By Michael Swan and Yone Simidzu, special to Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada
Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada has had a decades-long engagement with Brazil. Our support has helped our partners stand with, empower and accompany many Indigenous communities, especially in the Amazon region, who struggle to assert their rights to land, livelihoods and a healthy environment.
To help Canadians better understand the intricacies and complexities of the challenges that Indigenous communities face, the award-winning journalist couple Michael Swan and Yone Simidzu went on a mission to Brazil earlier this year. During his long stint as associate editor of The Catholic Register, Swan wrote extensively about our work. Simidzu, who is originally from Brazil, works as a Portuguese translator in Toronto.
The powerful testimonies and photos that Swan and Simidzu gathered in Brazil have appeared in the America magazine and been exhibited and presented across Ontario. Today, on the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, we bring you the first instalment of their Notes from Brazil. The remaining parts will be published on the next three Fridays of this month.
Paulo Ricardo Macushi knows there are wildcat miners, known as garimpeiros, on his people’s land in Brazil. He knows how area ranchers resent the 1.7 million hectares identified as Indigenous Territory since 1993 and legally reserved exclusively for Makushi people since 2005. He knows popular opinion in nearby Boa Vista leans mostly toward the view that the Indigenous have been given too much land, too easily by a bunch of urban elites who don’t understand how hardworking people in rural places, such as the northern state of Roraima, rely upon natural resources as the base of their economy.
But the 22-year-old youth coordinator in the Raposa/Serra do Sol region, working for the Roraima Indigenous Council, is not going to debate the constitutional rights of his people. He is going to fight―fight for his rights, fight for his land.
“The Brazilian state never stopped its ambition to take this land, our resources,” the young Makushi leader said. “The state is racist; a genocidal state.”
The fight for land in a lesser-known Brazil
Paulo lives in a part of the Amazon basin that doesn’t fit the National Geographic image of dense forest and endless rivers. It’s the cerrado, a tropical savanna of dry plains with termite mounds and cacti leading up to the mountains on the borders with Venezuela and Guayana. But the fight for the Amazon is Paulo’s fight.
“These people are children of the forest. The cerrado is part of the forest,” he explained to visitors on the banks of Lake Caracaranã, a sacred place for the Makushi, the people he spoke of.
For Paulo, standing for Makushi land means standing for all Indigenous land in Brazil. He looks south to Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, where lawmakers recently passed legislation in defiance of the Supreme Court and Brazil’s constitution that would limit and redraw the boundaries of Indigenous territories. That law cannot stand, Paulo said.
Seventeen-year-old Darlan Anildo Da Silva, is equally convinced he has to fight for Yanomami land. “Of course, we will fight. We are going to fight for our land,” he told us, a pair of Canadian journalists.
But standing in a clinic for the Yanomami in Boa Vista, where members of his family are being treated for respiratory infections, the handsome young man in a new shirt and fresh haircut is less certain than his Makushi counterpart, Paulo. How the Yanomami will fight, or what they are fighting for, are difficult questions for him to answer.
As much for culture as for land
“We’ve gone to the lifestyle of the whites,” he said, speaking Portuguese and surrounded in the clinic by Yanomami people obsessively scrolling through cheap cell phones.
Carelli Yanomami, 47, knows that the younger generation is losing its identity―an identity that depends on the Yanomami’s connection to their land. Carelli feels a sense of responsibility to Darlan’s generation, but he also lives in two worlds.
“When I come to the city, I wear a shirt and pants [the Yanomami traditionally do not wear clothes], but back home I am Yanomami. I don’t change my identity,” he said.
As the world around them changes, the Yanomami will need to be grounded on their land for that identity to survive. Carelli came to the city as a young man to study, but then went home to his family.
“The culture is inside. We can’t change,” he said.
A multitude of threats in Brazil
The immediate threats that both the Yanomami and the Makushi face are many and they are dire. Most famously, there are the illegal garimpeiros―explorers, prospectors, miners―often financed by organized crime and relentless in their search for gold. These hard men of the frontier fell trees to clear space for roads and landing strips. They dig up river beds. They toss mercury into the water to separate gold from the other floating solids they’ve churned up in what were pristine waters.
During the four years of his government, former President Jair Bolsonaro encouraged the garimpeiros to explore and exploit Indigenous Territories. He told them they would not be prosecuted, as he dismantled the federal government agency charged with protecting Indigenous lands. By the end of his four years in office, the 30,000 Yanomami were host to 20,000 garimpeiros who occupied government health stations and intimidated Yanomami communities with an astounding arsenal of pistols and automatic weapons.
Garimpeiro destruction of rivers and their sprawling encampments cut the Yanomami off from their sources of food―traditional hunting grounds, fishing spots and gardens. In January of 2023, as a new government took office, Brazilians and the world learned of a famine-like situation in Yanomami Indigenous Territory. During the Bolsonaro years, a minimum of 570 children under the age of five had died of malnutrition and related, preventable diseases. Malaria, once unknown to the Yanomami, was running rampant.
Grief and loss on a colossal scale
“It was a genocide. It is clearly connected to neo-colonialism,” said Gilmara Fernandes Ribeiro, northern region director for the Conselho Indigenista Missionario (CIMI, see website in Portuguese), the Brazilian bishops’ organization for missionaries that has been a Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada partner for most of the last 40 years.
