Infanticide in the Amazon

A 2009 documentary caused an international stir by showing footage of an Amazon tribe burying a boy alive.

The footage was shot among the Suruwaha tribe, who acted out the event for the camera, depicting what happens in real life in various tribes in the Amazon, who target disabled children for murder.

Kanhu, a girl with muscular dystrophy, fled the Kamayura tribe at age 7, saying, "If I had remained there, I would certainly be dead."

Hakani, a two-year-old girl, was ordered to be killed by the Suruwaha tribe, but her parents chose suicide rather than carry out the order. She was left to languish in the jungle for years, until a foreign couple found her and adopted her.

One instance is known of a 12-year-old boy buried alive by his tribe because he claimed to be transgender.

The practice prompted Muwaji's Law in Brazil, named after an Amazonian mother who refused to kill her disabled child.

The subject is now in the spotlight, the Amazon Synod in full swing at the Vatican and Pope Francis and various cardinals calling on Catholics to listen to the so-called ancestral wisdom of the people of the forest.

At Tuesday's synod presser, a journalist asked a question about tribal infanticide, leading Peruvian Cdl. Pedro Barreto to offer a defensive response.

Cardinal Pedro Barreto: "This is not something that can be stated so easily because it points at a situation of savagery."

In spite of the cardinal's denials, abundant evidence shows the barbaric Amazonian practice continues, spurring Catholics to say it's all the more reason the Church must bring Christ to the Amazon and cease its talk about interreligious dialogue, ecological conversion and listening to the voices of the indigenous tribes.