RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Indians Press Their Case in Inter-American Commission

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 29 2004 (IPS) - Brazil’s first female indigenous lawyer, Joenia Batista de Carvalho, was not even born yet when her people began to fight for the formal demarcation of the Raposa Sierra del Sol Reserve in the northern Brazilian state of Roraima, which borders Venezuela and Guyana.

Today, the 30-year-old attorney, one of four young activists awarded the 2004 human rights prize granted by athletic apparel and footwear giant Reebok, is representing the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR) in its lawsuit against the Brazilian government before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The lawsuit, which accuses the Brazilian state of violating the rights of Ingariko, Macuxi, Patamona, Taurepang and Wapichana Indians, was presented Monday in Washington, where the IACHR – which forms part of the Organisation of American States (OAS) system – is based.

The IACHR will decide whether to refer the case to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, said the young lawyer, who is also known as Joenia Wapichana according to the custom among many indigenous groups in Brazil who use the name of their ethnic community as their last name.

”We see our rights as human rights, and we thus want the OAS to call on Brazil to explain the reasons for the delay in ratifying the reserve,” she said in an interview with Radio Nacional, a radio station that broadcasts from the Amazon jungle region, before heading to Washington last Friday.

The demarcation of Raposa Sierra del Sol has been a focus of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), the government indigenous affairs agency, since the 1970s.

Several working groups carried out anthropological and territorial studies since 1977, and in 1993 a FUNAI report proposed the demarcation of a 1.67 million-hectare indigenous reservation.

After several years of public debate, then-minister of justice Renán Calheiros accepted the FUNAI proposal in 1998 and declared the Raposa Sierra del Sol territory as the ”permanent property of and for the exclusive use of” the Macuxi, Wapichana, Ingariko, Taurepang and Patamona people, who number around 15,000 in all.

But large landowners and other outside commercial and farming interests that have encroached on the indigenous communities’ ancestral lands are opposed to the creation of a continuous reserve, and want the areas that they have populated and farmed left out of the reservation.

The Roraima state government appealed to the courts to block the implementation of Calheiros’ ministerial decree, but the former justice minister’s decision was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2002.

The only step left to formally create the reserve is ratification by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which has been postponed several times.

The Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) points out that ”Ratification is simply a formal step, established under the Federal Constitution”.

”The establishment of indigenous territories is not a concession on the part of the government to indigenous peoples but rather recognition of an original right of those peoples who had their roots in Brazil prior to its becoming an independent state,” the group adds in a statement published on the web site of the U.S.-based Amazon Alliance.

In early January, non-indigenous rice-growers, with the support of a small group of Indians, went on a rampage in Roraima, invading the offices of FUNAI and the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), taking three missionaries hostage (they were released after two days), and ransacking schools and health clinics run by the Roman Catholic Church in the reservation.

The aim of the protesters was to keep the government from ratifying the creation of a continuous, undivided reserve, which Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos said was to occur in January.

”We are turning to the OAS after doing everything possible within the country,” Jacir José de Souza, the head of CIR, which is leading the struggle for the formal creation of the reserve, told IPS. ”We have been waiting for a meeting with President Lula since last year.”

The government has the obligation to clarify ”why the ratification has been delayed,” said de Souza, who pointed out that the Lula administration pledged to formalise the creation of the reserve from the time the leftist president, a former trade unionist, first came to office in January 2003.

The ratification, said the Macuxi leader, was promised in response to a 35-year struggle and ”the enormous suffering of our people.”

According to data collected by CIR, 20 indigenous people were killed between 1981 and 1999, 72 were assaulted, 54 received death threats, and 80 indigenous homes were destroyed.

CIR is preparing to hold an Apr. 15 demonstration in Brasilia, the capital, although de Souza underlined that ”it has not yet been confirmed.” The protest would draw representatives from indigenous groups from around the country.

The hope is that Lula will decide to ratify the creation of the Raposa Sierra del Sol reserve on Apr. 19, National Day of Indigenous peoples, said de Souza.

Meanwhile, the indigenous groups in Roraima continue living under tension, ”and there is no dialogue between the parties in conflict,” said Luis Marques de Brito, a Portuguese priest who has been active in that state for three years, after spending 10 years in southern Brazil.

The landowners, mainly rice producers, as well as the local state and municipal authorities want populated areas and farms to be left out of the reserve.

However, that would lead to the division of the territory into five separate parts.

The landowners are to receive indemnification for the property where they have planted crops.

The division of the reserve ”into islands would mean the end for these indigenous people, because they would lose their identity,” and would soon be assimilated by mainstream, or ‘white’, culture, de Brito told IPS.

They would suffer a sharp deterioration in their living conditions, due to the prejudice and discrimination they would face in a society in which they are viewed as ”lazy, just garbage,” said the priest.

A ”minority, no more than 20 percent,” of the Indians have backed the movement of landowners opposed to the undivided reserve, and some of them even took part in the January ”uprising,” said de Brito.

Although the Brazilian government pledged to ratify the creation of an undivided reserve, the delay in making it official, ”which was to occur by Christmas, and then in January,” indicates that it is wavering in the face of pressure from local authorities and landowners, he added.

De Brito also said it was increasingly difficult for him and other Roman Catholic churchworkers and missionaries to carry out their work in Roraima, where they mainly focus on ”providing support for the survival of the indigenous groups, and not so much on evangelisation.”

For example, a school in which young people received training in agriculture was destroyed, and the high level of tension makes it impossible to undertake other activities, he added.