The Yanomami death toll under Bolsonaro, comprised entirely of children below school age, was equivalent to two per cent of the entire Yanomami population of 30,000. Two per cent of Canada’s current population of 41 million would be 820,000 deaths. It represents a crippling toll of grief that no nation could easily bear.
Fernandes is not alone in accusing the previous Brazilian government of genocide. The Most Rev. Evaristo Spengler, Bishop of Roraima,said, “The previous [Bolsonaro] government denied safe drinking water and medication when there were reports that Indigenous people were dying. The project of, in fact, exterminating the Yanomami was so that the territory would be available for the garimpeiros and other natural resource projects. There is no other name for this than genocide.”
Spengler is the Brazilian president of REPAM (see website in Spanish), an ecumenical network of church leaders in the eight countries that have some part of the Amazon. Since 2014, REPAM has worked “to create a development model that privileges the poor and serves the common good.” Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada is a close ally of REPAM.
While the Yanomami represent the prime example of what happens when so-called economic development trumps the human right of Indigenous people to live on their own land in their own way, they are hardly alone. Between 2012 and 2022, the Kayapó lost nearly 14,000 hectares to wildcat mining, more than three times as much as the Yanomami.
Unequal under the law
Indigenous Brazilians are certainly under siege by garimpeiros (miners) and fazendeiros (ranchers, agribusiness), but the greater threat may be right-leaning Brazilian politicians who have pushed through new legislation that would cut Indigenous Brazilians off from their ancestral lands and limit their control over their homelands.
The new law is based upon a discredited, rejected legal theory, known as the marco temporal. According to this legal theory, Indigenous Brazilians are only entitled to land they physically inhabited or had claimed as of October 5, 1988, the day Brazil’s constitution was enacted. The new law, passed at the end of 2023, is headed for a confrontation with Brazil’s Supreme Court, which has already ruled, more than once, that this kind of limit on Indigenous land rights is unconstitutional.
“The House approved a bill, and this bill is a trick,” REPAM lawyer and political advisor Melillo Dinis do Nascimento explained in an email. “Obviously, this bill is unconstitutional.”
The Makushi and the Yanomami―Paulo, Darlan and Carelli―are counting on Nascimento, REPAM, CIMI and their own lawyers and leaders to put a stop to this law. Indigenous people did not suddenly appear in Brazil one day in the fall of 1988. Brazil’s constitution clearly recognizes the presence of Indigenous Brazilians before European settlement began in the 15th century.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had tried to gut the new law by vetoing about 80 per cent of the legislation line-by-line. His vetoes were overturned by an agribusiness-allied majority in Brazil’s senate.
The agribusiness lobby argues the law is necessary to provide stability to farmers who fear their land may be claimed by Indigenous people and turned over to them in a process Brazilians call “demarcation.” This legal process, in a country that never signed treaties with Indigenous nations, was mandated by the 1988 constitution.
“Our highest priority is to avoid conflicts that, in the past, undermined the peace and tranquillity of hundreds of rural families. We defend the most absolute respect for the rule of law”, the president of the Santa Catarina Federation of Agriculture, José Zeferino Pedrozo, a major spokesperson for the agriculture lobby, said in a January 18 press release.
In fact, imposing an artificial time limit on Indigenous land claims in Brazil achieves the opposite of legal stability and certainty, said Nascimento.
“The tactic of those who defend this idea is to create a series of legal disputes and put the issue back in the hands of the Court to delay the demarcation process, create obstacles and promote more violence against Indigenous people,” said the REPAM lawyer.
The farmers who claim to fear the demarcation process are, in many cases, farming stolen land. “It [the marco temporal legislation] will unfairly provide ‘legal security’ for the land’s current occupants, many of whom acquired the land illegally, via the theft of public lands,” said Nascimento.
Nascimento has absolute confidence that the new law will be struck down by Brazil’s Supreme Court. But REPAM, CIMI, the Articulation of Indigenous People of Brazil and their allies are equally committed to convincing the Brazilian public that Indigenous rights, as human rights, need to be woven into the fabric of Brazilian society.
“We have been committed to this fight since our founding,” said Nascimento. “The key words are resistance, advocacy and struggle.”
Brazilians have to decide whether they will be governed by the rule of law, said Fernandes of CIMI. The alternative to respecting the constitution and the Indigenous rights embedded in it is the anarchy of “murders, violence, suicide, economic dependency.” Fernandes added that the Indigenous people “are not fighting just for their land; they’re fighting for their spirituality―cosmic rights.”
Hope amid hunger: the role of the Catholic Church of Brazil
It’s a fight that has an important ally in the Catholic Church. “The support of Pope Francis is fundamental,” said Fernandes.
“The Catholic Church doesn’t assume the role of the Indigenous people. We walk together with the Indigenous,” Spengler said. “The issues Indigenous people face have to be solved by Indigenous people. The international attention helps.”
Living with the Yanomami, Consolata missionary Fr. Bob Franks has seen Indigenous resistance up close. Last year he was there when four young Yanomami, two men and two women, went to the local health station to ask the staff not to distribute malaria medication designated for the Indigenous to garimpeiros who had invaded their territory. Given the guns the garimpeiros tote all the time, showing up at the health station to make this demand while garimpeiros were there asking for malaria pills was an act of courage.
Franks reported that the Yanomami youth declared, “No, this is ours. They are from outside. They are white. They have everything to buy for them and they want to take what is ours.” Recalling how that act of resistance made him feel, Franks said, “That’s what gave me hope. That’s why I’m saying, ‘we have hunger, but we have mighty hope.’”
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