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The igarapé, a large stream, serves as the lifeblood for so many quilombola communities in the Amazon region as a source for food and water and medium of transport. Image by Cícero Pedrosa Neto.
The absence of data worsens the damage caused by the novel coronavirus in quilombola communities–descendants of escaped African and Afro-Brazilian slaves–located throughout the Amazon. According to a COVID-19 observatory
Quilombola communities in the Brazilian Amazon have already been devastated by the advance of commercial and state interests on their ancestral territories. A traditionally forest and river-dependent peoples, their rural livelihoods have often kept them on the outside of Brazil’s social and economic successes over the years. With limited access to formal education, health services and economic opportunities, their struggle is fundamentally a constitutional one: to be counted and accounted for in the face of longstanding discrimination.