September was marked by significant protests by indigenous peoples in Brasilia. In late August, more than six thousand native people descended on the city to accompany a long-awaited decision by the high court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), regarding the demarcation of native lands. On September 10, five thousand indigenous women representing more than 170 of Brazil’s 300-plus tribes marched through Brasilia for the second National March of Indigenous Women.
One of the main goals of this year’s indigenous women’s march was to protest the Bolsonaro administration’s violation of native land rights, at a time when the President has openly been expressing his support for legal actions to revoke indigenous land rights from multiple tribes and open their territories to agribusiness and mining. Particularly pressing is Bolsonaro’s support for the so-called ‘Marco Temporal,’ a legal argument which would invalidate all indigenous land claims by native peoples who were not inhabiting contested lands or were not actively seeking legal redress in court when the Constitution came into effect on October 5, 1988. As the indigenous women’s march progressed through the streets of Brasilia, they chanted ‘administração genocida’ (genocide administration). The final stop along the march route was at the Praça do Compromisso, where a member of the Pataxo tribe was burned to death in 1997 by a group of middle-class youth.
What explains the depth of indigenous peoples’ concern with President Bolsonaro? After all, government relations with native tribes have long been marked by sins of omission. Under the leftist administrations of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (2003-2016), for example, dozens of environmental activists – including indigenous leaders – were murdered. Although new monitoring programs drove down the pace of deforestation, the government turned a blind eye to abuses committed against native peoples by agribusiness and construction firms, most notably in the construction of the Belo Monte dam. The governments of presidents Lula and Rousseff consistently failed to uphold its promises to indigenous peoples, neglecting to uphold territorial boundaries, reverse armed incursions on native lands, and guarantee the full rights of indigenous citizens.
But as a recent article by Salo de Carvalho, David Goyes and Valeria Vegh Weis argues, under Bolsonaro, the government’s sins have shifted from omission to commission. Bolsonaro has engaged in cultural and symbolic violence against indigenous groups. As a candidate, he minced few words: “They are outcasts and we must treat them like terrorists. . . . Private property is sacred. We must criminalize the actions of those marginal people as terrorism. If they intrude on private lands, they’ll get “lead” [bullets].” This pattern continued throughout his presidential campaign when he promised that native peoples would get no more land in a television interview on the Bandeirantes TV channel in 2018.
Carvalho, Goyes and Weis note that as president, Bolsonaro’s rhetoric transformed into direct action. He appointed an anti-environmentalist as environment minister and a former head of the agribusiness lobby as his agricultural minister. He shifted the responsibility for establishing native territories out of the FUNAI agency into the Ministry of Agriculture, effectively mooting any new tribal claims. In 2019, he expanded rural ownership of weapons to enable farmers to defend themselves against “threats” from indigenous peoples, and authorized the use of police violence against citizens celebrating International Indigenous Day.
The National March of Indigenous Women sought to show how precarious the rights of indigenous peoples truly have become under Bolsonaro. Indigenous groups have been fighting and resisting since the 1500s when Portuguese colonizers landed in their territory. But the democratic regime has brought few noticeable improvements in their condition, and notably, the institutional protections that might support indigenous peoples against a motivated opponent such as Bolsonaro have often been far too weak. Notably, on September 15, the Supreme Federal Tribunal postponed any decision on the future demarcation of indigenous territories. With a Congress dominated by agribusiness, and a president who sees the tribes as a threat, rather than as citizens worthy of equal protection, Brazil’s native peoples have every reason to be immensely worried about their future.
Photo: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil
