Day: December 15, 2023

BRASILIA — Indigenous protesters tried to prevent a public hearing Friday on the construction of a railway that is planned to run through their lands to carry grains to a northern port in the Amazon.

The 1,000-kilometer Ferrograo railway is backed by farmers and grain companies who say it would reduce reliance on roads and lower costs for transporting soy from the farm state of Mato Grosso to the river ports in the Amazon basin.

But Munduruku and Kayapo Indigenous communities say they have not been consulted on a project that will affect their environment and cause deforestation.

Some 100 protesters holding banners blocked the entrance to the hearing in Novo Progresso in southern Para state, but the meeting eventually began when the protesters left the building, videos on social media posted by attendees showed.

“The railway is a development project that will benefit everybody,” one of its main backers, Senator Zequinha Marinho, told the protesters.

Leading the protest was Alessandra Munduruku, a winner of the 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts to stop mining development in the Amazon and protect the rainforest.

“We cannot agree to a project that will hurt our territory and threaten the future of our children and grandchildren,” she told Reuters by telephone.

“We are worried about climate change and trying to save the forest, but Congress is more worried about profiting from our lands,” she said.

The hearing was not to consult Indigenous people, it was about reconciling interests of soy-producing agribusiness that will benefit from the railway and local interests that seek to compensate for a loss of business from reduced road traffic, said Ana Carolina Alfinito, a legal adviser to Amazon Watch, a conservation advocacy group who attended the meeting.

It was held one day after a victory for the farm lobby in Brazil’s Congress when lawmakers overturned a presidential veto that had struck down the core of a bill that limited Indigenous land rights. The issue of a deadline for land claims will now be decided by the Supreme Court.

In August, in a ruling on the grain railway, the top court upheld the suspension of a government plan to reduce the size of a forest conservation park — to allow for the building of the railroad — pending new studies. 

washington — Two Palestinian American families have sued the Biden administration, saying the government has not done as much to evacuate their U.S. relatives stuck in Gaza as it did for Israeli dual nationals. 

In the days after Hamas’ October 7 assault in southern Israel, the U.S. government organized charter flights from Tel Aviv to Europe to help Americans leave Israel after many airlines canceled service to the country.  

The State Department says it has helped around 1,300 U.S. Palestinians leave Gaza and escape Israel’s retaliatory bombardment — in part by coordinating their exit to neighboring Egypt with Israeli and Egyptian authorities. 

But the United States has not taken steps to organize dedicated flights or otherwise help secure the exit of an estimated 900 U.S. citizens, residents and family members who remain trapped in Gaza, the American families suing the government say.  

They say this violates their constitutional rights.  

“There is more that the U.S. government can do, and they are choosing not to do it for Palestinians,” Yasmeen Elagha, who has family stuck in Gaza and helped organize the lawsuit, said in an interview.  

The State Department declined to comment on pending litigation, but a spokesperson said the department is working to get more Americans and family members out of Gaza. The White House referred questions on the lawsuit to the Justice Department, which did not immediately comment. 

Hamas militants killed 1,200 people in Israeli border communities with Gaza and took 240 hostages during their October 7 assault, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, Israeli bombardment has killed nearly 19,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials. According to U.N. estimates, up to 85% of the 2.3 million people in the densely populated enclave have been displaced from their homes.  

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, accuses the federal government of failing to protect U.S. citizens in an active war zone and denying equal protection to Palestinian Americans, a right under the U.S. Constitution. 

The suit seeks to force the government to begin evacuation efforts and secure the safety of its citizens “on equal terms to other noncombatants in the same war zone.” 

Two of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Elagha’s cousins, Borak Alagha and Hashem Alagha, U.S. citizens who were studying engineering in the Palestinian coastal enclave.  

Americans listed by the United States as wanting to leave Gaza at the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing must be approved by both Israel and Egypt. 

The three Americans cited in the lawsuit have not been cleared to leave, said Elagha, who lives near Chicago.  

Maria Kari, a lawyer with the Arab American Civil Rights League who represents the plaintiffs, said her organization filed about 40 lawsuits in the first month of the conflict on behalf of Palestinian dual nationals.  

“We’re simply asking the Biden administration to do something it already did for a class of citizens in the same war,” she said.