Society Indigenous Rights and Values

The protest

"They steal the land, they steal history." Native Brazilians against the land law

The indigenous people of Brazil are mobilizing against the "Marco Temporal", which limits their rights to the lands they inhabit, to consign them to deforestation and mining. They hope for President Lula, but Parliament is against them

08/06/2023

They gathered outside the Parliament and the Supreme Court, in the capital Brasilia. They dance, sing, hold signs.
They are a few hundred, but here they represent almost a million people and about 240 different ethnic groups: the indigenous people of the continent, exterminated by colonization, driven from their lands, still today an oppressed minority and threatened by deforestation, mining, disease.

They protest against a new law that threatens their ancestral territories, their very life in those lands: the "Marco Temporal".
The legislation has already been approved by the Chamber on May 30. If it also gets the green light from the Senate, all eyes will be on President Lula, who could exercise his veto power — but Congress will still have the power to overturn the veto.

The bill is called Marco Temporal because it limits the allocation of indigenous lands to those already occupied by natives before the 1988 Constitution. In essence, the indigenous people will have to prove that the lands on which they live were already permanently inhabited - and used for productive activities - before 1988. Which, for often nomadic peoples, becomes an insurmountable obstacle.
The text also authorizes transgenic cultivation in indigenous lands, prohibits the expansion of areas already demarcated, limits the allocation processes not yet completed and those not in line with the new law.

A blow to the claims of the indigenous communities and also to the Lula government, which had spent itself protecting the rights of the natives.
Good news instead for the businesses of crops, deforestation and mining, lobbies that influence many of the center and right parties that are the majority in Parliament.

"The Constitution of 1988? Indigenous peoples were here long before this country existed," says a woman among the protesters.