2023-11-17 21:58:00
Houses burned. Deadly epidemics. Indigenous people persecuted and hunted. Indigenous lands allocated to agricultural companies. Entire communities taken away in trucks, kilometers from their territories. These are just some of the serious human rights violations suffered by indigenous peoples in Brazil thanks to policies such as those that the ‘Law of the Temporal Framework’ (14,701/2023) wants to reissue.
On the eve of the session in the National Congress in which legislators will define whether or not to accept President Lula’s vetoes of the ‘Temporal Framework Law’, researchers from the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) produced two interactive maps to remember ten tragic cases of displacement and 12 cases of forced contacts with indigenous peoples.
The maps were produced from documents from the ISA collection and the entries in the Encyclopedia Indigenous Peoples in Brazil, which recall the violent history of contact experienced by many indigenous peoples. Another subsidy was the final report of the National Truth Commission (CNV), which investigated the serious violations suffered by indigenous peoples and proved that the indigenous policy prior to the 1988 Constitution victimized at least 8,350 indigenous people – crimes recognized by the Brazilian State only in 2014.
Without the vetoes, in addition to maintaining the ‘Temporal Framework’ thesis, which restricts the right of indigenous peoples to the lands they occupied on the date of promulgation of the Constitution, October 5, 1988, the Law can also implement forced contact with indigenous peoples isolated; the permanence of invaders in Indigenous Lands; authorization for agribusiness to explore Indigenous Lands, including with GMOs; and the annulment of indigenous reservations.
To overturn the vetoes in Congress, it will be necessary to reach an absolute majority – at least 257 votes from deputies and 41 from senators. However, the previous wording of the Bill (PL 2,603/2022) had already been approved with 283 votes in favor in the Chamber and 43 in the Senate. This way, if the vetoes are overturned, the law becomes valid, but it can still be questioned in the Supreme Court.
Imminent risk: forced contact with isolated indigenous peoples
On November 21st, President Lula vetoed Article 28 of the law in its entirety, which allowed forced contact with isolated people. The vetoed article, under the justification of “public interest”, established an end to the policy of non-contact with isolated indigenous people, created in 1987 to guarantee these peoples the right to isolation and territory, with contacts established only in extraordinary situations, of risks to health and physical integrity, or in cases where the approach is made by the group itself.
Now, the Federal Congress can decide to reinsert this article into the Law, disregarding the right to self-determination of peoples and reviving the disastrous policy of compulsory integration – which has already caused the death of thousands of indigenous people and the extermination of entire peoples, as shown in the map with 12 cases of forced contact with indigenous peoples.
Cases like that of the people Akuntsu, in Rondônia, expose the history of brutal violence that practically led to the decimation of a previously isolated people. Currently, the Akuntsu, after several massacres perpetrated by farmers, loggers and land grabbers, have had their population reduced to just four survivors.
Now the people Rikbaktsawhich also has its history of forced contact revealed on the interactive map, faced a “pacification” process that led to the death of 75% of its population due to epidemic diseases and other violence.
For anthropologist Tiago Moreira dos Santos, from ISA’s Indigenous Peoples in Brazil program, if the Law is approved without vetoes, this policy could once again decimate entire peoples: “The opening up to situations of forced contact with isolated peoples represents a serious threat to the physical and cultural integrity of these people. The historical examples are clear about what can happen: genocide, drastic population reductions, death of cultures and languages and a lot of suffering for these populations”.
The same was pointed out by President Lula in an order that accompanied the publication of the law in the Official Gazette of the Union: “This provision converts the policy of non-contact into a policy of forced contacts with isolated indigenous people ‘to mediate state action of public utility’, unprecedented and overly broad hypothesis that could generate threats to indigenous peoples in isolation”.
Forced removals freed up territories for colonization and infrastructure works
Article 4 of the Law revives the ‘Temporary Framework’ thesis – which was vetoed by President Lula. This article seeks to condition the rights of indigenous peoples only to the lands they occupied on the date of promulgation of the Constitution, except in cases of possessory conflict that must be proven by the communities.
The article, in addition to going against what was already decided by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) on September 27, 2023, which guaranteed constitutional protection for original rights over the lands they traditionally occupy, regardless of a time frame, ignores the extensive history of expulsions and forced displacements suffered by indigenous peoples, thanks to policies that, in the past, subordinated indigenous rights to government and business plans, legitimizing the plundering of Indigenous Lands.
According to the CNV, this was the objective of the state’s indigenous policy between 1946 and 1988: “A policy is established in practice which, instead of protecting indigenous ‘uses, customs and traditions’, acts directly to alter them whenever it is deemed which present themselves as an ‘impediment’ to the government’s political project”.
One of the examples highlighted on the map, which brings ten cases of forced displacement of indigenous peoples, and demonstrates the risks of approving the thesis, is from the Avá-Canoeiro from Araguaia.
Calling themselves Ãwa, these people were taking refuge from the harassment of farmers in Mata Azul when one of their groups was brutally surrendered by agents from a Funai Attraction Front and, later, they were forcibly transferred to the land of the Javaé. On that occasion, six indigenous people were captured – two men, one woman and three children –, imprisoned in an open-air cage and exposed to public viewing at Fazenda Canuanã. Today, the Avá-Canoeiro do Araguaia have a population of just 38 people and live in exile on other people’s lands, while fighting for the demarcation of their OF Taego us and fair compensation for violations suffered.
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