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Terence Turner
BRAZIL: INDIGENOUS RIGHTS VS. NEOLIBERALISM
Dissent v43 p67-9 Summ '96

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When Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, the indigenous population of what is now
Brazil stood by some estimates at around three million. After five hundred years of epidemics, slave
raiding, land expropriation, and more or less forcible cultural assimilation, there are today only
around 250,000 people still classified as "Indians" in Brazil. Although this figure amounts to only 2
percent of the national population, territories occupied by indigenous groups cover some 8.5 million
square kilometers, or 11 percent of the total area of the country. As in the United States, most of the
larger surviving indigenous groups, and all the large indigenous areas, are located in the west.
Indigenous people have been largely eliminated from the more heavily settled east.
From colonial times down to the late 1980s, Brazilian policy toward indigenous peoples was
frankly assimilationist, based on the twin assumptions that absorption into the Brazilian nation
represented evolutionary progress and that social and cultural homogenization was central to the
building of a strong Brazilian state. Indigenous societies and cultures, in this perspective,
constituted "ethnic cysts to be excised from the body politic," in the words of a general who headed
the national Indian agency (FUNAI) during the military dictatorship of 1964-1986. By the midtwentieth century, Indians and indigenous policy had almost disappeared from popular
consciousness and the national political agenda. During the "economic miracle" of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, as military rulers pushed the development of the Amazon, Indian communities that
found themselves in the way were roughly shouldered aside by government-supported settlers and
developers, while the government adopted what amounted to a policy of "benign neglect" toward
indigenous groups.
Nineteen sixty-eight, however, was a pivotal year in the Amazon as elsewhere. In that year,
sensational reports in the British press about the decline of indigenous populations, inaccurately
represented as a concerted policy of government-sponsored "genocide," set off an international
outcry that seriously damaged Brazil's foreign relations. The government and people of Brazil
discovered, to their surprise and considerable discomfort, that they had an "Indian problem." In
those years of repression, "Indian questions" (military censors did not consider them to be political
issues) became one of the few topics that could be freely discussed. Ever since, indigenous issues,
together with the environmental questions that rose to prominence at the same time, have played a
role in Brazilian domestic political discussion and foreign relations out of all proportion to the
demographic proportion of Indians in the national population. Indian issues became a rubric under
which generic human rights and development-vs.-environment issues could be raised.
This symbolic importance of indigenous issues, from land rights to cultural self-determination,
was reinforced through the new alliance of indigenous activism with environmentalism, the great
new cause of the 1970s. Many environmentalist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), both
foreign and domestic, dedicated themselves not only to defending the ecosystem of the Amazon but
also to championing the territorial and human rights of its indigenous inhabitants. The growing
political influence of the NGOs and more generally of environmentalist and human rights groups
coincided with the economic slump of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both developments helped to
relieve the pressure on the environment and the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and other parts
of Brazil. The military regime, politically exhausted and unable to cope with the economic decline,
ceded power to a civilian government in 1986.
The major political expression of this favorable political moment was the new Federal
Constitution of 1988, which for the first time recognized many rights of indigenous peoples,
including their right to their own cultural identity and to the territories they have traditionally
occupied. Together with these guarantees, the Constitution declared all titles to indigenous lands by
nonindigenous parties to be legally null and void. Finally, the Constitution called for the

