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Without any prior coordination with the Chief Ministers of State, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared the nationwide lockdown on March 23, 2020. The immediate shutdown of business industries resulted in about 400 million laborers becoming jobless in one day. A huge number of them are Adivasis, a term for Indigenous Peoples in India.* Many of them struggled for survival as lockdown had blocked all their livelihood sources.
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Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has compromised proper and efficient health care in responding to the pandemic that has affected the country’s Indigenous Peoples disproportionately. From February 28 to August 3, 2020, 4,178 Indigenous Peoples have contracted COVID-19 with a fatality rate of 16.5% higher compared to the non-indigenous population.
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Indigenous Peoples in Colombia represent 4.4 percent of the total population. In the Amazonas department, they make up 57.7 percent of the population and they have experienced the highest COVID-19 infection and mortality rates in the country. Due to the existing conditions of Indigenous Peoples in Colombia, they are particularly vulnerable to the pandemic, including to some of the measures the government has imposed to address the health crisis. As with the case of Omar and Ernesto Guasiruma of the Indigenous Emberá Peoples, they were murdered at their home while following the quarantine order.
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The threat from a hostile Federal Government worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic where lack of access to proper health care, especially in remote areas in the Amazon, coupled with the absence of immunological memory for infectious agents of Indigenous Peoples make them particularly vulnerable to the virus.1 From April 2020 to January 2021, around 941 Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon were reported to have died from the virus, half of them within Brazil.2 Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, has been consistent in being callous towards the plight of Indigenous Peoples during the pandemic and even took advantage of it to open their lands for illegal exploitation.
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Approximately 20 percent of the earth’s territory are Indigenous lands. These lands are home to about 476 million Indigenous Peoples worldwide, in over 90 countries. Indigenous lands and territories are at the core of Indigenous Peoples’ culture, spirituality, and identity. To them, land is life.