|
The almost 4,000 Terena people who live in the 2,090 hectares of the Buriti indigenous land, located in the northeastern region of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, live with the stress of imminent eviction from the lands to which they returned in 2001.
The reason is a repossession action for the Buriti indigenous land that had been schedule for March 5. At the request of the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Campo Grande, the action was suspended by the appeal court judge Ana Maria Pimentel, from the Federal Regional Court.
According to the local press, the mobilization of the police force for the eviction of two indigenous peoples - the Guarani-Kaiowá, in the Nhande Ru Marangatu land, and the Terena people, in the Buriti land - which were scheduled for earlier this month, had a cost of US$ 74,000.
The operation would have involved 160 men from the Federal and Military Police forces, a helicopter, an airplane and fire brigade vehicles.
In its March 8 edition, the Campo Grande-based newspaper Correio do Estado published, in an article entitled "Producers prepare to defend their lands" that "around 1,000 rural producers could be mobilized to expel the indigenous people from seven rural properties in Sidrolândia and Dois Irmãos de Buriti."
One of the producers is supposed to have said that "the group's intention is to retake the areas without the support of the police."
It their struggle for the land, the Terena de Buriti are facing a situation similar to that of the Guarani-Kaiowá: large populations living in small areas, where the search for crop lands has led to a repossession procedures or petitions requesting revision of land boundaries, so that the people can use places that they have traditionally occupied but which remained outside the lands demarcated by the Indigenous People's Protection Service (SPI) during the first two decades of the twentieth century. At that time, SPI demarcated 10 Terena lands in the region that we now call Mato Grosso do Sul.
The anthropological report dealing with the review of the boundaries of the Buriti lands was concluded in 2001 and identified 17,200 hectares traditionally occupied by the indigenous people.
Farmers contested the process in the courts and a new Working Group was set up under the federal court system in which representatives of the farmers participated in the information collection process.
The second group's report retained the area identified by the first, but with a 5% reduction, according to information from the Terena de Buriti. Even so, a federal court granted land rights to the farmers.
Rice, corn, cassava and cotton are being cultivated in the repossessed areas of the Buriti indigenous land. The concentration of people in the old areas does not leave any space for plantations beyond the yards of the houses.
A traditionally agricultural people, which survived by working on the cattle ranches that still exist in their region and on their lands, the Terena have adopted a strategy of interacting with non-indigenous people which has included schooling (many of them are at university).
They have also been present in places where public policies concerning the people are formulated or applied, such as in Funai and more recently through the election of Terena councilors, who have been charged with representing the people in the legislative sphere.
River Transposition
How important is the São Francisco river to the indigenous peoples that live on its banks? How will the transposition of this river affect these peoples? What transformations has the river undergone over the last few years? What must be done to guarantee the survival of the indigenous peoples that depend on the river?
These and other questions were discussed at the Meeting of the Riverine Indigenous People of the São Francisco River Basin on March 12 and 13 in the Tuxá indigenous land in Rodelas, state of Bahia.
The meeting, put on by the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Northeast, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo (Apoinme), is aimed at giving the indigenous communities clear details about the São Francisco river transposition project and preparing joint steps to be taken by the indigenous people with respect to the project.
Representative Edson Duarte, from the Green Party, Bahia, and José Augusto Laranjeiras Sampaio, representative of the National Association of Indigenist Action, have been invited to reflect on the indigenous policy.
Cimi - Indianist Missionary Council
www.cimi.org.br
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.