forensic examination, and cremation prevents postmortem analysis. How can we reconcile this relationship to death with the pursuit of post-event resolutions? How can we hold perpetrators accountable if cultural practices rather than denialism call for the destruction of proof? Perhaps we should ask further: can the delayed form of justice that usually characterizes genocide proceedings still be called justice?¹⁴

Epilogue of sorts

“During my distant trips to the white people’s lands, I sometimes heard them claim that we are warlike and that we spend our time shooting arrows at each other,” read the opening lines of a pivotal chapter of The falling sky (Kopenawa; Albert, 2013, p. 357). In “From one war to another”, Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa fights a double battle: he seeks to dismantle the image of his people as bellicose that Chagnon had spread under the guise of anthropological knowledge; and he denounces the Haximu massacre. After describing the reasons why Amazonian natives do go to war, he paints a grim picture of the violence that the gold rush had sown:

This is different from the wars with which the white people constantly mistreat each other. […] They simply make their wars for bad talk, to grab new land to tear minerals and oil out of its ground. Aren’t the garimpeiros constantly fighting over their gold? They drink cachaça, and having become ghost, face off like chickens or starving dogs until they have killed each other. They do it out of jealousy for gold and do not lament their dead: they abandon them buried under the forest’s floor (Kopenawa; Albert, 2013, p. 359).

As the “jealousy for gold” once more ravages Yanomami land, it becomes impossible not to agree with Felipe Tuxá’s perplexity at the fact that Kopenawa’s account is so often interpreted as an anodyne expression of native worldviews rather than as the urgent denunciation of violence that it so ostensibly is (Cruz, 2022, p. 187). This insensitivity to accounts of suffering can be seen as a crucial mechanism of what the former - an Indigenous anthropologist who has both taken part in struggles around genocide and analyzed them - has termed “white lethality.” It might not be a stretch to infer that the question Kopenawa was ultimately asking was the same one with which Felipe Tuxá defiantly confronts us: “Why do white people relate to us through death and extermination?” (Cruz, 2022, p. 186).

“Our ancestors inhabited the sources of these rivers long before the birth of my fathers and even long before the white people’s ancestors were born,” goes the closing paragraph of the very first chapter in The falling sky. The Yanomami shaman soon adopts a more somber tone: “In the past, we were really very numerous and our houses were vast. Then many of us died after the arrival of these outsiders with their epidemic fumes and shotguns” (Kopenawa; Albert, 2013, p. 26, emphasis added). It is not by chance that diseases appear alongside firearms as causes for the drastic diminishment of the Yanomami population. Yet acknowledgment that epidemics can constitute weapons of mass destruction remains scarce, even when there is evidence of the deliberate spread of pathogens, as in the 1967 Figueiredo Report.

Within this framework, the CPI da Covid’s decision to classify attacks on Indigenous peoples as crimes against humanity rather than genocide was not merely symbolic but also (un)practical, as it restricted their legal applicability. Its final report came to constitute an archive, documenting not only the debate over terminology but the crimes themselves. Yet, does this relegate the problem to the realm of history - or even memory?

This reflection adds weight to Clavero’s (2018, p. 674) assertion that, even if “social memory” and “the right to truth” cannot stand in for proper reparation measures, strongly memorialized genocides also tend to be more often put on trial, in the most literal of senses. Even amid all the shortcomings of international criminal law and of the concept of genocide, both might work towards an at least partial concretion of Yerushalmi’s (1996, p. 117, emphasis in the original) provocative question: “Is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering,’ but justice?”.

The long history of Yanomami genocides, whether they fit the deliberately restrictive definition of the 1948 UN Convention or not, reminds us of the endless and necessarily conflictual nature of struggles for justice. Struggles that work through legal mechanisms but also seek to go beyond them - and, further, strive to expand, make effective, and improve these mechanisms, even while fully aware of their limits. To reflect on genocide is to confront justice as an impossible act and temporalization: not a messianic “final judgment,” but one eternally deferred (Scott, 2020b; Felman, 2002). In his examination of the irreducible tension between law (positive, instituted legislation) and justice (an ethical ideal that transcends it), Derrida (1992) argues that, by definition, these concepts never fully coincide - yet remain mutually implicated. One may think that it is precisely within this gap - on the threshold between the juridical and the just - that a possibility emerges.

In Brazil, as elsewhere, legal mechanisms have nonetheless repeatedly failed to deliver anything even remotely resembling justice. In this regard, it is worth noting that the Boca do Capacete and the Haximu massacres occurred precisely as the Tikuna and Yanomami lands were being demarcated. This should serve as a warning that moments when struggles over Indigenous rights intensify tend to engender violence and can lead to high-risk scenarios - a fact illustrated by several other cases, such as that of the Xakriabá (Fernandes, 2022). Yet no situation better epitomizes the shortcomings of hegemonic views of genocide in dealing with long-term violence (Cruz, 2022, p. 112) than that of the Yanomami. Rather than passively waiting for extreme outbreaks of conflict or focusing on mass killings, we should thus be paying close attention to the workings of what Clavero (2011) terms “everyday genocides.”

In Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ delirious and contemplative “Higgs Boson Blues” (2013), “the missionary” is the one who brings “smallpox and flu” along with his supposed effort at “saving them savages.” The CPI da Covid’s final report blames certain forms of missionary work for promoting disinformation about the pandemic, particularly regarding vaccines, which led some of the most vulnerable populations in Brazil to reject immunization (Brasil, 2021, p. 624-626; p. 636-637). It further contends that, when undertaken in disregard of Indigenous cultures, the actions of religious envoys may foster internal conflict and favor the unraveling of local forms of life (Brasil, 2021, p. 598-599).

Missionary organizations also appear, however, among early whistleblowers for the attacks on Indigenous peoples, even before the outbreak of the pandemic (Brasil, 2021, p. 600, 606). As much as the discourse on human rights falters before Yanomami worldviews, it was instrumental in guaranteeing the demarcation of their land - to quote Boti Bernardi and João Roriz’s (2023) insightful rereading of Kopenawa’s denunciation, legal arguments eventually do help us “keep the sky in place.” Various forms of political mobilization put forward by Indigenous peoples have shown that a thorough critique of the shortcomings of categories such as genocide or crimes against humanity may coexist with strategic uses of the same categories and even lead to daring lawsuits before international courts (Cruz, 2022). Given the potential for fostering further political action, the act of drafting these types of legal documents may be of value in and of itself, regardless of the ultimate juridical outcome.

In the closing and title song of the 2013 album which features the verses that have guided us through this unfortunate journey, Nick Cave’s deep voice invites us to “keep on pushing, push the sky away.” The simultaneously legal and political categories of genocide and crimes against humanity are definitely not enough to shield Indigenous peoples (or the Brazilian population more broadly) from immediate danger, but could they not work as a way to keep pushing against the gates of law? Or as a safeguard in case the xapiri spirits fail to hold the sky in place? In certain circumstances, these concepts may constitute the only conduit for the pressing consciousness that, if we don’t keep on pushing, the sky is bound to fall, over and over again, as it has fallen so many times over Yanomami land.

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• 1
  A CPI (in the Portuguese acronym) is a parliamentary oversight mechanism of government actions (Brasil, 1988, art. 58, § 3º). Although a CPI lacks the authority to initiate lawsuits directly, its final report can serve as a basis for criminal accountability.
• 2
  All translations from sources quoted in languages other than English are our own.
• 3
  Lemkin concluded the book in 1943, but publication was delayed due to contractual disputes (Moses, 2021, p. 13; Clavero, 2008, p. 30).
• 4
  See also Dirk Moses’s (2021, p. 136-168) discussion of the link between Lemkin’s views and the debate about the protection of “small nations” during the interwar years, and of the need to clarify his ties to Zionism.
• 5
  Clastres (2004, p. 81) fails to acknowledge the presence of the term ethnocide in Lemkin’s work, attributing its inception to later ethnological works. He also misidentifies the 1946 Nuremberg trials as the moment in which the concept of genocide emerges.
• 6
  Established in 1967 as Fundação Nacional do Índio, this governmental body received its current name in 2023, though the acronym Funai remained unchanged.
• 7
  In the lead up to the 2018 presidential campaign, he had famously stated that “not even a centimeter” of Indigenous land would be demarcated during his term. For an overview of how Bolsonaro’s policies halted the advancement of Indigenous rights in Brazil, see Cruz (2022, p. 91-103).
• 8
  The death toll may differ across sources, as some of the victims disappeared and their bodies were never found.
• 9
  This alludes to the guarantees of indigenous rights over land established in article 231 of the Brazilian Constitution (Brasil, 1988).
• 10
  A black man known as Pedro Prancheta, he appeared in the criminal complaint as the unequivocal leader of the Haximu massacre (Brasil, 1993).
• 11
  Lemkin (1944, p. 94) had already warned against the risk that “atrocity stories” may end up “labeled as untrustworthy,” “because they are so gruesome that people simply refuse to believe them.”
• 12
  On September 11, 2025, Bolsonaro was criminally convicted by the Brazilian Supreme Court over a different matter: the attempted coup on January 8, 2023 (Richter, 2025).
• 13
  He identifies Swiss-Brazilian photographer Cláudia Andujar as one of the key “culprits.” Settling in Brazil in 1955, she began her immersive photographic work amid the Yanomami in the 1970s. See Nogueira (2018).
• 14
  See Derrida’s (1992) discussion of the inevitably urgent nature of demands for justice.

Edited by

• Editores responsáveis:
  Fabrina Magalhães Pinto (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5088-9125), Karla Carloni (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7586-3802) e Norberto Osvaldo Ferreras (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3801-0418).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 July 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  16 May 2025
• Accepted
  24 Sept 2025