Brasilia (EFE).- The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, resumed this Friday the process of recognition of indigenous lands, established by law and paralyzed since 2019 by decision of the previous president, the far-right Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula visited the Free Land Camp, which this week brought together some 6,000 indigenous people in Brasilia who have denounced the violence and the invasion of their territories by mining and logging mafias, and the impact of climate change on the Amazon and its lives.
“We are going to legalize indigenous lands again”, because “to reach 2030 with ‘zero deforestation’ in the Amazon”, as the Government has promised, “we are going to need you as guardians of the forests”, he declared.
A debt to the natives
The progressive leader closed the meeting with the signing of a decree that regularizes six new indigenous lands in the states of Acre, Alagoas, Amazonas, Ceará, Goiás and Rio Grande do Sul.
The largest, the Kariri-Xocó Indigenous Land, in Alagoas (northeast), has 2,300 inhabitants. The so-called Avá-Canoneiro, in the central state of Goiás, is the smallest, with only nine residents.
These lands extend for some 560,000 hectares and are added to some 600 indigenous reserves already recognized by the State, which have an area almost equivalent to 14% of the national territory.
Regarding this extension, Lula remarked in his speech that “before the arrival of the Portuguese (colonizers), the indigenous peoples occupied 100% of the territory.”
Around 90% of these lands, inhabited by some 500,000 indigenous people, are environmental reserves determined by law, but even so Bolsonaro promoted policies to promote the exploitation of minerals and other economic activities.
A defense of the Amazon
Sônia Guajajara, the first head of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, created by Lula when he took power on January 1, alluded to the Bolsonaro government (2019-2022) and assured that it implemented “a policy totally focused on denying the Rights of indigenous peoples”.
He denounced the mining activity in the Amazon, which has polluted rivers and jeopardized the diet of indigenous people, and stated that “this affects everyone, since we all breathe the same air, drink the same water and need it to live.”
According to Guajajara, this led to the “tragedy” of the Yanomami, on whose lands they found hundreds of indigenous people with severe malnutrition last January.
In the act, next to Lula was the chief Raoni, 93 years old, and who for decades has championed the defense of the Amazon.
Raoni, in Kayapó, one of the 247 indigenous languages spoken in Brazil, stressed that there are some 800 territories awaiting regularization.
He also asked Lula to oppose the so-called Temporary Framework, an initiative promoted by the right that proposes recognizing as indigenous lands only those that were occupied by the original peoples in 1988, when the current Constitution was promulgated.
“Hundreds of years before the Constitution, we already existed,” said Raoni, whom Bolsonaro accused in 2019, before the UN General Assembly, of being “used by foreign powers” that would try to seize the Amazon.