Brazil tribes use smartphones to fight eviction from ancestral lands

Threatend with eviction from their ancestral lands, indigenous tribes in Brazil are hitting back using video.

Communities, some of which have no electricity and no access to computers, have been given solar-powered smartphones by the London-based charity Survival International.

The remote tribes are using the camera-phones to broadcast their situation to the world and call for international support.

The Tribal Voices project was launched with two tribes - the Guarani in southwest Brazil, and the Yanomami in the mountains and forests of the north.

The Guarani, who have been resisting an eviction order, have used the project to send a video from their cemetery calling for their land to be mapped out by the Brazilian government in order to preserve it from ranchers:

Like other indigenous tribes, the Guarani in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul have been badly affected by increasing industrialisation that has forced them from their land and devastated their communities.

Many Guarani now live in severely crowded reserves.

The Yanomami have been luckier, their land was mapped out in the 1990s and the government expelled illegal gold miners from the area.

The UN marked its 'Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples' on Sunday.

There are an estimated 370 million indigenous people in 90 countries around the world.