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| Makuxi wearing paishara costume for meeting at Bismark, Raposa Serra do Sol, Brazil. October 1996
© 1996 Fiona Watson/Survival |
'This here is my life, my soul. If you take me away from this land,
you take my life.'Marcos Veron, Guarani-Kaiowá leader, killed January
2003.
In just the first two weeks of 2003, three Indians have been murdered in
Brazil. Behind these deaths lurks the spectre of Brazil's land rights scandal:
it remains the only country in South America apart from Suriname which does not
recognise Indian land ownership rights. One of the Indians killed, Marcos Veron,
had travelled to Europe two years previously to help launch Survival's book, Disinherited – Indians in Brazil, which highlights
this very problem.
Marcos Veron, aged around 70, was the leader of the Guarani-Kaiowá community
of Takuára. For fifty years his people had been trying to recover even a small
piece of their ancestral land, after it was seized by a wealthy Brazilian and
turned into a vast cattle ranch. Most of the forest that once covered the area
has since been cleared. In April 1997, desperate after years of lobbying the
government in vain, Marcos led his community back onto the ranch. They began to
rebuild their houses, and could plant their own crops again. But the rancher who
had occupied the area went to court and a judge ordered the Indians out. In
October 2001, more than a hundred heavily armed police and soldiers forced the
Indians to leave their land once more. They eventually ended up living under
plastic sheets by the side of a highway.
While still in Takuára, Marcos said, 'This here is my life, my soul. If
you take me away from this land, you take my life.' His words came
prophetically and tragically true early this year, when, during another attempt
to return peacefully to his land, he was viciously beaten by employees of the
rancher. He died a few hours later.
Marcos' death was the third Indian killing since the New Year. Just a few
days earlier a 77-year old Kaingang man, Leopoldo Crespo, was brutally attacked
and killed by a group of young men in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. A Makuxi
Indian, Aldo da Silva Mota, was found buried in a shallow grave on a ranch in
Roraima, northern Brazil. The Makuxi, like the Guarani, have been struggling for
years to reclaim their lands in the teeth of bitter opposition from ranchers who
now 'own' the land.
The hopes of Brazil's Indian peoples were raised last year when the Brazilian
Congress approved the ratification of Convention 169 of the International Labour
Organisation, the most important international law concerning tribal peoples.
This obliges a country to 'identify the lands which the peoples concerned
[i.e. tribal peoples] traditionally occupy, and to guarantee effective
protection of their rights of ownership and possession.'
But there has been no word from the government on how this can be
incorporated into law, given the country's historic refusal to do anything other
than set aside areas of land for Indians to live in, the borders of which can
then be reduced or moved at any time.
The Makuxi know well how vulnerable the present system leaves them: despite
much of their homeland in Raposa-Serra do Sol being 'demarcated' for their use
in this way, a minister signed an act to reduce the Indian area, and local
ranchers have contested the demarcation. Because of these challenges, the
demarcation has still not been ratified in law, and the Makuxi still suffer
terribly as ranchers and goldminers invade their land and attack them.
Around the time of these three deaths, a new president took office in Brazil.
Brazil's Indian peoples, and their friends and supporters around the world, are
now hoping that he will at last take action to rectify this centuries-old
injustice.
