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Mexico Bans Jungle Animals In Circuses

Mexico Bans Jungle Animals In Circuses

MEXICO CITY — Legislators in Mexico have voted to forbid the use of jungle animals such as elephants, big cats or monkeys in circuses across the country, threatening fines equivalent to over $220,000 for offenders, Spain's EFE agency and Latin American newspapers report.

The ban, applicable nationwide, is already in force in Mexico City and certain states such as Chihuahua in northern Mexico and Quintana Roo on the Caribbean. The bill empowers the federal government to create norms on the humane treatment of animals, and it obligates circuses to provide the Environment Ministry with a list of all their wild animals "with their characteristics."

The legislation was partly driven by recognition that large animals need particular foods and care conditions. In 2013-14, government inspectors carried out 96 checks, found 54 "irregularities" in circuses, and confiscated 117 animals from their owners, either for cruel treatment or uncertain origins, EFE reports.

Photo: Graeme Churchard

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Society

Brazil's Evangelical Surge Threatens Survival Of Native Afro-Brazilian Faith

Followers of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion in four traditional communities in the country’s northeast are resisting pressure to convert to evangelical Christianity.

image of Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Agencia Publica
Géssica Amorim

Among a host of images of saints and Afro-Brazilian divinities known as orixás, Abel José, 42, an Umbanda priest, lights some candles, picks up his protective beads and adjusts the straw hat that sits atop his head. He is preparing to treat four people from neighboring villages who have come to his house in search of spiritual help and treatment for health ailments.

The meeting takes place discreetly, in a small room that has been built in the back of the garage of his house. Abel lives in the quilombo of Sítio Bredos, home to 135 families. The community, located in the municipality of Betânia of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is one of the municipality’s four remaining communities that have been certified as quilombos, the word used to refer to communities formed in the colonial era by enslaved Africans and/or their descendents.

In these villages there are almost no residents who still follow traditional Afro-Brazilian religions. Abel, Seu Joaquim Firmo and Dona Maura Maria da Silva are the sole remaining followers of Umbanda in the communities in which they live. A wave of evangelical missionary activity has taken hold of Betânia’s quilombos ever since the first evangelical church belonging to the Assembleia de Deus group was built in the quilombo of Bredos around 20 years ago. Since then, other evangelical, pentecostal, and neo-pentecostal churches and congregations have established themselves in the area. Today there are now nine temples spread among the four communities, home to roughly 900 families.

The temples belong to the Assembleia de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the World Church of God's Power, the latter of which has over 6,000 temples spread across Brazil and was founded by the apostle and televangelist Valdemiro Santiago, who became infamous during the pandemic for trying to sell beans that he had blessed as a Covid-19 cure. Assembleia de Deus alone, who are the largest pentecostal denomination in the world, have built five churches in Betânia’s quilombos.


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