Brazil’s Congress weakens protection of indigenous territories and defies Lula

Brazilian officials served a variety of plans and figures at the recent COP28 climate summit in Dubai, presenting itself as a world leader, on track to protect the forests and the people who live there.

But on Thursday, Brazil’s Congress passed a law that threatens the rights of indigenous people to most of the land they inhabit or claim, potentially opening vast areas to deforestation, agriculture and mining.

The new law requires indigenous people to provide concrete evidence that they occupied the land they claim on October 5, 1988, when the country’s current constitution was adopted – a requirement that many of them have little or no hope for.

Under the new rule, not only can Indigenous land claims currently going through the legal process be dismissed for lack of such documentation, but established legal protections for Indigenous lands can also be challenged in court and revoked.

“We saw the whole world at COP28 saying that we need to change the direction the planet is taking,” said left-wing congressman Tarcísio Motta, who voted against the bill, “but Congress just revoked the rights of the people who live on it point to the future of the planet.”

Studies have repeatedly shown that protected indigenous areas have helped prevent deforestation in the Amazon, meaning the forest can better store carbon to fight climate change.

In September, Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled ruled against a 1988 deadline for indigenous land claims, but proponents of the new law, including powerful agricultural interests, hope it will change the legal calculus.

Congress passed the legislation last month, but President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva quickly vetoed most of its provisions. Then the House and Senate overrode the president’s veto on Thursday, with many of his own allies joining his opponents in voting to defy him. Lawmakers also recently passed a measure that environmentalists call the “poison bill,” which loosens regulations on pesticides, and sent it to the president.

Congress “has accepted the agenda of the agricultural caucus and of environmental setbacks,” said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental and civil society organizations in Brazil.

The Indigenous Lands Act is expected to come into effect next week. Legal experts expect it will be challenged in the Supreme Court, and members of Apib, a leading indigenous rights movement in Brazil, have already prepared a request for the court to review it.

Still, it could be months or longer before the court rules on the case, and environmentalists and indigenous rights activists fear the damage that could be done by then.

“We will see total chaos in the jurisprudence and threats to the lives of these vulnerable people who depend on state action and on these areas for survival,” said Beto Marubo, an indigenous leader and advocate of indigenous rights from the Javari Valley of the Amazon basin. , home to some of the most isolated people in Brazil.

According to figures, Brazil has more than 1.7 million indigenous people official figures, and more than half live in the Amazon region. But only 20 percent of households with at least one Indigenous person live in designated Indigenous areas.

Those who do live in the areas are already fighting illegal logging for ranching and mining, and living with legal uncertainty, but the rate of deforestation is much lower in indigenous areas than elsewhere.

Across Brazil, 483 such areas have received full legal protection, and 278 others are in the process of gaining protection, according to FUNAI, a government agency.

In total they cover more than 1.1 million square kilometersor about 425,000 square kilometers, the size of Texas and California combined, almost 14 percent of the area of ​​Brazil.

Advocacy groups say protection for more than 90 percent of these areas could be lifted under the new law, and they have called out the government for undermining Mr. Lula’s environmental agenda, including the conservation of the Amazon rainforest.

“It is a very contradictory situation for the country to be pursuing policies to reduce deforestation, and on the other hand, to have a Congress that is fighting tirelessly to end the richest instrument we have to protect the Amazon: the indigenous lands,” said Mr. Astrini.

Indigenous and environmental groups say tribes with traditional lifestyles may have occupied an area for centuries without any way to prove it. Some have had only fleeting contact with the developed world.

Members of Congress who support the bill say it is necessary to give landowners confidence that their land will not be taken from them, which would also create a better business environment for agriculture.

“What is happening today, with the overturning of the veto on the ‘term law’, is admirable because it provides legal certainty to those who own rural properties in Brazil,” said Márcio Bittar, a right-wing senator.

But it is indigenous people whose land has been — and continues to be — taken from them, their advocates say, and the law ignores their history of dispossession and marginalization.

Outside government buildings in Brasília, at least a hundred indigenous peoples and their supporters, including Indigenous Peoples Minister Sônia Guajajara, protested against the bill on Thursday, while inside lawmakers voted to override the veto. They then went to the nearby Supreme Court building to symbolically file their petition for review.

Flavia Milhorance reported from Rio de Janeiro and Paulo Motoryn from Brasília.