demarcation of all indigenous areas as reserves within five years (that is, by the end of 1993). No
serious effort was made to meet this goal, but a number of reserves were in fact created.
Even this modest amount of progress, however, aroused intense opposition among conservative
politicians, ranchers, and mining and logging entrepreneurs. Many in the Brazilian military opposed
indigenous reserves on the grounds that they would constitute quasi-independent political states that
would pose a threat to national security. Military opinion also harbored paranoid suspicions that
environmentalist and indigenous support groups were merely fronts for an international conspiracy
to steal the Amazon and its resources from Brazil.
Thus it was that rightist politicians and businessmen, in alliance with the military, launched a
political and media campaign to roll back the gains made by indigenous peoples. The political
pressure to repeal or abolish indigenous reserves, or, failing that, simply to invade and exploit their
resources by force, was greatly augmented by the discovery of gold in many of these areas and the
intensification of mahogany logging in others.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso won the presidential election in 1994 with the support of rightist
elements from the northern states opposed to indigenous rights and territorial reserves. Cardoso's
program combines neoliberal economic reforms with cutbacks on government bureaucracy and
welfare-state programs. To get it through Congress he needs the support of his northern rightist
allies. This has given them the clout they need to gain control over indigenous policy. Their
representative in the Cardoso government is Nelson Jobim, the minister of justice. FUNAI is a
subdivision of the Ministry of Justice and thus under Jobim's authority. Before becoming minister,
Jobim, a lawyer, had put together a brief on behalf of the governor of the Amazonian state of Par,
which argued that the Indian reserves demarcated in that state were unconstitutional, because they
had failed to take account of objections from non-Indians whose "interests" were affected. The
Supreme Court threw out Jobim's case in 1993. As minister of justice in the Cardoso government,
however, Jobim recycled the same argument as the basis of a new presidential decree.
The signing of Decree 1775 by President Cardoso on January 8 of this year marked a drastic
reversal of policy toward the protection of the human rights of indigenous peoples and the natural
environment. Decree 1775 opens up over half the area of Brazil's demarcated indigenous reserves to
claims by private or local state development agencies. The decree makes the minister of justice and
the president the sole arbiters of all challenges to indigenous territorial boundaries, insulating their
decisions from independent legal review. In effect, the decree and its accompanying ministerial
order make up a legal-administrative mechanism for circumventing the Constitution's guarantees of
indigenous land rights.
By plunging the legal status of indigenous lands into confusion, the decree has created a
climate of uncertainty that is already being exploited by the usual array of unscrupulous speculators
and invaders who hope to gain a foothold in indigenous territories; fifteen invasions of indigenous
areas have been reported since the decree was signed, some of them accompanied by violence.
These economic interests are of the most environmentally and culturally destructive kinds: mining,
logging, and ranching. In Brazil, it is mostly in indigenous areas that natural ecosystems survive
relatively intact. The decree thus potentially poses as grave a threat to environmental diversity as to
cultural diversity.
The many legal and constitutional flaws in the new decree have been made the grounds of
challenges filed with the Supreme Court of Brazil by several indigenous and pro-indigenous
organizations, including the Labor party and COIAB, a coalition of over a hundred indigenous
groups with ties to CIMI, the Catholic Church's indigenist missionary council.
Throughout the three-month period allowed by the decree for the submission of contestations of
indigenous lands, the minister and the president assured anxious indigenous representatives that
only a handful would actually be submitted, affecting at most only a half-dozen areas. When the
period expired on April 8, however, over a thousand contestations had in fact been submitted,
affecting eighty-three areas, a significant proportion of all the indigenous territory in the country.
The quantitative dimensions of this disaster should not obscure the equally important political and
ideological function of the decree as the foundational document of a new, neoliberal approach to

indigenous rights that the current Brazilian regime is attempting to put in place of the more
progressive perspective embodied by the Federal Constitution of 1988. The decree promotes
nonindigenous economic interests over the communal interests of indigenous people. Lest anyone
miss the economic inspiration for this new turn in Brazilian policy, a statement released by the
Ministry of Justice says it all:
Economic development will determine a flow of capital from east to west, and from south to
north [in Brazil] ... where most indigenous peoples live. Therefore, either for humanitarian or
economic reasons, the government had to act urgently to address the issue of Indian lands in a
permanent way.
Added material
TERENCE TURNER is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and a
member of the Commission for Human Rights of the American Anthropological Association.
WBN: 9619703550013
Source: Dissent (00123846), Summer96, Vol. 43, p67, 3p