Feisty Aphrodite Archives
Indigenous Groups Defend Constitutional Right to Land in Brazil
The following is from the article written by Mario Osava, published by the Inter Press Service News Agency:
Thousands of indigenous people in the west-central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul are living in precarious camps or small overcrowded reservations, lacking the land they need to grow the food needed to overcome high levels of malnutrition.
But despite government recognition of their ancestral land, their claims are tied up in court. Meanwhile, their community leaders face the threat of being killed for attempting to secure respect for indigenous people’s constitutional right to their traditional lands.
"We are not opposed to indigenous people," but their territory cannot be expanded "by violating other people’s property rights," argued Dacio Queiroz, secretary of the Agriculture Federation that represents large landowners in the state.
Landowners, who are afraid of losing property as a result of the formal demarcation of new indigenous reservations, "hold proper land titles" that cannot be annulled just because Indians "supposedly" used to live there, argued Queiroz, who inherited land that was acquired in 1948 and that is claimed by members of the Guaraní ethnic group in the municipality of Antonio Joao in Mato Grosso do Sul.
But the only option for survival that Brazil’s indigenous people have is to recover their ancestral land, based on rights that are enshrined in the country’s 1988 constitution.
The population explosion of the last few decades has pushed Brazil’s indigenous communities to stage peaceful occupations of land that their ancestors lived on in recent generations, thus seeking to accelerate the government’s demarcation process. The reservations that were drawn up decades ago are now too small, given the growth of their communities.
For example, Zacarias Rodrigues, a 50-year-old father of four and grandfather of two, decided to lead an occupation of land that his community, the Terena Indians, used to live on, when he -- the youngest of 12 siblings -- was left without land to farm and he foresaw a similar fate for the future generations.
After three years of preparations and a lengthy campaign to get people involved, 21 families occupied part of an estate in the early hours of Nov. 28, 2005, setting up a camp that they called Mother Earth.
"It was hard work convincing people in public meetings, seminars, and going door to door," recalled another of the movement’s leaders, 43-year-old Maria Belizario, who has three children and three grandchildren.
"The earth is our mother, it is everything for us, and in the village where we were living, there was no more room for our children," said Belizario, who suggested the name of the camp.
Her group broke with the long tradition of diplomacy of the Terena people, who are known for engaging in dialogue and adapting to being hemmed in by "non-indigenous" society.
The ethnic group in fact was split by the occupation, a tactic used for decades by the much bigger Guaraní community, who have long suffered discrimination in the southern part of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
There were moments of tension. On the second night of the occupation, shots fired by the landowner’s security guards terrified the women who were standing watch while their husbands rested from a long, tiring day of building huts, said Darci Santos, a 43-year-old who has five children and two grandchildren.
Albertina Fonseca, who is the same age as Santos but has 11 children and eight grandchildren, also vividly remembers the frightening incident.
At one point, 120 families were living in the camp, but the number has dwindled to 68. Many left because of the lack of water, electricity and schools, lamented Rodrigues.
The remaining families depend on water brought in by truck and food distributed by the government, as they are unable to grow enough crops for their survival given the fact that the legal dispute over the land is ongoing.
The occupation expanded the Terena reserve in the municipality of Miranda, in western Mato Grosso do Sul, by 1,297 hectares, from the original 2,660 hectares inhabited by 6,000 Terena Indians in the municipality of Miranda, in the western part of the state.
But the group lays claim to the entire zone of Cachoeirinha, an area of 36,288 hectares that anthropologists say is traditional Terena territory.
Some of the large landowners affected by the Terena occupation decided not to take the matter to court, but are seeking indemnification from the state. Read the entire story here.
