Dictatorship worsened segregation when treat indigenous people as enemies 

Anthropologist analyzes the military's conception of original peoples in light of atrocities and episodes of extermination

Liana Coll 

The reports above refer to acts of violence committed by members of the Armed Forces during the military dictatorship (1964-1985). The first, collected by Meire da Silva, is from the indigenous Kaiowá Livrada Rodrigues and cites one of the many cases of expulsion and violence involving the regime. On several occasions, the Kaiowá of Rancho Jacaré and Guaimbé, in Mato Grosso do Sul, found themselves forcibly removed from their lands and taken to the Pantanal, to places up to 800 km away from where they lived. On foot, many returned to their ancestral land, coveted by farmers and the military regime for agricultural expansion. The abuses, part of one of the bloodiest periods in the lives of indigenous people – the military dictatorship – are still repeated, as documented by the National Truth Commission (CNV) thanks to the work of Marcelo Zelic. The researcher and ally of the indigenous cause was responsible for discovering the Figueiredo Report, a document of more than 7 thousand pages written by prosecutor Jader de Figueiredo Correia between 1967 and 1968 with allegations about the practice of acts of violence against indigenous peoples.

The CNV estimates that at least 8 indigenous people died as a result of the actions of the military regime, whether in episodes of direct extermination, in cases of torture, arbitrary incarceration and ill-treatment or through epidemics caused by a disastrous contact policy. The violence to which indigenous people were subjected could be part of the past if there had been accountability for the crimes and reparation measures, but it continues to be systematically practiced. In 2020, the Jair Bolsonaro government, with a Normative Instruction published by the body supposedly responsible for protecting indigenous rights, the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (Funai, formerly the National Indian Foundation), released areas of the Guarani-Kaiowá to farmers, and These territories became the scene of murders of indigenous people and threats against indigenous people, all occurring in the context of a fierce agrarian dispute due to the non-approval of original lands.

At the beginning of 2023, the newly installed government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva began an operation in the Yanomami Indigenous Land, exposing the serious health and conflict situation faced by indigenous people in the State of Roraima. Just as during the dictatorship, when the construction of a road caused the death of at least 354 Yanomami due to epidemics caused by the presence of white people in the region, the most recent period was marked by death. It is estimated that, between 2019 and 2022, 692 children up to the age of 9 died as a result of preventable diseases. The number of deaths increased with the takeover of the territory by illegal mining, a movement widely encouraged under the Bolsonaro government, and the lack of assistance in healthcare, a problem throughout the national territory.

A year after the start of the operation, journalist Rubens Valente, responsible for an extensive investigation into the crimes committed by the military during the dictatorship, denounced the fact that the Armed Forces had charged, still in 2023, an additional R$1,6 billion per two months from the federal government to promote the removal of miners from Yanomami lands and the delivery of basic food baskets to the indigenous people who lived in the region, despite the Ministry of Defense's budget of R$124,4 billion. Also in 2023, the Armed Forces did not react when indigenous people and employees of the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) were shot by invaders who closed a fuel supply station in one of the regions most sought after by mining.

The behavior of the military led public servants who work in the environment and indigenous politics to publish a note in which they repudiated the way in which the Armed Forces had been acting in the operation. Among the complaints, there is one indicating that the military refused to fly over the affected territory, another about omission and/or when it came to destroying seized equipment, another about the demobilization of support points and another about difficulties in obtaining information . “What other mission are the Armed Forces carrying out that they could not have the contingent and equipment to handle this operation?”, ask Ibama employees.

For Artionka Capiberibe, professor at the Department of Anthropology at Unicamp and member of the Center for Research in Indigenous Ethnology, what is happening today characterizes the training process of the Brazilian military. According to Capiberibe, there is a notion of progress at the expense of human lives and natural resources, widely disseminated in the dictatorship, which remains. “There is an outdated idea of ​​wealth, of excessive exploitation of natural resources without foreseeing that they will be exhausted. This means that, in their minds, these indigenous people will soon no longer be indigenous. In their mindset, these populations are simply a nuisance. It is an idea of ​​a country in which indigenous people have no space. This attitude towards the Yanomami is actually an old attitude. It is a thought that has not changed and that had an exaggerated and explicit expression in Bolsonaro”, she states.

