Family of indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, murdered in the Javari Valley, begins to receive pension after six months
December 2, 2022
12:12
Mencius Melo – From Amazon Agency
MANAUS – After a delay of six months, finally, the family of the indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, murdered in Vale do Javari, will receive the pension to which they are entitled. The federal government will pay a pension to the indigenous activist’s wife, anthropologist Beatriz Matos, and their three children. The authorisation was signed on the 24th by the Ministry of Justice.
Bruno Pereira was murdered together with the British journalist Dom Phillips in the Vale do Javari region. Bruno was a Funai employee. His work was focused on the delicate contact with indigenous people in missions with isolated peoples. Bruno was removed from his position as general coordinator of isolated and recently contacted Indians 15 days after having led an operation against illegal mining in the Javari Valley.
For the anthropologist and political scientist Paulo Queiroz, the component of evil was contained in the tardiness of the federal government in doing something, which the law guarantees, to the family of the indigenist. “The aim, among others, was to aggravate the distressing state of the family by barring the encumbrance, but the Ministry of Justice also came under pressure. In fact, the pension to his family is an absolutely legitimate right”, he said.
‘Providential…’
According to the scientist, Bruno Pereira’s family waited this long because the indigenous leader was not well regarded in the Planalto government, due to his work with indigenous peoples and their causes. In Paulo Queiroz’s opinion, the delay was deliberate and providential. “In fact, a ‘providential’ delay, since he was a ‘persona non grata’ of the FUNAI system, precisely because he went against institutional inertia and denounced abuses”, he observed.
In the operation that Bruno Pereira led against illegal mining in Vale do Javari, more than 50 mining rafts were destroyed. The dismantling of the mining infrastructure made him fierce enemies. He resigned from the body when he realised that he would not be able to carry out his work in the Bolsonaro government, and thus began to act independently to help indigenous peoples.
Incompetence
Sociologist Luiz Antônio, on the other hand, considers incompetence as a factor to be analysed. “There is a time of public bureaucracy that is sometimes cruel and perverse, processes take weeks, months, but in this specific case, it seems to me the result of a fact that we cannot disregard: Bolsonaro has placed thousands of military personnel in the public machine who are very incompetent. They don’t know what they are doing in these functions. This document may have been sleeping in the drawer of a commissioned servant of the Army, who did not take the care to look at and treat the process well”, he said.
But he does not rule out the political component: “We may have another interpretation, which is the interference of the president of Funai, or President Bolsonaro himself may have given the order not to pay any attention to this process and let it (the process) run in his own time and do nothing, which may have taken these six months to be resolved,” he assessed.
“Regardless, the perversity persists because we, public servants, support our families with the salary we earn, even because we are prohibited by law to have another job. Bruno was murdered in the course of his duties. He was not skiing in the Swiss Alps. I doubt that a general who died in a mission, in Haiti, would have his family abandoned, surviving, for six months, on favours from third parties”, concluded Luiz Antonio.
Read also: Murdered at age 41, indigenist Bruno Pereira receives tribute in Atalaia do Norte, in AM
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