RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Indigenous Groups Welcome Gov’t Decision on Reserve

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 15 2005 (IPS) - Indigenous groups welcomed a decision by the Brazilian Justice Ministry Friday to formalise the demarcation of the Raposa Sierra del Sol reserve in the northern state of Roraima.

“It’s a big relief, even if the joy isn’t 100 percent complete,” the head of the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR), Marinaldo Justino Trajano, said in a telephone interview with IPS.

A statement issued by the Justice Ministry recognises the right of 15,000 indigenous people from five ethnic groups to an area of 1.74 million hectares in northeastern Roraima, on the border with Guyana and Venezuela.

It also sets a deadline for large landowners who grow rice and raise cattle on part of the land awarded to the indigenous communities to pull out.

The measure will allow Brazil’s Supreme Court to throw out legal challenges questioning the validity of the demarcation of the territory, which was carried out in 1998, but was still pending final approval by the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

President Lula signed the document shortly after the Justice Ministry made its announcement Friday.

The relief expressed by Trajano was in response to what he considered a successful end to a 30-year struggle in which many indigenous people have died.

The local indigenous groups and the organisations that defend them have been the target of violence, against a backdrop of land disputes in which the political and economic interests of large landowners and local governments come into play.

But Trajano’s joy is “only 90 percent complete” because the new limits of the reserve exclude the town of Uiramután, a military base, and the strips of land along which highways and power lines run.

“First we wanted to win formal approval, and now we’ll start to discuss the exclusion of these areas, which we do not believe was legal,” said the Macuxi tribal leader.

Nevertheless, the excluded areas will not have a great impact on the demand for a continuous, unbroken territory set forth by the Macuxi, Ingarikó, Patamona, Taurepang and Wapichana ethnic groups.

The legal challenges were aimed at excluding from the reserve the areas occupied by Uiramután, rice plantations and cattle ranches.

The town was created in 1995 within the reserve, despite the fact that the boundaries had already been defined two years earlier by the government’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), after lengthy debate and numerous court battles.

Under the constitution, the Indian groups living in that part of the state of Roraima have a clearly defined right to their ancestral land.

But celebrations of the victory could be premature. Roraima Governor Ottomar Pinto announced Friday that he would appeal to the Supreme Court as soon as Lula signed the document.

Pinto, who said it is incredible that most of the state of Roraima is under the control of the central government, with just seven or eight percent of the territory under state jurisdiction, argued that the formal creation of the indigenous reserve would further limit the state’s prospects for productive development.

Rice plantations cover 110,000 hectares of the land that has formally been awarded to the indigenous groups. “That is less than seven percent of the entire area of Raposa Sierra del Sol,” said Fabio Pereira Lima, an agronomist and adviser to the Roraima Agricultural Cooperative and Farmers Federation.

Rice production accounts for half of the state’s gross domestic product, and 90 percent of the crop is grown on land within the borders of the indigenous territory. “These figures shed light on the magnitude of the problem,” Pereira Lima told IPS.

There are only 14 large rice-growers in the area, who directly employ 6,000 people – a significant number in a state with a population of just 400,000, he added.

The local indigenous communities have long provided cheap labour for the “white” settlers who came into their territory and set up large farms. The Indians, meanwhile, gradually lost their right to hunt and fish on their own land. Three decades ago, they began to fight for their constitutional right over the land where their ancestors had lived for generations.

The indigenous groups have their own plans for the region’s development. They raise cattle, pigs, chickens and horses, and plant manioc, plantains, rice and beans, selling their products in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima.

But the landowners and others opposed to the creation of the Raposa Sierra del Sol reservation argue that the five indigenous groups represent just nine percent of the population of Roraima, and have been awarded half of the territory, in dozens of reserves.

Some opponents of the reserve reacted to the Justice Ministry measure by issuing warnings that there may be “bloodshed”.

But Trajano underlined that “this is not what we want. Besides, that has already been occurring, with many deaths on our side.”

More than 20 indigenous activists have been killed during the three-decade struggle over the creation of the reserve.

The Ministry’s decision sets a one-year deadline for rice farmers and stockbreeders to abandon the land they have been using in the indigenous territory. But according to Governor Pinto, this could trigger a rise in violence in Roraima.

In a meeting with rice farmers, who announced a protest demonstration for Saturday, the governor warned against “rash” decisions.

All action taken must be “within the framework of the law,” and the state government will not encourage “civil disobedience,” said Pinto.

The tension over land disputes in the indigenous territory has frequently flared up into violence.

In January 2004, rice farmers backed by a small group of local Indians staged protests in Roraima, in which they mounted roadblocks, destroyed homes, schools and crops, and even took three Catholic missionaries hostage briefly to demand that the government break up the reserve, leaving out the areas settled by white farmers, and the town of Uiramután.

Saulo Feitosa, vice-president of the Catholic Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), told IPS that a definitive solution to the conflict also depends on the compensation that the central government has promised Roraima and the settlers that have occupied indigenous land.

He said the promise, which would likely take the shape of transfers of federal land to the state to resettle the farmers and to respond to the demands of the state government, was an “error”, and could give rise to “illegalities”.