31/Jul/2019
We, members of the Wajãpi Village Council, would like to share new information about what is happening in our Indigenous Land and ask once again for support from either the Federal Police or the Army to ensure the safety of the Wajãpi people.
Yesterday (07/30/19), we received a visit from Senator Randolfe Rodrigues during the morning. He came to hear our perspective about what is happening in our Indigenous Land and asked for better clarification on some information he has received.
The senator declared he will keep on supporting us so that the police can continue investigating the invasion until they arrest the invaders. He also said we should stay in the Wajãpi territory, protecting our communities until we are sure the attackers are no longer inside. Moreover, he invited some Wajãpi people to the physical location of the Federal Prosecution Service to report what they saw and what they know about the invaders.
Last evening, we received some information from the residents of the CTA village, located on the limits with the BR 210 highway. Around 6 pm, a young man from that village went to bathe in the stream nearby the village and heard someone shouting “Hey!” from behind him. When he turned around, there was a tall, strong man with long curly hair and beard pointing at him with a weapon that looked like an automatic 12-gauge shotgun. He got very scared and ran back to the village to call someone for help. Right after that, he returned to the stream with five other men but they no longer found the invader. They found two pairs of barefoot footprints, each of them going in a different direction. They took some pictures and made some videos to present to the police. They decided, however, not to follow the tracks because it was getting dark. According to the young one, the man with the shotgun was wearing a long sleeve black t-shirt.
After receiving this information from the CTA residents, people from other villages by the highway got together to guard the entire portion of the highway located inside the Wajãpi Indigenous Land limits over the night.
This morning, CTA residents found new tracks of two people near the village and warned the other settlements. The residents of the villages by the highway formed groups to search for the invaders. They are still searching.
We, the Wajãpi people, would like to use this note to thank for the great support we are receiving from the organizations of our indigenous movement, such as APOIANP, COIAB, APIB, AIM, Hutukara, CIR, FOIRN, Senator Randolfe Rodrigues, former Senator João Capiberibe, MP Joênia Wapixana, from support organizations as our partner Iepé, CIMI, other civil society organizations like OAB, Association of Judges for Democracy, Brazilian Association of Anthropology, Brazilian Archaeological Society, Greenpeace, WWF, Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network and many others. Not to mention the UN, the Organization of American States (OAS) and people from all over the world.
30/Jul/2019
Illustration @criscvector / @designativista
The first Indigenous Women’s March will be held from August 9 to 13 in Brasilia, where will gather two thousand women from the most different peoples, from all over Brazil.
With the theme “Territory: our body, our spirit”, the goal is to give visibility to the indigenous women’s actions, discussing issues inherent to their diverse realities, recognizing and strengthening their protagonism and capacities in defense and guarantee of human rights, in particular the care of mother earth, the territory, the body, and the spirit.
The Indigenous Women’s March will be much more than the name literally suggests. The proposal is to hold a large gathering of indigenous women: from August 9 to 12, the “National Indigenous Women’s Forum”, which will discuss issues raised during the women’s plenary at the ATL 2019 (Free Land Camp 2019), followed by the Indigenous Women’s March on August 13.
Within the framework of unity and empowerment, the idea is to join the Daisies’ March, an act that brings together women from the countryside and the forest, in a great national demonstration for women’s rights and protagonism, from a new vision of sustainable development and social justice.
The National Indigenous Women’s Forum is necessary since threats to indigenous’ rights are spreading throughout Brazil in the current political conjuncture, which demands an immediate reaction, especially since women are the most affected by agrobusiness, climate change, machismo, and racism.
Besides, on August 9, the International Day of Indigenous Peoples is celebrated, a very significant date that will also be reinforced at the Forum.
The meeting will be held with indigenous women’s resources, support from partner organizations and donations raised here: http://bit.ly/MarchaMulheresIndigenas. Your contribution is fundamental to ensure the leaders’ arrival and the realization of the meeting. You can also collaborate by donating miles of travel, food supplies, blankets and mattresses to who’s in Brasilia. More information at [email protected].
