BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s has 1.69 million Indigenous people, almost twice as many as previously acknowledged by the state, according to numbers announced on Monday by the national statistics agency IBGE from the 2022 census.
In 2010, the IBGE had counted 896,917 indigenous people.
Government officials said the 88% increase was due to changes in methodology by census teams that traveled to remote villages in the Amazon rainforest to count indigenous population for the first time.
Minister of Indigenous Peoples Sonia Guajajara said more of Indigenous people were identifying themselves as such.
“People feel more comfortable today identifying as Indigenous. Before they had to hide their identity for fear of being killed,” Guajajara said at a news conference in Belem.
She and Planning Minister Simone Tebet spoke at a convention center in Belem at the mouth of the Amazon River where the region’s heads of state will meet this week to discuss trans-border cooperation to protect the Amazon and its forests.
Tebet told reporters the new population numbers will allow for improved budget funding for policies to help Indigenous communities, in education but mainly in health services to make up for government neglect.
Tebet also said census teams, backed up by police and traveling on helicopters, were able to cover villages where they had no access in the past or were too dangerous due to the presence of illegal miners and loggers.
This was the case of the Yanomami territory, where leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government launched a major enforcement operation in January to expel thousands of miners who violently entered the region causing a humanitarian crisis and malnutrition, diseases such as malaria, along with the pollution of rivers with mercury and the killing of wildlife.
The IBGE said the Yanomami, who live on a reservation the size of Portugal on the border with Venezuela, have a population of 27,152 people, more than was previously estimated.
Half of Brazil’s Indigenous communities live in the Amazon region, some 867,900, with the highest urban concentration in the city of Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state.
The census for the first time allowed Indigenous people living in urban areas to identify themselves.
Tebet said the previous government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro had curtailed census activity and dismantled agencies working in the interest of Indigenous people.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
