BRASILIA — Federal prosecutors sought on Tuesday to reverse a controversial decision by Brazil's right-wing government to appoint a former evangelical missionary to protect isolated and recently contacted indigenous tribes in the Amazon. The prosecutors cited a conflict of interest in the appointment of Ricardo Lopes Dias as head of the department in charge of protecting indigenous tribes from contact with non-indigenous people because he was linked to a missionary group, the New Tribes, whose aim was to convert "unreached people" to Christianity. They asked a Brasilia court to suspend the appointment because it raises the risk of "genocide and ethnocide" among Brazil's 107 non-contacted or barely contacted indigenous groups living in the Amazon rainforest, the lawsuit said. Dias, a theologian and anthropologist, was from 1997 to 2007 a member of the New Tribes, a group founded in the United States in 1942 and now called Ethnos360, whose mission is to evangelize indigenous peoples by bringing the Bible to them in their own languages.

Source: International New York Times February 11, 2020 20:51 UTC