Brazilian police on Friday entered a vast tract of the Amazon rainforest set aside as an indigenous reserve to evict non-indigenous farmers ordered to leave the area.
The Supreme Court ruled last month that non-indigenous residents had until last Wednesday to leave the vast Raposa Serra do Sol indigenous reserve in northern Brazil.
Most outsiders left the region by the deadline, but the owners of several large rice farms and families who worked on them were still in the area, according to the National Foundation for the Indian.
Early on Friday, some 300 Federal Police agents entered the vast area to evict the holdouts, the government news wire Agencia Brasil reported.
At 17,000km², the forested territory in northern Brazil, along the border with Venezuela and Guyana, is equal to half the size of Belgium.
The farmers had earlier vowed to fight any attempt to force them out, and several stockpiled arms and threatened to blow up bridges and spike roads if police moved in.
Police have set up five operational bases in the reserve to enforce the court ruling, Agencia Brasil said.
Last month the Brazilian Supreme Court upheld the integrity of the vast reserve, issuing a final ruling on a 30-year dispute over the rights of native groups to lands in South America’s largest country.
Some 19,000 members of the indigenous Macuxi, Wapichana, Ingariko, Taurepang and Patamona tribes call the territory home.
The dispute has raged since the 1970s between the native groups seeking to protect the forest, their ancestral lands and their traditional way of life, and white agricultural and industrial interests.
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