Enlarge image
Indigenous people in Brazil are following a court decision on the expansion of protected areas in August
Photo: Eraldo Peres / dpa
The Brazilian parliament has inflicted a heavy defeat on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and restored controversial articles of law that make it difficult to recognise indigenous protected areas. At a joint session of both chambers of parliament, a majority of 321 deputies and 53 senators voted in favor of the articles, overriding Lula's veto.
Accordingly, only land that was inhabited by indigenous people at the time of the promulgation of the Brazilian Constitution in 1988 may be recognized as a protected area. However, indigenous communities argue that at that time they had been expelled from many territories by the previous military dictatorship and had a right to the lands regardless of this date.
The indigenous peoples' association Apib has now announced that it has appealed to Brazil's highest court. The court must declare the law unconstitutional.
The court had already rejected the law's underlying concept of limiting the claims of indigenous peoples in a historic decision in September. Nevertheless, the Senate passed the Indigenous Protected Areas Act the following week, which accommodates the South American country's powerful agricultural sector. Lula partially vetoed it in October, but has now been overruled by parliament.
Senator Ciro Nogueira, a minister in the former government of Lula's far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, said on Thursday that parliament had created "legal certainty for the agricultural sector."
According to the latest census, around 800,000 indigenous people live in Brazil, most of them in reserves that make up 13.75 percent of the country's area. Under the Bolsonaro government, the allocation of land to indigenous people had stalled. Shortly before the start of his term in office, Bolsonaro had announced that he would not give "an inch more" to indigenous people. Under his presidency, deforestation also increased sharply.
When he took office, the left-wing politician Lula, who has been in power since the beginning of the year, promised to turn his back on the policies of his predecessor and declared that he would work vigorously for the protection of indigenous peoples and the Amazon rainforest. It was only in April that he designated six new indigenous territories and guaranteed the indigenous people the exclusive use of natural resources. Experts see the protected areas as a bulwark against deforestation of the Amazon rainforest – one of the biggest challenges in the fight against climate change.
mfh/AFP