29/Jul/2019
We, the members of the Wajãpi – Apina Village Council wish to disclose the information we have today, July 29, 2019, regarding the invasion occurred in the Wajãpi Indigenous Land.
Last Sunday, July 28, 2019, police teams arrived at Mariry Village in the early afternoon and headed to the Yvytotõ village, accompanied by our warriors. When they arrived, there was no one there, just the footprints of the invaders. The police marked the points on their GPS and took pictures.
Our warriors brought the police team to a place where the invaders had hidden themselves on July 26, but they found no one there either. After that, the police claimed that they could not look for the invaders inside the forest by following the vestiges we showed them, then they returned to the Mariry village and from there to the Aramirã post, where they arrived around 9:30 p.m.
At the Aramirã Indigenous Post, the police met with representatives of Funai, of the Apina, of the villages in the Aramirã region and of the Pedra Branca City Hall, in Amapá. They said that the region of the Yvytotõ village is difficult to reach and that they had no means to remain and continue the search there due to the difficulties one has of moving and feeding oneself in the forest.
During the meeting, the superintendent of the police promised he would study the region around the Yvytotõ village using satellite images to check for evidence of irregular gold mining within the Wajãpi Indigenous Land. If the images show any vestiges, they will fly over to check. After this meeting, the police teams returned to Macapá, Amapá’s capital.
We, the Wajãpi Indigenous People, remain very concerned about the irregular prospectors who have invaded the northern region of our Indigenous Land. In our villages of this region, our families are very afraid of going out to their fields or hunting in the woods. Some communities have left their villages to join families from other villages so as to feel a bit safer.
That’s why our warriors from all over the Wajãpi Indigenous Land are organizing themselves to help the Mariry village warriors who continue to search for the hidden invaders, and we are asking Funai’s support to locate them.
As soon as we have any new information, we will post more of these Notes.
Aramirã Post – Wajãpi Indigenous Land, July 29, 2019.
28/Jul/2019
We, the Council of Wajãpi Villages – APINA, want to release the information so far available about the invasion of Wajãpi Indigenous Land.
On Monday, July 22nd, by the end of the evening, the Indigenous chief called Emyra Wajãpi was violently killed in the region of his village called Waseity, near the Mariry village. No one from Wajãpi Indigenous People testified his death. His death was noticed and disseminated to all Wajãpi communities just in the following morning, on Tuesday, July 23rd. In the next few days, kinfolk looked into the local. They found tracks and clues which indicate that the death was caused by non-Indigenous people, outsiders from the Wajãpi Indigenous Land.
On Friday, July 26th, the Wajãpi from Yvytotõ village, located at the same region where the death happened, met a group of armed non-Indigenous people near their village. Then, they warned the other Wajãpi communities by radio. During that same night, the invaders came to Yvytotõ village and got into the house, threatening the residents. The afraid Yvytotõ villagers ran away to the Mariry village located nearby the very next day.
On Friday night, we reported it to the federal government, through the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), and to the Public Federal Ministry of Brazil about the invasion. At that occasion, we requested the presence of the Federal Police on the site. Early on the morning of Saturday, July 27th, residents of Karapijuty village sighted another invader near their village.
Saturday, we spread the news to our allies, in an attempt to hurry up the coming of the Federal Police. Also, a group of Wajãpi warriors from other regions of the Indigenous Land went to the area of Mariry village to support its residents until the Federal Police arrives. In the evening of Saturday, representatives of FUNAI arrived in the Wajãpi Indigenous Land. They went to the Jakare village to interview relatives of the deceased chief who moved there. Soon after, the representatives of FUNAI came back to Macapá (capital of Amapá, Brazil) to contact the Federal Police. Meanwhile, the Wajãpi warriors stayed guarding nearby the place where the invaders were, and the villages located on the exit route from the Wajãpi Land. In that same night, some people heard gunshots in the region of the Jakare village, near the 210-Highway, where there were no Wajãpi.
