Members of Congress Urge Indian Land Protection in Brazilian Amazon

(7 October, 1996 — Washington, DC) The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) supported the action taken by seventeen members of the US House of Representatives, led by Tom Lantos (D- CA) and John Porter (R-IL), in a letter sent to Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso urging rapid action to protect the land of the Macuxi Indians in the Raposa/Serra do Sol area of Roraima state in the northern Brazilian Amazon. The representatives expressed concern that Brazil’s Minister of Justice Nelson Jobim may turn much of the area over to ranchers and gold miners in response to pressure from Amazon politicians, precipitating violence in the region and setting a disastrous precedent for other Indian lands. The Minister is scheduled to make a decision by October 10th on whether to protect this key area. In separate correspondence, Representatives Porter and Lantos urged the State Department to raise the issue with Brazil’s government.

“The letter shows that US policy makers understand the importance of the decision Minister Jobim is about to take,” said EDF anthropologist Stephan Schwartzman. “The fate of another 177 Indian areas is hanging in the balance, and there is real potential for explosive conflict in Raposa/Serra do Sol. This decision will be the bellwether of the current government’s indigenous policy.”

The letter followed a September 26th briefing by Macuxi leader Jose Adalberto Silva, vice- coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR), representing most of the 12,000 Macuxi, Wapixana, Taurepang, and Ingariko Indians of the Raposa/Serra do Sol area. Adalberto detailed how successive local governments have promoted illegal invasion and appropriation of Indian land in the region by cattle ranchers and gold and diamond miners. Twelve Macuxi have been killed in the last nine years in land conflicts, but no one has been held judicially accountable. The state government has frequently used military police to repress Indian efforts to resist the invasions. Death threats, intimidation, and destruction of indigenous property are commonplace.

The CIR vice-coordinator called on the government to honor the commitment in the 1988 Constitution to demarcate (or legally protect) Indian lands in Brazil, and denounced the government’s new regulations for Indian land demarcation, Decree 1775, as a delaying tactic that has provoked new invasions and heightened tension in the area. Adalberto further promised that if Minister Jobim does not sign the demarcation order, the Indians will carry out the demarcation themselves. “The government has the money to pay for an Amazon Week festival in New York,” said Adalberto. “We have the courage to demarcate our own land if the government won’t.”