One of the country’s main Indigenous leaders, writer Ailton Krenak, commented on the disappearance of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenist Bruno Pereira while attending the Pacaembu Book Fair this Thursday.
“Two citizens are now missing in the Amazon, you know?” he said in response to criticism of the region’s predatory exploitation. “You’ve been kidnapped. It’s in a wooded area where our relatives can even track down a tamarin.”
Krenak was speaking alone as Places of Origin coauthor Yussef Campos, who would be sharing a table with him, was diagnosed with Covid and was unable to attend the event.
The conversation about the disappearance was cut short when a group of teenagers ran away screaming to visit the football museum, which is meters from the stage where the table took place. But Krenak later echoed his criticism of mining, when it was the attention of the likes of the event’s audience that shielded vocal activists like him from the “laser beam” of illegal forest explorers.
The table was stopped by a man who approached the table and yelled at the clerk. He was asked to put a question into the microphone asking about the potential benefits of gold mining. Krenak responded that he “sees no reason to take gold from anywhere except to make someone’s dentures,” to which he received a standing ovation to shouts of “out Bolsonaro” and “out mining.”
The indigenous leader then added a maxim that set the general tone of his speech and much of his recent literary output. “When the last fish and the last forest are gone, people will understand that we don’t eat money.”
During the lecture, Krenak also criticized the war in Europe “they are trying to put a missile in Chernobyl”, in particular the US intervention on the continent in support of Ukraine.
“How much has Biden given from the collection he made in his little church for Europe? He gave billions to the war. We use the same amount of phosphorus for rockets.