Big Agro wants to override Lula on indigenous land rights issue

Indigenous groups protest against the "time-frame argument." Photo: Joédson Alves/ABr

Lawmakers allied to Big Agro have pledged to override President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s veto of a bill aiming to curtail the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands.

In recent years, Big Agro has defended the so-called “time-frame argument.” It seeks to define October 5, 1988 — the date the Brazilian Constitution was enacted — as the cut-off point for land rights. According to this understanding, if an indigenous group could not prove that it was occupying or contesting said land on that date, it would not have a territorial claim.

Indigenous leaders have rejected the time-frame argument because several communities were displaced from their lands while the Constitution was being drawn up.

Back in September, in a landmark decision, Supreme Court justices ruled 9-2 that the time-frame argument is unconstitutional.

Records of Brazil’s Constituent Assembly in the 1980s show that those who put the charter together explicitly debated the point of indigenous land occupation. The wording of the draft was changed at the request of the late conservative senator Jarbas Passarinho in order not to define something similar to a time frame or cut-off point, precisely to defend the rights of indigenous peoples to land that they perhaps did not occupy at the time of the assembly, but were entitled to.

Lawmakers representing Big Agro’s interests reacted to the Supreme Court decision by approving a bill last month with 1988 as an explicit cut-off point for the demarcation of new indigenous lands. President Lula vetoed most of the bill, including the “time-frame” provision, last Friday.

On Saturday, the Big Agro caucus pledged to override Lula’s veto. However, regular bills are weaker than constitutional amendments, and the Supreme Court could later decide that the bill is also unconstitutional. According to the statement, “recent decisions” are responsible for “stimulating conflicts” in Brazil’s rural areas.

Brazil’s Indigenous People Articulation (Apib) said in a statement that Lula’s decision was insufficient and that Big Agro could still override vetoes to measures such as building large infrastructure projects and planting genetically modified organisms in or near indigenous lands. Apib said that the bill is “genocidal” and “sponsored by agribusiness.”