By Silvia Beatriz Adoue on August 30, 2021
An encampment of 6,000 people, members of 132 indigenous groups has been camped for a week 20 blocks from the National Congress, in Brasilia. At the same time, the peoples carried out 43 road blockades throughout the week in different states of the country. In the capital, they have held events, marches and much debate on the situation of the territories.
The reason for this meeting is the legislating of Bill 490, which introduces a means for the recognition by the State of indigenous lands that not only compromises future demarcations, but also threatens to annul many of those already carried out.
The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 establishes in article 231:
The Indians are recognized for their social organization, customs, languages, beliefs and traditions, and their original rights over the lands they traditionally occupy, and the union is responsible for demarcating them, protecting and ensuring respect for all their property.
The lands traditionally occupied by the Indians are those which are permanently inhabited by them, those used for their productive activities, those essential for the preservation of the environmental resources necessary for their well-being and those necessary for their physical and cultural reproduction.
However, Bill 490 is intended to introduce a device to regulate the demarcation known as “temporary framework”, which would define “permanently inhabited” as those occupied until the promulgation of the Constitution.
If the first wave of European invasion of the continent advanced primarily on the tropical and subtropical plains, it was in the last decades of the century that areas that had been relatively preserved until then were integrated into the production of goods. The second industrial revolution demanded inputs in greater volume, creating business opportunities for the local bourgeoisie. This new invasive wave required a homogenization of territories for flexible land use. Forest fires and violence against populations are instruments for this flexible integration of land into the extraction chains. It is within this larger context that the processing of Bill 490 needs to be understood.
It is not a circumstantial purpose of one government or another. It is a structural trend of the new model of capital accumulation: and the domestic bourgeoisie needs this to expand its opportunities for integration into the business world. The electoral race for 2022 runs outside these debates, since the dispute between all the party organizations is not for different structural projects, but for representing the interests of that internal bourgeoisie with different forms of participation in the benefits of the export surpluses. This is the reason why the peoples have not received the explicit support of any institutional party.
Indigenous lands, although threatened, are in quite different situations. Some peoples, because of their geographical location and history, have managed to preserve the material basis for their economies of abundance. Others have seen their territories destroyed by intensive and destructive use by private groups. The former defend their territories themselves from illegal mining and land grabbers. Some of them even carry out “self-demarcation”, without waiting for the State to carry out the whole delayed and sometimes frozen legal process. This self-demarcation and defense of the areas strengthens them.
The processing of Bill 490 in the National Congress has been interrupted and resumed in order to avoid the presence of indigenous demonstrations in the capital, which, organized by the APIB (Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil), intermittently set up in Brasilia. These encampments, however, have been an opportunity for meeting, articulation and rehearsals of synchronized action. The peoples embody in their struggle the aspiration of coexistence among peoples and with other beings, in the hope of, as Aílton Krenak says, “postponing the end of the world”.
Source: Alainet, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English