•  rio de janeiro
• Friday, January 14, 2011
• Inter Press Service

In Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's eight years as president of Brazil, he signed decrees creating just 88 indigenous reserves, far fewer than his immediate predecessors. That figure comes from the governmental National Indian Foundation and the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), which also reported that violence against, and among, indigenous communities increased under the Lula administration.

'A policy to demarcate native reserves and protect and give effective assistance to indigenous communities was not implemented,' the vice president of CIMI, Roberto Antonio Liebgott, told IPS. 'Solving land conflicts was not a priority of the government.' According to the president's office, Lula, who governed from Jan. 1, 2003 to Jan. 1, 2011, had signed decrees legally creating native reserves covering a combined total of 18.6 million hectares of land by 2009.

But CIMI, which was founded in 1972 by the National Bishops' Conference of Brazil as a missionary council for indigenous people, reported that Indian reserves have been created on 14.3 million hectares of land since 2003.

That is equivalent to 60 percent of what was achieved by the administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), who finalised the creation of 147 reserves on more than 36 million hectares of land. And it even falls short in comparison to the short term of impeached president Fernando Collor de Mello (1990-1992), who signed decrees creating 128 reserves, covering nearly 32 million hectares.

The identification and demarcation of indigenous lands is carried out in accordance with principles laid out in the 1988 constitution. There are more than 650 reserves in Brazil, covering nearly 13 percent of the national territory. The census recorded 736,000 indigenous people, distributed in 242 different ethnic groups, in this country of 190 million.

Demarcation involves marking out the boundaries of a territory that has traditionally been occupied by indigenous communities. Legislation passed in 1996 streamlined the process to speed it up. The president's signature on a decree formally creating the reserves is the final step. The slowest stages of the process are marking out the boundaries and arranging the payment of compensation for land expropriated from non-indigenous owners, which can take decades.

'The entire process is supposed to take no more than a year and a half, but I have never seen a case that came anywhere near that. It normally takes between 15 and 30 years,' Liebgott said. The most controversial of the native territories formally created by Lula was the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve in the northern Amazon jungle state of Roraima, which is home to some 20,000 indigenous people belonging to five ethnic groups, the largest of which is the Macuxi.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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