Will Lula keep his promise to protect Brazil’s Indigenous people?

A controversial land-use bill has pitted Indigenous communities in Brazil against powerful lobby groups, which want to grow crops and mine minerals in the forested lands where Indigenous people have lived for centuries.

Thousands of people belonging to different tribes have taken part in rallies after the Brazilian lower house of Congress passed a bill titled PL 490/2007 that would make it easier for the corporations to move onto the land belonging to Indigenous people.

The bill has not yet been signed into a law but it will test left-leaning President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s ability to fend off the crisis.

"Many of us are leaving the territories to carry out demonstrations," Alessandra Korap, an Indigenous leader for the Munduruku people tells TRT World.

The 39-year-old is part of the Munduruku tribe, a community of 14,000 people, who live in settlements scattered across the Tapajos River Basin in Brazil’s Amazonian states of Para and Mato Grosso.

Reports suggest Lula could veto the bill, however, a large number of conservative lawmakers in Congress can make it difficult for him to do so.

Last year Lula returned to Brazil's presidency on a campaign that pledged to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and protect Amazon jungles from deforestation.

His predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, oversaw policies, which allowed agribusinesses to quickly expand their footprint in the rainforests that are home Indigenous communities and a biodiverse ecosystem.

History repeats itself

A crucial aspect of the bill involves transferring the powers to demarcate tribal lands from the executive to the legislative branch of the Brazilian government.

Currently the decision to determine the boundaries of Indigenous lands is undertaken by the National Indian Foundation (Funai), a government body that establishes and carries out policies in relation to Indigenous peoples through an administrative procedure involving technical and legal reviews.

Critics of the bill say it would strip powers of government bodies such as the environmental ministry and the recently established Indigenous ministry, undermining their authority to enforce protections and the demarcations of Indigenous lands.

The bill passed by the lower house last week could further open the door to the powerful agribusiness sector to exploit the land in Amazon rainforest, they say.

Now it goes to the Upper House of the Senate.

If the bill gets approved then in the final stage it goes to Lula to be signed off as a law, where he can veto it in whole or in part.

The legislation can kick-start a long battle as Korap knows very well.

Korap, a leader of the Munduruku people, successfully waged a legal battle against British miner Anglo American that in 2001 withdrew 27 mining projects in her Indigenous territory of Sawre Muybu spread over 160,000 hectares of forest.

"It (the bill) is an attempt to erase our memory, to erase our existence in Brazil, to say in the future that the Indigenous people existed a long time back but don’t exist anymore."

Since the arrival of the Portuguese colonizers in the areas that now constitute Brazil, she describes the Munduruku's way of life as being under threat from outsiders.

In the 1980s, the Munduruku people faced a health disaster after their lands were taken over by illegal gold prospectors who contaminated riverways with chemicals. A subsequent investigation revealed that all Munduruku people have some degree of mercury poisoning that can have serious consequences on the tribe’s future generations.

Their ancestral lands have also been scarred by mining, cattle grazing and largely transgenic soya cultivation that, Korap says, is foreign to the local climate and does not bring any benefit for her people.

"We don't even eat soya. Soya goes to cattle, to pigs. It doesn't go on our table. We eat fruit, mandioca, beiju, tapioca, cana, and potato. That’s what people live on. That’s what’s healthy for us.”

She says her community's survival is tied to the bounty of the forest and the bill threatens their way of life.

"In our territory there exists forest, rivers, sources of fish, many fruits, many traditional medicines, but now the agribusiness is growing," she warns.

When big money comes

For years, private companies have pushed to get leases for mines and permission to search for mineral resources, build roads, railways and dams deep inside the Amazon forest.

Fábio M. Alkmin, a researcher in Human Geography at the University of São Paulo, says the bill was first proposed by Homero Pereira, a lawmaker from the Mato Grosso state who is also a cattle rancher, in 2007 and is "closely tied to agribusiness interests."

In the bill, Pereira argues that the demarcations establishing the extent of land belonging to the tribes goes beyond the limits set in Brazil’s Indigenous policy - suggesting tribal communities were allocated more lands than they were supposed to.

Alkmin’s says more than a dozen similar bills are pending approval of Congress.

Like bill PL 490, they are "aimed at the flexibilization of Indigenous territorial rights", he says.

The current bill, PL 490, has two principal objectives.

"Firstly, the economic objective is to allow private capital to enter Indigenous territories, leading to the Indigenous population becoming subservient to capitalist production relationships. The second political objective is to expand the state's authority and control over Indigenous peoples and their territories", Alkmin tells TRT World.

Activists say the proposed law is primarily driven by commercial interests.

Sarah Shenker, the head of Survival International Brazil (SIB) tells TRT World "the final aim is to steal and destroy Indigenous territories - open them up for mining and agribusiness business and profit.”

