- Maxciel Pereira dos Santos, who worked at the Brazilian indigenous protection agency, FUNAI, was shot twice in the head last week while riding his motorcycle down a busy street of Tabatinga, located in the Amazon rainforest.
- Police are still investigating potential suspects and a motive, and they have yet to disclose the information to the public, Reuters reported.
- Though the motive for Santos' murder is not immediately clear, it comes amid a dramatic increase in man-made fires raging the Amazon rainforest due to development.
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A worker for an agency that defends Brazil's indigenous people was murdered in front of his family "execution-style" in a remote Amazon town, Reuters reported.
Maxciel Pereira dos Santos, who worked at the Brazilian indigenous protection agency, FUNAI, was shot twice in the head last week while riding his motorcycle down the main street of Tabatinga, located in the Amazon rainforest, the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo reported. FUNAI said in a statement that Santos' death is a "great loss to the Foundation," Earther reported.
Police are still investigating potential suspects and a motive, and they have yet to disclose the information to the public, Reuters reported.
O colaborador da Fundação Nacional do Índio (Funai) Maxciel Pereira dos Santos foi assassinado a tiros na noite de sexta-feira, em Tabatinga, Amazonas, na fronteira com Peru e Colômbia.
— CLACSO (@_CLACSO) September 9, 2019
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Read more: The Amazon is losing about 3 football fields' worth of rainforest per minute
Kerry Bowman, a bioethicist from the University of Toronto, researched the biodiversity and indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest and knew Santos personally, Earther reported.
"I respected him greatly; he was a very brave man," Bowman told Earther. "His death highlights how standing up for environmental and indigenous rights protection can cost people their lives."
Though the motive for Santos' murder is not immediately clear, it comes amid a dramatic increase in man-made fires raging the Amazon rainforest due to development. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro encouraged the development of the Amazon for logging and farming, thus threatening the biodiversity and indigenous tribes that currently reside in the world's largest rainforest.
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