Mark Harris and Denise Ferreira Da Silva write:

Indigenous peoples in Brazil are under siege by the Brazilian government, which is waging war on two fronts. New legislation in the form of a bill known as PL 490/2007 threatens to cancel legal protections for Indigenous territories, while a landmark Supreme Court case over the so-called marco temporal, a 1988 cut-off date that threatens to strip the Indigenous peoples of existing land rights. Though not as visible as the effects of the fires that destroyed large swathes of the Amazon forest in 2019 and 2020, were the legislation to pass and the legal ruling to go against the Indigenous peoples, the consequences will be catastrophic.

On 23 June, a committee in the lower house of the Brazilian parliament approved a draft of PL 490/2007, which will now be put to the vote. If lawmakers pass the bill, it will end Indigenous peoples’ right to be consulted on the use of their land by non-Indigenous peoples. The government could allow unrestricted access to natural resources, including extractive activities such as mining and commercial agriculture.

The bill, which has been under consideration since 2007, was proposed by the country’s powerful agro-business lobby. It is a clear violation of the existing protections afforded to Indigenous populations under the Brazilian Federal Constitution and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Its motivation is obvious: to allow greater loggers, miners and cattle ranchers access to vast tracts of land in the Amazon, which is home to the so-called “lungs of the planet”, the single largest remaining tropical rainforest in the world, and houses at least 10% of the known biodiversity. As they have for more than 500 years, the Indigenous peoples of Brazil are once again struggling to maintain their way of life. They are fighting to defend their constitutionally mandated ancestral lands in much the way they once faced down Portuguese colonizers, loggers, and illegal gold miners. [Continue reading…]