Brazilian officials served a series of plans and figures at the recent COP28 climate summit in Dubai, presenting itself as a world leader, on track to protect its forests and the people who live there.
But Brazil’s Congress on Thursday passed a law that threatens the rights of indigenous peoples to most of the land they inhabit or claim, potentially opening vast territories to deforestation, agriculture and mining.
The new law requires indigenous peoples to provide concrete evidence that they occupied the land they claim on October 5, 1988, when the country’s current Constitution was promulgated – a requirement that many of them have little or no hope of meeting.
Under the new rule, not only can indigenous land claims currently in the legal process be rejected for lack of such documentation, but legal protections established for indigenous territories can also be challenged in court and overturned.
“We saw the whole world say at COP28 that we have to change the direction the planet is taking,” said left-wing MP Tarcísio Motta, who voted against the bill, “but congress has just withdrawn people’s rights which aim at “the future of the planet”.
Studies have repeatedly shown that protected indigenous territories have helped prevent deforestation in the Amazon, meaning the forest can better store carbon to fight climate change.
In September, the Supreme Court of Brazil spoke out against a 1988 cut-off date for indigenous land claims, but supporters of the new law, who include 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 on Thursday, the House and Senate overrode the president’s veto, with many of his allies joining his opponents in voting to challenge him. Lawmakers also recently passed a measure that environmentalists call the “poison bill,” which loosens pesticide rules, and sent it to the president.
Congress “agreed with the caucus’s agenda of agribusiness and 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 force next week. Legal experts expect it to be challenged in the Supreme Court, and members of Apib, one of Brazil’s main indigenous rights movements, have already prepared a request for the court to hear.
Yet it could take months or more for the court to rule on the case, and environmentalists and indigenous rights activists fear the damage that could be done by then.
“We will observe total chaos in jurisprudence and threats to the lives of these vulnerable people who depend on state action and these territories to survive,” said Beto Marubo, indigenous leader and advocate for indigenous rights from the Javari Valley of the Amazon basin . , where some of the most isolated people in Brazil live.
According to data, Brazil has more than 1.7 million indigenous people official figuresand more than half live in the Amazon region. But only 20% of households with at least one indigenous person live within designated indigenous territories.
Those living in the territories already struggle with illegal logging for farming and mining, and live in legal uncertainty, but the rate of deforestation is steadily increasing. much lower in indigenous territories than elsewhere.
According to FUNAI, a government agency, across Brazil, 483 of these territories have been granted full legal protection, and another 278 are going through the process of gaining protection.
Overall they cover more than 1.1 million square kilometersthat’s about 425,000 square miles, the size of Texas and California combined, nearly 14% of the area of Brazil.
Advocacy groups say that under the new law, more than 90% of these lands could be removed from protection, and have denounced the government for undermining Lula’s environmental agenda, including the conservation of the Amazon rainforest.
“It is a very contradictory situation for the country to have a policy aimed at reducing deforestation and, on the other hand, to have a Congress that tirelessly fights to end the richest tool we have to protect the Amazon: indigenous lands” , stated …Astrini.
Indigenous and environmental groups say tribes with traditional lifestyles may have occupied an area for centuries without having any way to provide it. Some have only outgrown contact with the developed world.
MPs supporting the law argue that 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 elimination of the veto on the ‘times law,’ is admirable because it gives legal certainty to those who own rural property in Brazil,” said Márcio Bittar, a right-wing senator.
But they are the indigenous people whose land has been – and is – taken from them, their supporters say, and the law ignores their history of dispossession and marginalization.
Outside government buildings in Brasilia on Thursday, at least 100 indigenous people and their supporters, including the government’s Indigenous Peoples Minister, Sônia Guajajara, protested against the bill as lawmakers inside voted to override the veto. Afterwards, they headed to the nearby Supreme Court building to symbolically submit their review petition.
Flavia Milhorance reported from Rio de Janeiro e Paolo Motoryn from Brasilia.