On July 28th, in the morning, a group of federal policemen and the BOPE Special Police Forces arrived at the Wajãpi Indigenous Land (TIW) and went to the place to arrest the invaders. And this is all that we know so far. Once we have more information, we will release a new document.
Posto Aramirã – Wajãpi Indigenous Land, July 28, 2019.
12/Jul/2019
Indigenous leaders from the South and Southeast of Brazil occupied the Ministry of Health in the fight against the dismantling of the Indigenous Health policies and for the dismissal of Silvia Nobre, the current National Secretary. Today several points are blocked in the South and Southeast regions, with new blockades expected in other areas of the country, while the leadership group remains in the Ministry of Health in Brasilia. The National Secretary appointed by Bolsonaro’s Government as the first indigenous person to occupy this role, does not know, does not respect, does not dialogue with indigenous peoples, and has been acting in an authoritarian way, as it is the characteristic of this government. We will not accept the dismantling of our indigenous health subsystem that was won by us.
21/Jul/2017
This week, Brazil’s highly unpopular President Michel Temer signed a legal opinion from the office of his Attorney General (AGU) that directs his government’s administration to paralyze all indigenous land demarcations in the country. The move continues a string of devastating assaults on human rights and environmental protections that blatantly cater to Brazil’s regressive “ruralista” agribusiness lobby, which Temer is courting in the run-up to a congressional vote next week that could remove him from office to face charges of rampant corruption.
While potentially halting 748 pending cases to demarcate tribal lands, the measure also illegally attempts to strip indigenous peoples of their constitutional rights to permanent and exclusive use of their territories, claiming these rights cannot overrule “national interests” such as military operations, road construction, communications infrastructure, and hydroelectric dams. Such projects would be authorized in native territories without respecting the indigenous right to consultation.
Imposing a highly contentious “time frame” (marco temporal) clause, the AGU’s opinion only recognizes the land claims of indigenous peoples that have continuously occupied their territories since Brazil’s 1988 Constitution was enshrined, ignoring common situations in which communities were brutally driven off their lands. Authoritarianism is a key concept here: Temer’s blatant disregard for indigenous rights runs parallel to acts committed in the absence of democracy, during the military dictatorship (1964-1985) – a situation the country increasingly confronts today.
Brazil’s dictatorship and its current political crisis share a common denominator: the ascendant power of a conservative rural elite posing as a modern agribusiness sector. A steadfast ally of the authoritarian coronels of Brazil’s past, they now constitute Mr. Temer’s political base and offer his only chance of political salvation from a mushrooming corruption scandal and indictment that threaten to see him removed from office and investigated by the Supreme Court. Accordingly, the President has obediently done their bidding, enacting a draconian ruralistawishlist that guts indigenous territorial rights and opens vast protected areas in the Amazon to unfettered destruction. Indeed, mainstream media characterized this paradigm as trading trees for votes.
“Michel Temer is cutting indigenous rights to remain in power by attending to ruralista interests,” said Luiz Henrique Eloy, a lawyer for Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples (APIB). “The Temer government wants to remain at all costs, which requires the votes of the ruralista bloc.”
Anticipating the AGU decision and its endorsement from the president, the ruralista lawmaker Luiz Carlos Heinze – notorious for his comments that indigenous peoples, escaped slave communities (quilombolas), gays and lesbians are worthless – gleefully acknowledged that the agribusiness bloc pursued this agenda with Mr. Temer from the first day of his administration, when his party seized power with the removal of President Dilma Rousseff.
“In my evaluation, over 90% of Brazil’s [pending demarcation] processes are illegal and will be archived,” said Mr. Heinze, claiming the measure represents “a new direction for Brazilian rural producers.” Attorney General Grace Mendonça’s statement goes further, making the absurd assertion that her opinion will “bring judicial security to indigenous people” by “standardizing understandings and diminishing social and landholding conflicts across the country.”
