The government of Jair Bolsonaro, through Funai (Brazilian National Indian Foundation), appointed evangelical preacher, anthropologist, and missionary Ricardo Lopes Dias to the General Coordination of Isolated Indians and Newly Contacted, the most technical position of the agency.
Lopes Dias is a theologian and served for many years in the New Tribes of Brazil Mission (MNTB), an organization that aims to evangelize indigenous people.
According to El País, the appointment of the anthropologist produced a series of criticisms made by Indigenous entities and servants of the Funai itself, who fear a change in the policy practiced in the country since the end of the military dictatorship: to protect these peoples without forcing any type of contact, as it happened before the re-democratization with the objective of "evangelizing" and "integrating" them into society.
For the Indigenous leader, Sonia Guajajara, with the indication of the evangelical preacher Lopes Dias, "the danger [for the Indigenous people] now comes from who has the duty to protect them", that is, Funai itself.
According to The Guardian, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a UN special rapporteur, says that Jair Bolsonaro’s ‘dangerous’ appointment of Ricardo Lopes Dias threatens remote Indigenous people. For her, “this is a dangerous decision that may have the potential to cause genocide among isolated Indigenous people.”
According to the former Minister of the Environment, Marina Silva, "the president of FUNAI changed the internal rules of the agency so that a person outside the staff of career servants would assume a commissioned function of leadership. He appointed Mr. Ricardo Lopes Dias to be the new coordinator of isolated and recently contacted Indigenous people".
For her, "an area that requires a lot of experience and technical knowledge cannot be held hostage by patronage, at the risk of returning to a policy of the time of the dictatorship that does not respect the condition of isolation of some Indigenous peoples".