Massacre against the Waimiri-Atroari

“It's good to remember that the dictatorship's military decided that they were going to drill into the Amazon on all sides, opening roads for 'progress' to get there. They wanted to occupy the space because this 'empty' space was in danger. There was a question of sovereignty over space. So there could not be unoccupied territory because it could be occupied by other nationalities. And then they decide to open a BR, BR-174, cutting through the Waimiri indigenous land.”

“The CNV data on population reduction are absurd. From a population of 3 in 1972, the Waimiri arrived in 1983 with 350 people. The allegations are very serious, because the Army came in to clear them. It is the Army itself that will vacate and then it will enter into a war operation. Indigenous people were treated as enemies of the country. The complaints even talk about bombings”, says Capiberibe. 

“There is a statement from a Catholic missionary from Cimi [Indigenist Missionary Council] according to which, while a party was taking place in a village of the Kinja people [self-denomination of the Waimiri-Atroari], a helicopter suddenly appeared, approached and threw a white powder . All the people hit by the dust died. The number he gives is 33 people killed in this party that was taking place in a village around a maloca. Journalist Memélia Moreira gave a statement, also at the National Truth Commission, about the Waimiri-Atroari saying that they [the military] dropped napalm on the villages.”

Savagery in Araguaia

Capiberibe continues: “This militarized vision of treating indigenous people as enemies to be exterminated was also present in the Araguaia region. In the early 1970s, when the Army began operations in the Araguaia region to exterminate the guerrillas, they used the Suruí indigenous people of Pará, the Aikewara, as bushmen. But it's not like they pay the indigenous people for the service they provide. That in itself would be serious, but the situation is even more serious. They first arrested the women and children in the houses and then took the men of the village as bushmen, forcing them to walk through the forest to locate the guerrillas.”

“In the statements that are there, the indigenous people say: 'We didn't know what a terrorist was and they asked: Where are the terrorists?'. Imagine the brutality. They asked: 'Where did they hide? You are hiding the terrorists!'. This happened to the indigenous people and also to the peasants in the region. However, in the case of indigenous people, there was this aggravating factor. Anthropologist Iara Ferraz made a very detailed study of the Aikewara case and, according to her, they went down in history as those who handed over and killed the guerrillas, because they were the ones who took [the military] to the places [where the guerrillas were] ]. But the indigenous people were forced to do this”, reports Capiberibe.

According to the teacher, “It was a state of war. The military decapitated several guerrillas and had the indigenous people holding their heads, insinuating a notion of savagery, with the military, the Army, being savages. Iara says: 'Look, the Aikewara suffered a lot because for them a dead person cannot be touched'. So that was torture, a form of torture. They even made the indigenous people carry the bodies of the deceased to the helicopters, to throw them into the ditches”.

“There were also punishments, which already happened before the dictatorial regime. Specific prisons were created – the most famous is the Krenak reformatory, a mixture of a prison and a mental institution, in the Krenak indigenous land, in Minas Gerais – in which several people were imprisoned, all against the law. In one of the reports I had access to, there is talk of a Krenak indigenous man arrested for vagrancy, for vagrancy, because he drank and was, according to them, a vagrant. And then they put him inside [the reformatory] without any right to defense and without any process, nothing”, says the anthropologist.

“Once inside, you forget about the person… In these regimes, whoever manages the prison systems becomes a kind of king, a despot. The internal laws of this system are made by the small bureaucrat, by the employee who is there. So there are punishments such as food deprivation, sleep deprivation, all kinds of violence.”

Forced displacements 

According to Capiberibe, “there have been forced displacements of entire populations, more than once. They are being taken from their lands due to some project. There is the case of Xetá, people from Paraná expelled because of a coffee front. This people ended up dispersing, its members ended up losing each other. The people were declared extinct by Funai in the 1970s. In the 1990s, they reappeared because they had not been exterminated, but dispersed. They reappeared, demanded the resumption of their lands and told how they suffered a process of unviability, which is also a process of violence”.

