Our rights are non-negotiable: indigenous groups go after Lula coalition amid veto vote

With Congress set to analyze a presidential veto of a landmark indigenous land bill this week, Brazil’s Indigenous People Articulation (Apib) has launched a manifesto decrying the “anti-indigenous” sectors of the current governing coalition, affirming that traditional communities’ rights are “non-negotiable.”

In September, pro-agro sectors of Congress pushed through a bill establishing the so-called “time-frame argument” for indigenous land claims in Brazil. Said argument stipulates that traditional communities would only be able to demand ownership of territory if they could prove that they effectively inhabited it on October 5, 1988 — the day Brazil’s current Constitution was enacted.

The approval was in direct response to a Supreme Court decision that ruled the time-frame argument as unconstitutional. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vetoed most of the bill in October, and Congress is set to ratify or overrule those vetoes this week.

While Apib hails Lula’s election last year as a “collective achievement,” it complains that the electoral context forced him to form a “broad ideological alliance, encompassing conservative and anti-indigenous economic and political sectors.”

“Congress continues to be dominated by lawmakers backed by national and international corporations and stakeholders in agribusiness, aiming to undermine indigenous rights,” reads an Apib statement.

The organization goes on to call the time-frame argument an example of “state-sanctioned and legislated genocide,” saying that their rights have become a “bargaining chip” among the three branches of government in Brasília.

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