In most democracies, citizens go to the polls. But in Brazil’s sparsely populated Amazon region, the polls often go to the voters. That’s thanks in large part to a system created by Indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira, who was murdered earlier this year.
Until 2012, the region’s only voting centers were in the city of Atalaia do Norte. That year, a mayoral candidate distributed gasoline to about 1,200 Indigenous people from the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory so they could make the multiday trip downriver to vote.
At the time, Pereira led the local bureau of Brazil’s agency for Indigenous affairs. He provided them with food and water, and coordinated a quarantine to prevent the virus from reaching Indigenous villages. Later, he and local Indigenous leaders developed a plan for transporting electronic voting machines to remote villages.
Villages in the Javari Valley territory received their first voting centers in 2014. To deliver a voting machine to the most distant village, Vida Nova, election officials usually fly in a small plane from Manaus to Cruzeiro do Sul, a city in Acre state. There, they board a helicopter for the final leg. It is a 1,000-mile round-trip voyage to reach a place with 327 voters, in a nation with an electorate of more than 150 million people.
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