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As Brazil approaches presidential elections, “The Territory” documents the struggle of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people in the Brazilian Amazon against the deforestation and destruction of their land by farmers and others illegally extracting resources, which has expanded under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. We speak with director Alex Pritz and two people featured in the film, ahead of its release on Friday: Bitaté Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, an Uru-eu-wau-wau leader, and activist Neidinha Bandeira. “The Indigenous populations [in Brazil] are being massacred,” says Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, who helped film how his people are fighting to preserve nearly 7,000 square miles of their territory. “We will never stop fighting for our territory and for our rights.”

We look at the recent murders of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous researcher Bruno Pereira in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and what it says about Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who once vowed, “There won’t be one more inch of Indigenous reserve.” Phillips and Pereira went missing in June, and their remains were found dismembered about two weeks later. This week, a Brazilian Senate commission investigating the murders recommended a military operation in the Javari Valley to address the rise in organized crime there. Police have arrested five people linked to the murders and identified a suspect arrested earlier as the leader of an illegal fishing organized crime group in the Amazon region. “When the president dismantles public policies and public institutions that should serve Indigenous rights, when the government persecutes its civil servants whose mandate it should be to protect the Indigenous peoples and the policies applied to them, we become more vulnerable,” says Indigenous lawyer Eliésio Marubo, who led a search and rescue mission for Phillips and Pereira and recently returned to Brasília after visiting with U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to call for an independent investigation into the murders.

On today's BradCast: What you need to know about the stolen national security documents retrieved by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago and the trouble Trump is in. And, about the known results of the strange-world-we-now-live-in primaries and special elections yesterday. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.] First up, those elections, as based on [...]

We really do have (at least) two Americas at this point. One America, led by President Joe Biden and his Democratic party in Congress, who have now triumphantly signed into law the largest climate bill in U.S. history, which also includes landmark measures to make healthcare cheaper for tens of millions of Americans. And [...]

During the 2020 mass racial justice uprisings, many Americans understood for the first time that racist police brutality was a critically important issue.

The recent raid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at Donald Trump’s residence in his Mar-a-Lago Florida resort, has pro-Trump forces up in arms.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Sophie Shepherd sophie.shepherd@codepink.org