“What diminishes rural conflicts is indigenous land demarcation,” said Juliana de Paula Batista, a lawyer at Brazil’s Socio-environmental institute (ISA). “To the contrary, what causes conflicts is the message from executive power and from Congress that it is possible to mitigate the constitutional rights of indigenous peoples. This is a clear message from a president that seeks to keep his job at any cost, including by offering amnesty to land grabbers, invaders of Conservation Units, and by disrespecting peoples whose rights have been historically violated.”
The AGU’s opinion directly violates article 231 of the Brazilian Constitution, which guarantees indigenous people “the right to traditionally occupied land.” It also interferes with contentious land titling processes, such as the Munduruku struggle to demarcate their ancestral dominion Sawré Muybu, that are flashpoints for rural conflict. Definitively barring their demarcation efforts – as President Temer and his ruralista bosses propose – would do anything but “bring judicial security” to the Munduruku.
Worse still, it directly contradicts Brazil’s commitments to international agreements on indigenous rights, such as Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
The office of Brazil’s Federal Public Prosecutors (MPF), a constitutional watchdog agency, issued a scathing statement and is preparing a rebuttal to the AGU’s opinion, based on its clear unconstitutionality. The country’s National Indigenous Movement (MNI) and their allies are also organizing resistance to the measure, which had proven critical to reversing similar, past regressions. In a statement, the MNI calls for support from social movements and society in general to impede these violent actions.
Catering to ruthless ruralista greed and motivated by a foolish determination to hold onto power with no mandate while under indictment, President Temer is personally driving an unprecedented series of assaults on human rights and environmental protection in Brazil. His actions must be categorically denounced as they portend disaster for native peoples, endangered biomes such as the Amazon, and humanity as a whole.
20/Apr/2017
There are only a few days left for the beginning of the Free Land Camp 2017. The entire program aims to bring together in a large assembly leaders of indigenous peoples and organizations from all regions of Brazil to discuss and position themselves on the violation of the constitutional indigenous rights and the anti-indigenous policies of the brazilian State. Check out the complete grid:
Monday (April 24th)
9am – Free Conference on Women’s Health
Location: Indigenous Peoples’ Memorial
9am/6pm – Presidents of CONDISI Forum
Location: SESAI – 510 North
6pm – Dinner
Location: ATL
7pm – Opening Plenary
Location: ATL
8:30pm – Documentary: ‘Preconstituinte’
9pm – Publication Launch (Unified Report): UN special Rapporteur to the indigenous people; Rapporteur about indigenous rights (Dhesca Platform) and parallel Report to the RPU.
Location: ATL
10:30pm – Surprise artistic presentation
Location: ATL
**All day: Delegations arrival and camp set up
Tuesday (April 25th)
6am/8:30 am – Cultural Activities: singing, dancing and body painting
Location: Delegation tent
7am – Breakfast
Location: ATL
8am – Opening Plenary – welcoming dancing and singing
Location: Main tent
8:30am – Opening Plenary with traditional leaders from the 5 regions
9am/1pm – Seminar “Indigenous Peoples and Original Rights”
Location: Ministério Público Federal
10am – Debate on threats to indigenous rights in the three branches of government
Location: ATL
- Executive Power: Deconstructing the institutions and public policies directed to indigenous people (the paralyzation of demarcation, the dismantling of Funai and Sesai, decrees, etc.).
Participants: Weibe Tapeba and Adriana Ramos
- Legislative Power: anti-indigenous legislative initiatives (Inquiry Parliamentary Commission – CPI; Law Proposals – LP; Constitutional Amendment Proposals – CAP; Legislative Decree Proposals – LDP).
Participants: Sônia Guajajara and Maurício Guetta.
- Judiciary System: “Time Frame” thesis, judicialized demarcation processes; Repossessions of Property; denial of Access to Justice rights; criminalization of leadership.
