Scars on the Land
Honoring the Lives and Investigating the Deaths of Indigenous Land Defenders
Co-authored by Vyoma Raman, Ana Linares Montoya, Rosie Foulds, Crystal Choi, and Zaidie Long
This is a collective reflection of our project “Indigenous Land Defenders of Brazil: In Memoriam.” You can also explore the Portuguese version “Defensores de Terras Indígenas do Brasil In Memorian.”
Since the beginning of European colonization, Indigenous communities in Brazil have been subjected to repeated and brutal degradations of their rights and of the land they live on. These range from illegal mining that poisons food sources of native communities, to the killing of Indigenous People who organized to defend their lands. More recently, the very institutions established to protect Indigenous groups and their lands were effectively defanged under the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these issues and placed Brazil’s Indigenous communities at higher risk. Indigenous adults and children are killed every year, including through police violence. 182 Indigenous People were murdered in 2020, a striking uptick of 61 percent from an average of 123 in prior years. Their bodies are often assaulted and otherwise mutilated as a visceral expression of hostility toward Indigenous people. Many of the deceased have been involved in activism and efforts to prevent incursion into their lands, including several members of the Guajajara Guardians of the Forest. With these facts, our team undertook an investigation into the killing of Brazil’s Indigenous land defenders.
Our work seeks to draw attention to killings of 13 individuals between 2019 and 2022. As part of a larger effort in collaboration with the UC Digital Investigations Network — made up of the HRC Investigations Lab and sister labs at the UCLA Promise Institute and the UCSC Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas — the Berkeley Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab team investigated the circumstances surrounding the deaths of five individuals, as well as the broader economic and geopolitical forces creating this violence. We hope to raise awareness of these details that generally fail to reach the attention of international audiences. More critically, by assembling a coherent report of our findings, we seek to highlight the patterns of these events and how they show the failure of national and international legal provisions and enforcement.. With a report of such a kind, we hope to pave the way for future recourse to hold the relevant parties accountable and encourage action to prevent similar crimes in the future.
Our report was an attempt to highlight the larger fight of environmental defenders against the systemic violence towards Indigenous communities in Brazil, as there were clear links between the Bolsonaro administration’s policies and extractive practices. We also contextualized the defenders’ activism in the face of the legal violence faced by their communities, including the changing land demarcation process and policies minimizing the corporate accountability of extractive industries. Finally, we worked with our colleagues at UCLA and UCSC to weave the stories of each Indigenous land defender into a broader narrative that traced the geographies of violence.
Project Partnerships
Our professional partner for this project was Cultural Survival, an Indigenous-led non-profit organization advocating for Indigenous rights. Their team briefed us on the political, social, and historical context of the threats facing the Indigenous groups in the Brazilian Amazon. As our project developed, we questioned how we could best balance honoring those killed with our initial goal of encouraging accountability for the crimes committed. Thanks to Cultural Survival’s trusted relationships with many of the families and communities of the targeted defenders, we had their guidance in deciding to make this project a memorialization of the land defenders rather than a more traditional fact-finding open source investigation.
Working with our colleagues at UCLA and UCSC, we split up the work in a strategic way that played to each team’s strengths. For example, the UCLA students took on the legal analysis, which they were well-placed to do as law students, while the UCSC students were integral in the project organization because they completed a similar project documenting the killing of Colombian environmental defenders. Our Labs had consistent weekly meetings between team leads and supervisors, which kept us on track and allowed us to work through challenges, course correct, and exchange ideas.
Research Process
Our team was initially challenged by our limited knowledge concerning cultural context and key communities impacted by violence. Aside from our briefings with Cultural Survival, we reviewed quantitative data such as the 2022 report “Observations on the State of Indigenous Human Rights in Brazil” prepared for the UN Human Rights Council, and the 2021 report “COVID-19 Recovery in Brazil,” submitted to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. To facilitate a culturally-sensitive approach, we created a glossary defining key terms in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. This resource enabled us to search for videos, images, and regions to locate the impacted indigenous defenders and their surrounding communities. Our team’s objective was to investigate these crimes in a culturally conscious manner.
We devoted a significant portion of our research to building regional reports contextualizing the legal, political, social, and historical background relevant to the contemporary crisis. In particular, we weaved information about the economy, geography, and political climate of each region into an analysis of conflicts surrounding Indigenous lands. We identified different forces driving local human rights violations by poring through numerous documents describing the state of each region and news articles reporting regional clashes. For a different perspective, we also delved into open-source tabular data. We used Python to probe the Transition Minerals Tracker released by corporate accountability and transparency NGO Business & Human Rights, which details 510 human rights incidents involving different mining corporations. This enabled us to identify the different categories of impact that mining activity caused, including the environment, local communities, workers, governance, conflict, and health. Of these, 25% involved an attack on a human rights defender.
