BRAZIL’S far-right President Jair Bolsonaro plans “genocide, ethnocide and ecocide,” indigenous groups said on Friday as they formed an alliance to resist the attacks on their people, land and culture.

About 600 leaders gathered at the four-day summit held in Piaracu village in Mato Grosso state called by 90-year-old environmental campaigner and Kayapo chief Raoni Metuktire.

He warned that the Brazilian regime was threatening the survival of indigenous groups by allowing the expansion of commercial projects on protected land.

This includes plans to “liberate mining, agribusiness and land-leasing in the Amazon basin,” which environmental activists fear will lead to the destruction of the rainforest.

“The current president is threatening our rights, our health, our territory,” the manifesto reads, with the gathered communities agreeing to form an alliance to “defend themselves against the current government’s predatory policies.”

The indigenous leaders came together amid fears over increasing violence and racism. Mr Bolsonaro has made a string of shocking remarks about Brazil’s indigenous people, branding their occupation of land “an obstacle to agribusiness.”

In a 1998 newspaper interview he said: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians.”

At least eight indigenous leaders were killed in 2019, as invasions of protected areas by illegal loggers and miners increased after Mr Bolsonaro came to power.

But those gathered at the conference vowed to stand together united in struggle.

Angela Mendes, whose father Chico, a trade union leader and environmentalist, was killed in 1998, said: “If we stand together, we can resist. They have the power of the state: but we have the strength of our ancestral waters, flowers and lands.”