Timeframe: Chamber punishes indigenous victim – 06/01/2023 – Marcelo Leite

The time has come for the jaguar to drink water. With the time frame approved in the chamber of disqualified, soon all of Brazil will know if there are still judges in Brasilia and if the STF (Federal Supreme Court) will be able to lance the malignant tumor that it generated in 2008 in the judgment of the Indigenous Land Raposa-Serra do Sol .

The main trigger of the metastasis now disseminated by the body politic was Minister Carlos Alberto Direito, now deceased. May his soul not be lost by his last name.

TI’s rapporteur in Roraima, the STF minister invented the time frame thesis. That is, the notion that the State should only recognize indigenous lands (TIs) effectively occupied by ethnic groups on October 5, 1988, the date of promulgation of the Constitution.

The charter guarantees indigenous peoples, in Article 231, “their original rights over the lands they traditionally occupy, and it is incumbent upon the Union to demarcate them, protect and ensure respect for all their assets”. For the avoidance of doubt, the first paragraph draws:

“Lands traditionally occupied by the Indians are those that they inhabit permanently, those used for their productive activities, those essential for the preservation of the environmental resources necessary for their well-being and those necessary for their physical and cultural reproduction”.

Clearer, impossible. Law itself conceded in its vote: “There is no Indian without land. Everything he is is on the land and with the land”. He quoted Darcy Ribeiro, mind you, and said that “the Indian is ontologically earthly. He IS a being of his land. Possession of the land is essential to his survival”.

The corollary: there is no reason or reason to limit permanent occupation in time. The presence of a people in a certain territory ceases to be permanent only in the case of migration (a hypothesis in which the highest law would recognize the right to more recent occupation), extermination or escape from violence and disease.

Consider the case of the panarás. The first contact in 1973, due to the opening of the BR-163 highway, led to a sequence of deaths from flu and other diseases carried by non-Indians that reduced the population from 400 to 70 people.

The federal government then determined the removal to the Xingu Indigenous Park. It was only in 1997 that the Panará managed to recover the previously occupied territory, with the creation of the IL that bears their name, in the Serra do Cachimbo, on the border of Mato Grosso and Pará. Today there are seven villages and 705 inhabitants.

If in 1997 the timeframe was in force, as the rural-Bolsonarist group intends now, they would no longer be able to have the land demarcated and ratified. They would cease to exist, according to the paradoxical criterion of the Minister of Law.

The Chamber’s text is not limited to making difficult or even unfeasible the demarcation of new ILs. The 283 deputies who entered their votes in the history of national ignominy still intend to allow revision of those already approved in case of “alteration of cultural traits” of the community.

It would not take long for conservative prosecutors, prosecutors and magistrates to come out in defense of the rights of land grabbers to reverse ILs, alleging that the Indians of this or that land use cell phones and drive vans. Disclaimers will not have the power to stop this genocide 2.0.

The time has come for the jaguar to drink water. Either the Supreme Court sides with the victims of Brazil’s stupid and perennial colonial history, or it aligns itself with its own relatives, friends and allies in the forefront of backwardness that no longer feels racist.

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