The future of traditional Indian cultures was under challenge on Wednesday as Brazil’s Supreme Court began hearing arguments on whether to break up a vast Amazon reserve.
The dispute concerning the 1.7 million-hectare Raposa Serra do Sol reservation pits about 18,000 Amazon Indians against a handful of large-scale rice farmers who have violently fought efforts to remove them.
Carlos Ayres Britto, the first justice to take up the case on Wednesday, voted in favor of the reservation, saying “according to my vote, all of this area is indigenous.”
PHOTO: AP
But immediately after his vote, a fellow justice asked for a recess to further study the case. The court’s president then said the case would be taken up again later this year, without providing a date.
Indian-rights advocates say a ruling against the reservation could set a precedent that would eventually destroy policies that grant Indians land and autonomy to maintain their traditional cultures.
Politicians from Roraima state, however, say leaving the entire reservation in Indian hands is a threat to national security and strangles economic growth in the sparsely populated state.
State lawyer Luiz Valdemar Albrecht urged the justices to cut the reserve into pieces so the rice farmers can stay alongside 18,000 Indians from the Macuxi, Ingarico, Patamona, Wapixana and Taurpeng tribes.
He argued the anthropological study saying the tribes traditionally inhabited the land was a shoddy “cut and paste job.”
While Brazil’s 1988 Constitution mandated the demarcation of Indian lands within five years, the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve was not created until 2005, and the government still has not enforced its borders.
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