The campaigner says it could affect all of Brazil's 300 Indigenous peoples and more than a million Individuals and over 100 uncontacted tribes.

“It contains lots of different clauses which could enable politicians to undo the demarcation of Indigenous territories and undo their legal recognition,” says Shenker.

This could have a particularly devastating impact on uncontacted tribes, she says.

She adds it can even potentially allow outsiders like loggers and ranchers to settle down on Indigenous lands.

A long-time coming

Activists say the Bill PL-490 is a culmination of years-long efforts of businesses to find a legal bridge to make way into the tribal lands.

The Bill PL-490 is basically a “compilation” of 13 other anti-Indigenous bills that were prepared between 2007 and 2020, says Alkmin of University of São Paulo.

It allows agribusinesses to exploit a legal technicality on the rights of Indigenous people.

The bill says that only Indigenous people who can prove they were living on their lands in October 1988, when Brazil’s constitution was signed, retain the right over the lands.

SIB’s Shenker says such a move can become a reason to expel many Indigenous communities from their lands as not everyone can come up with legal documents and other means to show that they had been living there since long before the constitution was adopted.

Take the example of the Guarani tribe, one of the first Indigenous peoples to come in contact with the European settlers after they arrived in Latin America some 500 years ago.

With a population of little over 50,000, the Guaranis inhabit patches of land in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. But by 1988, the Guaranis were not living on their ancestral lands of Laranjeira Nanderu in the State of Mato Grosso due to evictions amid an agribusiness push for cattle grazing in the 1960s.

Other uncontacted tribes in the same state such the Kawahiva weren't recognised until 1996.

Alkmin says failure to provide evidence, whether due to lack of documentation or forced displacement, could result in the loss of Indigenous territorial rights guaranteed by the constitution, as the bill hands control of economic exploitation of Indigenous lands to Brazil's congress.

The bill could also allow the Brazilian-state the authority to initiate contact with over 100 Indigenous people living in voluntary isolation.

Shenker argues such a move would be "fatal” as uncontacted tribes have previously been decimated by disease to which they have “no immunity" and have historically suffered violence after forced contact.

The uncontacted tribes in the rainforest are unaware of the vote on the bill yet the decision, made in the Congress hundreds of kilometers away, “could mean life or death for them.”

Fighting back

SIB are pressuring lawmakers in 100 countries with help from thousands of volunteers worldwide who have been emailing Brazil’s senators to reject the bill.

The rights groups that campaign for Indigenous, tribal and uncontacted peoples are also undertaking other actions such as backstage lobbying and international visibility.

Between 2018-2021, deforestation levels tied to mining in the Amazon increased by 62 percent while 2021 witnessed the highest deforestation in the last 15 years.

A lawyer for the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR), Ivo Cípio Aureliano, who bongs to the Makuxi People of Roraima state, says the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the Organization of American States (OAS) have expressed serious concern over the bill and asked lawmakers not to approve it into a law.

The international community can pressure Brazil to reject it and to comply with the UN Declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples and other international human rights treaties, he says.

"The international public needs to recognize the importance of Indigenous territories in combating climate change. Indigenous territories are responsible for preserving about 80 percent of global biodiversity," he tells TRT World.

Alkmin says the Amazon is approaching a "tipping point" towards a degraded savanna-like ecosystem.

After assuming office this year, Lula appointed environmentalist Marina Silva as his environmental minister. Delivering on a campaign promise, he also created a ministry for Indigenous Peoples, which is overseen by Sônia Guajajara.

Guajajara labelled the bill as "a grave attack against Indigenous peoples and the environment" and pledged to keep fighting it.

Even if Lula vetoes the bill, there is a chance Congress could still turn it into a law in a re-vote, says Shenker.

However, experts suggest the bill poses challenges for Lula.

Lula, who relies on coalition partners to form his government, doesn't have complete freedom to do what he wants, experts say.

According to Alkmin, "Lula is facing the limits of his coalition government, which tries to reconcile sectors with completely antagonistic interests: like agribusiness, the mining sector, and the military, with Indigenous peoples, peasants, and social movements in general".

“The question is to which direction Lula will give in to when the contradictions become insurmountable,” he says.

Nevertheless, as Indigenous peoples continue to mobilise across the country, raising their voice and denouncing what they say will lead to generational devastation, some are taking to the streets and others to social media.

In the state of Para, Korap is reflecting about the harm the bill could have on her own community's prosperity after the Munduruku's previous interactions with the outsiders.

“Demarcation for us is life. It is protection for our life and our children and our future generations so they continue to flourish, counting on the rivers,” she says.

“PL 490 is going to paralyze the demarcation of Indigenous territories. Their reason behind it is to advance big business - big infrastructure, the rail, involving deforestation to plant soy, deforestation to place cattle. It will directly affect the Indigenous people”