Indigenous
communities and isolated tribes in Brazil are under threat as the
government moves to legalize mining, logging, and industrial farming in their lands without their consent.
[Image description: Indigenous protesters
dance outside the Congressional Palace in Brasilia last month to protest
legislation that would roll back protections of Indigenous lands and
rights enshrined in Brazil’s constitution.]
As tensions between illegal gold miners and Indigenous communities
erupt into open violence in the Brazilian Amazon, legislators allied
with right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro are aggressively pursuing
measures aimed at curtailing protections of the territories and rights
of Indigenous people.
Since mid-May, prospectors have launched a
series of brazen attacks against Yanomami and Munduruku communities in
the states of Roraima and Pará respectively.
Indigenous leaders
believe their communities are facing the most perilous moment since
Brazil returned to democracy in the 1980s, after more than 20 years of
military dictatorship. Death threats and intimidation are daily
occurrences in some areas, and Munduruku leaders say their people are
living in a “state of war.”
Miners and their Indigenous collaborators in the Munduruku Indigenous
Territory set fire to the homes of several tribal leaders in late May,
an apparent reprisal for a police raid on a gold strike.
Recently,
at least eight separate attacks have been reported in the Yanomami
Indigenous Territory, including a running gun battle between gold miners
and villagers, according to the Hutukara Yanomami Association. In one incident, two Indigenous children drowned in the panic that ensued
as miners opened fire with automatic weapons from speedboats on the
Uraricoera River. In another encounter, miners rammed a canoe with eight
children aboard. All of them managed to reach shore safely and hide in
the brush.
In
both territories, Federal Police agents who arrived to defuse tensions
also came under assault by the gold miners, popularly known as garimpeiros.
Meanwhile in Brasilia, hardline conservatives in the lower chamber of
Brazil’s Congress cleared a major hurdle last month in their quest to
reshape Brazil’s 1988 constitution to allow commercial activity on
Indigenous lands.
Law Project 490, known as PL490, would legalize
mining, logging, industrial agriculture, and other projects deemed “in
the national interest” on Indigenous lands without the consent of local
communities. The controversial bill was approved on June 23 by the
Constitution and Justice Committee and will now move to the lower house,
called the Chamber of Deputies, before heading to the Senate.
Conservatives allied with agribusiness—ruralistas—together with evangelical fundamentalists, form the core of the voting block that holds majorities in both houses.
The
catchall measure would also open the way for legal challenges to the
boundaries of Indigenous territories, threatening to reduce the size of
some areas and eliminate others altogether. In Brazil, 441 Indigenous
territories have been demarcated and officially recognized, 237 more are
in intermediate stages of recognition. The largest of Brazil’s
Indigenous territories are in the rainforest, and they cover one-quarter
of the country’s Amazon region.
Perhaps most unsettling of all,
critics say, the bill would make it possible for the government to
review and scale back the boundaries of several territories set aside to
protect isolated Indigenous groups, also known as “uncontacted tribes.”
Field agents from the Indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, have confirmed
the existence of 28 isolated Indigenous groups in Brazil, and there may
be as many as 70 more. The controversial legislation would also clear
the way to force contact on these highly vulnerable groups for any
overriding national interest, even allowing third parties to participate
in organized contact teams.
“And who would these third parties
be?” says Fabricio Amorim, a 10-year veteran of FUNAI who now works for
the Observatory of Human Rights for Isolated and Recently Contacted
Indigenous Peoples, a Brazilian advocacy group. “Missionaries, of
course. The PL490 is opening terrain not only for the ruralistas but
also for evangelicals who have this extremist view to spread the word of
Christ to the isolated tribes.”