Most of the source material we uncovered in our research was in Portuguese. As researchers, a cornerstone of any project is identifying reliable first-hand accounts of the incidents we investigate. Though convenient, machine-translated sources are not always the most accurate. Some of our team members had worked on a prior Lab project collecting mis/disinformation circulating online that spread through faulty translation software features on social media platforms, and knew the risks first-hand. To combat this, we cross-referenced the translated articles and native sources with different translation tools, and then checked our work with individuals on our team who speak Portuguese.
A key stage of the open-source investigations process is verifying the truthfulness of our sources. The majority of the material we gathered for the project was from local journalists, social media, national Brazilian media outlets, and NGO advocacy reports. In some cases, we were also able to access primary sources, including police reports, first-person accounts of the killings, and footage of the aftermath of the killings. We cross-checked the different sources against each other to piece together a fuller narrative of the life and death of each defender.
Since most of our team members were not intimately familiar with the Brazilian media context and were primarily working with content in a language they didn’t speak, our capacity for verification was limited. Disentangling fact from fiction from thousands of miles away, particularly when reviewing such sensitive content, was daunting. We were further challenged by a lack of publicly available information for some of the defenders whose deaths we were tasked with investigating. Neither our glossary nor our collaborative efforts within the Lab could tell us the biographical details of certain defenders, such as their upbringing, their position within their tribe’s hierarchy, or living photographs. In response, we oriented the project towards memorialization and environmental justice advocacy, rather than designing a more traditional open source investigation. This allowed us to engage with as much material as was available and focus attention towards the larger fight that the defenders were engaged in against environmental exploitation and structural violence, and their roles within their communities. This proved much more powerful than merely summarizing the “facts” of the killings, as we were able to piece together the stories of these defenders’ lives into a mosaic of zealous advocacy and heroism.
Report Building
During this project, our team conducted geolocation, digital verification, and geographic mapping. We used Hunchly, a web capture tool, to track our browser use and record our navigation across various local and international news outlets; search engines; and social media. We also took screen grabs that allowed our team to create an informational database with data about land defenders and their regions. While using TikTok in our investigation, we created a spreadsheet with relevant hashtags in different languages to locate videos and images of the last living moments of these Indigenous defenders, and to track community responses to their deaths. We used screen grabs from these videos to geolocate the killing sites, explore their proximity to their villages, and note their proximity to agribusiness and demarcated lands. This database helped our team track patterns of abuse related to land grabbing as well as the frequency of the attacks. We then repeated this process for Twitter and Facebook. All the sources we used were screened under a credibility protocol, which included verifying that Twitter posts and news outlets had known authors, a certain number of followers, and were actively reposting or sharing information from credible outlets, among other tools throughout the investigation. Before synthesizing the information we collected, we used source evaluation documents and redistributed our sections among team members for a last round of digital verification to ensure the report’s integrity. Finally, we created an ArcGIS StoryMap to commemorate the killed land defenders, their communities, and their historic regions. Our map shows the pattern of the killings — both geographically and through the shared activism of the targeted defenders.
Another part of the mapping process included visualizations of deforestation through remote sensing technologies across different regions. Using satellite imagery, we could visualize the fight for land preservation that the defenders were engaged in, and once again highlight the broader missions of the activists. We paired powerful visualizations of the destruction to their lands with a section titled “Emerging Regions of Risk,” discussing the broader threats and patterns of environmental devastation across the regions. This section shows that violence and injustice are part of a wider pattern, and are not isolated or random.
Honoring Memory
What does it truly mean to humanize a person’s memory? Our documentation of these land defenders started after their deaths, but was specifically designed to commemorate their lives. The Lab builds on the legacy of HRC Co-Faculty Director Eric Stover’s forensic work identifying the disappeared, which he describes as “writing the last chapter of someone’s life.” This framework helped us be intentional in the way we pieced together each person’s last moments, and reminded us of what a privilege that is.
Documenting someone’s life by simply reporting on the events that led up to and followed their death did not sit right with our team. With this in mind, our team worked hard to create research objectives that portrayed more holistic views of the defenders’ lives. We started our investigation by asking specifically what we wanted to highlight about these land defenders. Who were they to their community? Who were they to their close friends and family? How were they exposed to environmental stewardship? All these questions were carefully considered in the balance of respecting the deceased while putting forth our best efforts to tell the full story. We remember these defenders for the courage and importance of their work, while fighting against the tendency to simplify the legacy of their lives to their final moments.
