Brazil & Southern Cone - January 2017 (ISSN 1741-4431)

The Brazilian government has caved in to the demands of agricultural lobbyists and stopped automatically demarcating the land for indigenous people. Indigenous groups such as the Conselho Indigenista Missionário (CIMI) say they are “worried and surprised” by the move that could lead to the undermining of their rights.

Until now, the government agency charged with representing indigenous people, Funai, had been responsible for determining which land belongs to local tribes. However, in a statement issued on 18 January by in the Diário Oficial da União official gazette, Justice Minister Alexandre de Moraes announced that a new group of government-appointed specialists (GTE) would also be involved in arbitrating land disputes. While the measure has not yet been approved by President Michel Temer, the decree is widely expected to get the greenlight.

Changes to the demarcation system would boost agribusinesses looking to expand, but threaten the rights of indigenous tribes. The extra layer of bureaucracy introduced by the new system could make land demarcation for indigenous people a “virtually endless” process, said the former Funai head, Marcio Santilli, in an interview with the Thomas Reuters Foundation, Reuters’ charitable arm.

Environmentalists have also criticised the proposed changes to land demarcation procedures by pointing out that indigenous people generally take better care of the areas they live in than other land owners. A recent report by the World Resources Institute found that deforestation rates are 2.5 lower in areas owned by indigenous groups. Therefore, denying indigenous people the right to lay claim to their ancestral territories could jeopardise Brazil’s commitment to combat global warming as part of the 2016 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP22), which Brazil undersigned.

Human rights and minority advocacy groups have argued that the proposed new system fails to comply with the government’s obligation to represent indigenous people as per Brazil’s constitution. The government published these proposed changes, reportedly without consulting indigenous groups, while public attention in the Amazon region was diverted to the prison riots. Further diminishing the impression that indigenous people’s interests are fully represented by the Brazilian government was Moraes’s decision to name a new Funai head, Antônio Fernandes Toninho Costa, without their prior approval. The new Funai head, appointed on 12 January, is affiliated to the Partido Social Cristão (PSC), an ally of the current centre-right government led by Temer, in what critics say was a politically motivated decision.

While Costa has a master’s degree in indigenous health, some indigenous groups feel he is not qualified to act as a spokesman for them. “The PSC does not have any political record of representing indigenous concerns. On the contrary, many [indigenous] leaders fear that Funai is going in a politically conservative direction which could worsen tensions with the indigenous movement”, Daniel Pierr from the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista NGO remarked in an interview with news site G1. The government defended Costa’s appointment by arguing that the indigenous community had failed to come up with a credible candidate of their own.

• Yellow fever: Brazil’s next epidemic?

Cases of yellow fever are on the rise in Brazil, public health officials have warned. So far, the disease’s outbreak has mainly been confined to the southern state of Minas Gerais, where over 270 people have been infected and 25 people have died according to statistics from the federal health ministry. While there is now a vaccine for yellow fever, the uptake is low. On 13 January, the federal government sent an extra 735,000 doses of the vaccine to Minas Gerais to help tackle the outbreak. But the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the mosquito-borne virus could quickly spread and cause an epidemic as the Zika virus did last year.