A video made with the help of U.S. missionaries and depicting Amazon Indians burying children alive is "faked" and inciting racial hatred, a group campaigning for tribal rights said. It depicts scenes of Indians in an isolated forest village digging graves and burying several live children in them.
London-based Survival International said the film is "faked, that the earth covering the children's faces is actually chocolate cake, and that the film's claim that infanticide among Brazilian Indians is widespread is false. People are being taught to hate Indians, even wish them dead," said Survival's director, Stephen Corry. Critics claim that the film is a tool for evangelical Christian groups to increase their ability to spread religious beliefs among indigenous peoples.
Enock Freire, one of the makers of the film, acknowledged that it was fictional but was aimed at drawing attention to what he said was a serious problem. "It (infanticide) is common," he said from Hawaii. "This distortion that we are trying to incite hate is untrue."
Infanticide is believed to be practiced only rarely in the Amazon region on disabled children, based on the belief that children who take their last breath above land will come back to haunt a community. Indigenous supporters have argued that hen Brazil's Indian tribes are being forced off their land or killed by ranchers, miners and loggers, the infanticide issue is a destructive distraction.
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