Brazilian Indians secure nationwide land victory / Reproduced from: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/10623
Tribes across Brazil have secured a historic nationwide victory, preventing Congress from seizing control of the future of their lands.
A proposal to change the constitution and give Congress power in the demarcation of indigenous territories has been shelved following months of vociferous protests by thousands of Indians, representing dozens of tribes.
If passed, the proposed constitutional amendment, known as ‘PEC215’, would have caused further delays and obstacles to the recognition and protection of the tribes’ ancestral land, on which they depend for their survival.
Indigenous leader Sonia Guajajara stated on her way back to her Amazon home after weeks of lobbying in Brasilia, “I am returning with a cleansed heart, a light soul, and full of courage to do it all over again if ever needed in the fight for the defense of our rights and our peoples.”
The Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) issued an open letter to mark this momentous occasion, stating, “We indigenous peoples have shown that we will never allow our lands to be recolonized, invaded or destroyed, even if that means sacrificing our own lives.”
Alongside several other proposals, PEC 215 was a result of pressure by Brazil’s powerful agri-business lobby group which includes many politicians who own ranches on indigenous land.
It threatened to spell disaster for tribes such as the Guarani who have been evicted from most of their land and who face appalling living conditions and one of the highest suicide rates in the world while they wait for the government to fulfil its legal duty to map out their land, and Brazil’s numerous uncontacted tribes – the country’s most vulnerable societies.
Survival has been lobbying against PEC 215 and the other dangerous proposals. Nixiwaka Yawanawá, an Amazon Indian from Brazil, led the international protests by Survival supporters and stated, “We’re here to support our indigenous brothers and sisters in Brazil who are facing the worst assault on their rights in decades.”
Brazilian Indians continue to fight against the invasion of their lands by loggers, miners, ranchers and others, and against a series of Amazon mega-dams which threaten to destroy the livelihoods of thousands of Indians, and wipe out some uncontacted tribes.
Occupy Amazonia? Indigenous activists are taking direct action - and it's working
The indigenous peoples of the Amazon are employing the tactics of the Occupy movement against oil companies, gold miners and illegal loggers, writes Marc Brightman. Their methods are home-grown: lacking the protection of the state, they have always had to fight their own battles. But recent campaign successes owe much to outside support. We must maintain, and strengthen, our solidarity.
The native peoples of Loreto, in Peru's Amazon basin, have just ended a month long occupation of 14 oil wells belonging to the Argentine company Pluspetrol.
Negotiations are still underway between the oil company and various other communities, represented by the indigenous association Feconaco.
This is not the first time Feconaco has occupied Pluspetrol's operations. Such actions on the part of indigenous groups are relatively common.
Amazonian people don't appear to have learned direct action from the Occupy Movement or from Euro-American protest traditions, despite the similar tactics. In the absence of functioning state protection, native people have always had to stand up for themselves.
Last September, for instance, Ka'apor people of northeastern Maranhão in Brazil published photographs of illegal loggers whom they had captured and tied up. They had taken matters into their own hands because the state was not protecting their territory.
The pioneers of indigenous direct action were the Kayapó of southern Pará in Brazil, who began monitoring goldmining and later logging in their territory, which senior leaders tolerated and indeed profited from.
In the early 1990s, environmental destruction and mercury poisoning led many Kayapó people to support a younger generation of leaders who expelled the miners and loggers from their territory. Images of the Kayapó have since become synonymous with indigenous environmentalism.
A history of exploitation
The relative success of direct action in recent decades contrasts with the often bloody encounters that went before, from which poorly-armed Indians invariably emerged badly.
Indigenous people in the Amazon have been the victims of the mining and energy industries for hundreds of years. The earliest colonists were motivated by greed for gold, and successive waves of exploitation have followed. The violent and coercive labour relations of the rubber boom (which ended a century ago) continue to affect how local people view trade and outsiders.
Fur hunters would shoot native people on sight throughout much of the 20th century. A good friend of mine, one of my principal informants in the field, fled Brazil as a child after his family were killed by fur hunters, and came to live with another tribe in the border area between French Guiana and Suriname.
Here, and across the Guiana region (the vast area of northeastern Amazonia bordered by the rivers Negro, Orinoco and the lower Amazon), mining for gold, diamonds and other minerals has led to significant social conflicts.
The region's small communities are held together by personal ties of kinship and are highly dependent upon local ecosystems for their livelihoods. This makes them particularly vulnerable to the side-effects of extractive industries such as environmental destruction and pollution of rivers and lakes. But there are also social and medical effects: prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction and the introduction of new diseases such as HIV.
Mining and oil companies generally earn a bad reputation for their Amazon activities, but projects devised in the name of 'sustainability' can have a negative impact too. Think in particular of the programme of hydroelectric dams being rolled out across Brazil.
Belo Monte, the world's fourth largest hydroelectric dam, is being built across a southern tributary of the Amazon, for instance. It has already caused the influx of tens of thousands of workers, with severe strain on local social relations. Its impact on a vast ecosystem - a major hydrological basin - will be monumental.
Protests against the Belo Monte dam have failed, as a Brazilian government focused on development ploughed on with its project which is, after all, consistent with the political rhetoric of the 'green economy'. Indigenous people are a small section of the electorate, and their voice cuts little sway in the national political scene.
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