{"id":117028,"date":"2018-08-20T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2018-08-20T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=117028"},"modified":"2018-08-20T12:14:03","modified_gmt":"2018-08-20T11:14:03","slug":"forget-your-son-brazil-is-forcibly-taking-indigenous-children-and-putting-them-up-for-adoption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/08\/forget-your-son-brazil-is-forcibly-taking-indigenous-children-and-putting-them-up-for-adoption\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cForget Your Son\u201d: Brazil Is Forcibly Taking Indigenous Children and Putting Them Up for Adoption"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leia em portugu\u00eas<\/a> <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KrUJcPRHS9c<\/p>\n

19 Aug 2018 – <\/em>I practiced my\u00a0greetings in Guarani several times before approaching \u00c9lida Oliveira. \u00c9lida, who doesn\u2019t speak Portuguese, had arrived that morning in the town of Amambai, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, deep in Brazil\u2019s agricultural heartland and less than an hour\u2019s drive from Paraguay. She was accompanied by officials from Funai, the federal agency responsible for indigenous affairs in Brazil. \u00c9lida had traveled there to explain how, three years earlier, local health agents and representatives of the municipal Guardianship Council in the city of Dourados, where she lives, had arrived to remove her newborn child from her custody.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe child, they took him when he was only 8 days old. She asks that you not take away her children again.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two-hundred women listened in silence to \u00c9lida\u2019s testimony, given in her native language Guarani, an indigenous language of central South America. A local named Wanda Ku\u00f1a Rendy had volunteered to translate \u00c9lida\u2019s words to Portuguese for the authorities in attendance, but she was only able to get through a few sentences before bursting into tears. \u201cThe child, they took him when he was only\u00a08 days old,\u201d Rendy said. \u201cShe asks that you not take away her children again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00c9lida smiled when I asked for an interview, but she was hesitant to allow her youngest child to leave her lap as we recorded. As a researcher, I had prepared to attend the sixth annual Ku\u00f1angue Aty, a large gathering of women from the Kaiow\u00e1 and Guarani indigenous communities, to focus on the prayers and songs that marked the nights and days of the meeting, from the initial reception to the final debates. As an ethnographer or a reporter, however, I was compelled to pay attention to the issues afflicting the human beings involved. \u201cWhy has the number of indigenous children in institutional care increased so much in the last year?\u201d I wondered. Janete Alegre, organizer of the Amambai meeting, asked, \u201cIs there now a law that says indigenous children must be taken from their indigenous families and given to the whites?\u201d<\/p>\n

In the sprawling municipality of Dourados alone \u2014 with a population of some 200,000 people in an area twice the size of Los Angeles \u2014 50 indigenous children were living in shelters at the end of 2017, according to a study by the Funai Regional Office. By July 2018, 34 remained separated from their families. I discovered the stories of \u00c9lida and other mothers in Dourados are just the tip of the iceberg. Uncountable communities suffer from the complex problems associated with the state taking indigenous children from their families. There are indications of even more serious irregularities in the processes where the children are taken, which have been monitored since 2010 by Funai, the Public Defender\u2019s Office, and the Federal Public Ministry.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe institution says that she is poor, that she lives in an unauthorized occupation,\u201d shouts Jaqueline Gon\u00e7alves, a young member of the Kaiow\u00e1 leadership. \u201cInstitutions need to respect us. This is the genocide of indigenous peoples!\u201d Her words invoked the violence inflicted upon the Kaiow\u00e1 and Guarani peoples in Brazil since the beginning of the 20th century. The local family court alleges mistreatment and neglect, as well as drug and alcohol problems, to justify the separation of children from their mothers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey claim that our children are dirty. But of course! We live off the land and cook over open fires,\u201d a group of women wrote in a letter signed by participants of the Amambai meeting. Demanding that alternatives be found within the villages themselves, as mandated by the federal Statute for Children and Adolescents, these women want to have the right to follow the traditions of child care passed down from their ancestors. You should eat food from your place of origin and sing to newborn babies, they said.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Tatiane Klein<\/a><\/em> – <\/em>tatianeklein@\u200busp.br<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

19 Aug 2018 – Without land and living in extreme poverty, indigenous mothers in Brazil are fighting back against local authorities who are taking their children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":117029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}