A man stands in front of the charred ruins of his house explaining how gunmen torched everything his family owned. Another makes a speech in a small cemetery, saying his isolated community will die and be buried there rather than give up their land.
The scenes are being beamed directly from indigenous communities, tribes that are being menaced by the hired gunmen of ranchers and threatened by illegal loggers and gold diggers.
The project, named Tribal Voice, aims to allow some of the most remote communities in the world to air their voices on the internet.
Sponsored by Survival International, which lobbies for endangered indigenous groups, it has so far been taken up by the Guarani and Yanomami, whose lifestyles are under threat from cattle ranchers, loggers, miners and even the vast dams that are flooding their ancestral territories to provide Brazil’s cities with power.
In one video, a Guarani man named Tupa from the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, one of the breadbaskets of Brazil’s farm industry, was threatened by armed ranchers and then had his house torched. “Everything was burnt down. says one of his relatives, translating from Guarani to Portuguese. “They are desperate, all they have is the shirts on their backs.”
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Many of the videos appeal to President Rousseff and her government to do more to map out the traditional lands that belong to the indigenous communities. Brazil’s hugely powerful agricultural lobby has been pushing for oversight of the mapping process to be transferred from an independent agency to Congress itself, which the tribes warn would be a disaster for them.