“They were in a region close to the Itaipu Hydroelectric Plant. So the government thought: 'I'm going to take these indigenous people out of here, I'm going to create the Sete Quedas park and put them there'. So it's not just that they didn't have rights. It's something deeper: treating human beings as if they weren't human, as if they didn't have a will, as if they had no relationship with the places where they were”, says the teacher. 

“This also happened with the Xavante and with several other ethnicities. Well, let's remember the name of the body, right, the Indian Protection Service [the body that preceded Funai]. 'Indian' is everything there. There is no linguistic diversity, there is no sociocultural diversity, of habits, of languages… There is nothing. So they force the displacement of these populations and think: 'Ah, let's put these Xetá people here together with the Kaingang'. But they are not the same people. So this is it: they are throwing people from one side to the other, expelling them, and occupying indigenous territories according to different interests. There are economic interests, there are interests that are State, public enterprises, such as Itaipu, responsible for the displacement of the Guarani people who lived in the region. These people suddenly find themselves caught up in a process in which there is no space for them. It is simply said: 'Look, this land of yours is going to be flooded'. It's a logic that thinks: 'Ah, let's move them from apartment 102 to 110'. This is incalculably violent,” says Capiberibe.

Repair

The work of the CNV, for Capiberibe, brought to light the different types of violence to which indigenous people were subjected during the dictatorship. Despite the military's attempt to erase historical records, testimonies indicate a pattern of violations. The anthropologist recalls that, even before the dictatorship, the military practiced abuses in the name of border control. 

From the Indian Protection Service and Location of National Workers, from 1910, to the Indian Protection Service (SPI), from 1927, and later to Funai, created in 1967 in response to complaints about acts of violence carried out by the SPI, it remained There is a vision of “civilizing” indigenous people, including using civility scales in an attempt to remove from those seen as “integrated into society” the need for connection with the land. 

“The SPI, a service that preceded Funai, was born as a body to protect Indians, as the acronym says, but with the idea of ​​progress and civilization, as expressed in our flag. Progress is seen by these officials, most of whom are military personnel, as a gradual process through which indigenous people would no longer be indigenous. During the dictatorship, this process accelerated”, explains the professor.

The CNV's work, which began in 2011, should be deepened, argues the anthropologist. “The path would be compensation, mapping the lands taken from indigenous peoples. There is a lot to be discussed, details related to the specificities of indigenous peoples. This work could have continued if the coup had not occurred in 2016, which interrupted the process”, she analyzes.

Setbacks that disregard this entire history of violent subtraction of lands and indigenous lives, argues the professor, should give way to a reparation process. 

Secular resistance

Amid the systematic violations of human rights committed during the dictatorship, the indigenous movement grew stronger and organized. In 1980, the Union of Indigenous Nations was born, the first organization entirely managed by indigenous people. This organized effort left its mark, for example, in the 1988 Constitution, a milestone in the achievement of rights.

“They started a national movement, whose leaders are very well known today, such as Ailton Krenak and Davi Kopenawa. They began to gather a little around the rubber tappers movement in Acre, under the leadership of Chico Mendes, and in this dialogue they became stronger. And at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s, indigenous people began to mobilize that expanded outside the country, where they filed complaints about several cases of human rights violations”, says Capiberibe.

The Constituent Assembly of the 80s, according to the professor, is the culmination of a movement that gradually gained support from several other sectors of society. Today, she reflects, there are several movements within the great indigenous movement: representatives of LGBTs, women and students, among others. “This shows that indigenous peoples are contemporary and not our past.” 

For the anthropologist, it is now necessary, in a government that is favorable to indigenous and environmental issues (the current federal administration created, for example, the first Ministry of Indigenous Peoples), to reverse a backward mentality of predatory economic exploitation responsible for put original peoples at risk. “Indigenous ways of life are good for indigenous peoples and also for the planet, but the safety of the planet should not only weigh on the shoulders of indigenous peoples”, says Capiberibe.