Participants: Valéria Buriti and Adelar Cupsinski
1pm/2pm – Lunch
Location: ATL
3pm – Guidance for the march
3:30pm – March / National Congress Act
6pm – Dinner
Location: ATL
6pm/7pm – Terra Livre Audiovisual show
7pm/8pm – Monologue Theatre Piece: Gavião de Duas Cabeças
8pm – Indigenous Women Plenary with Angela Kaxuyana and Samanta Xavante
11pm – Cultural Activities
Wednesday (April 26th)
6am/8:30 am – Cultural Activities: singing, dancing and body painting
Location: Delegation tent
7am – Breakfast
Location: ATL
7:30am – General Plenary – welcoming, dancing and singing
Location: Main tent
8am – Plenary: Themed Work Groups Guidance
Moderator: Ceiça Pitaguari and Marivelton Baré
9am – Themed Work Groups
* Indigenous Lands and Territories (land situation, indigenous land demarcation)
* Enterprises that impact indigenous territories (Right to consultation and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), consultation of community protocols).
* “Time Frame” thesis; right to access justice; indigenous communities and the criminalization of leaders
* Indigenous Health / Indigenous Health Special Secretary (SESAI): background, current situation of the special policy and prospects.
* Indigenous School Education: past, current and prospective situation of the special policy
* Indigenous legislative proposal, national and international (Law Proposals – LP, Constitutional Amendment Proposals – CAP, International Treaties).
Note: In addressing the themes, consider the basic text of the ATL and the proposals deliberated by the First National Conference of Indigenous Peoples (I CNPI).
12am – Lunch
2pm/3:30pm – Plenary: sharing the conclusions of the Themed Groups
Moderator: Dinaman Tuxá and Nara Baré
3:30pm/6:30pm – Debate and ways forward
Note: Invited participants for the plenary: government authorities; members of the Parliament; Jurists and MPF representatives (participants in the Seminar “Indigenous Peoples and Original Rights”).
External
2pm – Public Hearing at the CDH of the Federal Senate, with the participation of a commission of 80 to 100 leaders representing the ATL.
** Table: Kretan Kaingang; Lindomar Terena; Eliseu Lopes; Paulinho Guarani; Paulo Tupiniquim; Sônia Guajajara and Darã Tupi-Guarani
Location: Federal Senate
6pm – Dinner
6pm/9pm – Terra Livre Audiovisual Show
9pm – ‘Demarcação Já’ Concert with indigenous and non indigenous people
Thursday (April 27th)
6am/8h30am – Cultural Activities: singing, dancing and body painting
Location: Delegation tent
7am – Breakfast
8am – General Plenary welcoming dancing and singing
Location: Main tent
8:30am/9:30am – Plenary: “Unify the fights in defense of indigenous Brazil”, with the presence of representatives from urban and rural organizations and social movements.
9:30am/4:30pm – Plenary: “International mobilization and unification of the indigenous peoples fights”, with the presence of APIB indigenous leadership and international indigenous movements.
10h30am/11h30am – Approval of the Conclusions of the Women’s Free Conference
11:30am/12:30am – ATL Final Document
12:30am – Lunch
3pm – March and Demonstration to the Ministries of Environment, Health, Justice and Education, besides Planalto Palace, to file the Final Document of the ATL.
4pm/6pm – Hearings and filing of the Final Document of the ATL and other texts in the offices of the STF Ministers.
6pm – Dinner
6pm – Maracatu
7pm – Terra Livre Audiovisual Show
Movie: Movie Martyrdom
Friday (April 28th)
6am/8h30am – Cultural Activities: singing, dancing and body painting
Location: Delegation tent
7am – Breakfast
8am – General Plenary – welcoming, dancing and singing
Location: Main tent
9am – General Strike: integration with social movements
12am – Final referrals
Additional activities:
1. Meeting of indigenous parliamentarians, mayors and vice-mayors
2. Meetings of indigenous communicators.
3. Meetings of indigenous lawyers.
4. Meetings of Women and Indigenous Youth
5. Other joint meetings.
6. Shows: audiovisual, musical and other cultural and artistic manifestations.
Note: Complementary activities should take place at times other than plenary sessions, working groups, marches and demonstrations, preferably during ATL evenings.
