Indian infanticide video ‘faked to incite hatred’

A VIDEO, made with the help of US missionaries, depicting Amazon Indians burying children alive is “faked” and inciting racial hatred, a group campaigning for tribal rights said.

The video, “Hakani”, has been watched more than 350,000 times on the YouTube website.

It depicts scenes of Indians digging graves and burying live children in them.

London-based Survival International said in a statement 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.

The video was made by the son of the founder of an American missionary organisation called Youth with a Mission, which has a branch in Brazil known as Jocum.

Enock Freire, one of the makers of the film, acknowledged it was fictional and aimed at drawing attention to what he said was a serious problem.

“It [infanticide] is common,” he said. “This distortion that we are trying to incite hate is untrue.”

Infanticide is practiced by some tribes in the Amazon region, sometimes on disabled children, often based on the belief that children who take their last breath above land will come back to haunt a community.