Pathways forward
Márcio Santilli looks back on the resistance and the alliances of the constitutional assembly as an inspiration for today
Our young democracy is currently facing some of its greatest threats in decades. Given the situation, it is important to remember the history of struggle that allowed the rights of indigenous peoples to be inscribed into our constitution. An understanding of this battle, fought more than 30 years ago, in a society still marked by authoritarianism, may be useful to find pathways forward and ways to defend human and socio-environmental rights today, when people speak openly about freezing or reversing the demarcation of indigenous lands and stripping rights from other traditional populations.
With this in mind, ISA interviewed one of its founding partners, Márcio Santilli, former congressman (1983–1986), former president of the National Indian Foundation (Funai) and one of the negotiators of the chapter on indigenous rights in the Citizen Constitution. He shares stories from behind the scenes about the constitutional assembly and emphasizes that a somber political scenario, such as the one we have today, is also an opportunity to resist by forming renew alliances. See below key passages from an interview conducted during the anniversary month of our Magna Carta.
Setbacks and resistance
People still think that Brazil’s only role internationally is to produce soybeans, beef and other tangible material goods, most of them with no value added, and very much vulnerable to the game of international trade.
The land is going to the large rural property owners and the producers of commodities, as if this was the only viable national plan for a country of this size, with over 200 million people and a series of other dynamic factors that could allow us to be a much more interesting country.
We are talking about the tense dispute over what is left of Brazilian territory, of the lands still not set aside by the state for agrarian reform, quilombos or conservation units. We’re talking about the allocation of parts of the territory for different socio-environmental purposes.
This reactionary syndrome, which we call “ruralist” and which could even be described as fascist today, will peter out given its abject inability to respond to the century’s greatest challenge: the threat of climate change.
Increasing resistance, expanding alliances and disputing public opinion are generally the best ways to counter the setbacks we see today.
There have been previous attacks on the constitutional rights of indigenous peoples, such as a proposed amendment to the constitution (PEC 215) and others, but today we have a much bleaker outlook: signs point to a repeal of the Constitution of 1988. In other words: far beyond the chapter on indigenous peoples. The threat is much greater and so is the need for alliances to counter it, for indigenous peoples and any other social group.
Demarcations
When the Brazilian government has to meet a repressed historical demand, as with the demarcations of indigenous lands, and titles for quilombos, one would predict that in the cases where the demographic density of indigenous people is greater, where the process of colonization and territorial occupation was less intense, the demarcations would occur more quickly and encounter less resistance. The Brazilian government agreed to around 2/3 of the territorial demands of the indigenous peoples, while the remaining third contained more difficult cases, tense disputes, more complicated situations, with correlations of forces that disfavor the indigenous peoples, who are more susceptible to judicialization, and end up pushing the resolution of conflicts into the future.
This is why I believe that the government needs to create new instruments that deal specifically with this lingering situation. Brazil has not been able to create these instruments, so what we have today is a growing impasse with regard to these demands.
There are still lands in the Amazon that could go more quickly than the demarcation of very small areas, situated in regions of non-indigenous occupation, of great interest and value, and that end up being much more difficult to resolve and overcome. This is one side of the story.
The other is that, over the last 30 years, although there have been important initiatives to overcome obstacles, political forces were not able to escape the corruption, cronyism, and a series of political practices that progressively wear down the democratic process itself.
Constitutional assembly
The indigenous issue, like other issues, emerged during the constitutional assembly as very much associated with people’s main concern: democratization. We cannot forget that Brazil had experienced over 20 years of dictatorship, witnessing a monumental campaign for direct elections and that this aim ended up being thwarted at that moment.
The convening of the constitutional assembly and the drafting of the new constitution were the main focus, the catalyst of a desire for democracy that created a favorable climate in public opinion to rethink the approach to issues or specific policies, such as the indigenous issue. That does not mean to say that the result of the constitutional assembly was identical for each specific social issue. Much to the contrary: in each case, monumental battles were waged and correlations of specific forces were established.
We believe that the treatment given in the constitutional assembly to indigenous rights was better than that given to agrarian reform, for example. But there was, in the realm of public opinion, diffuse support for the idea that Brazil should have a generous, inclusive standard for democratization, and this paved the way for an unprecedented approach to indigenous rights.
The big question was how to address indigenous rights, and those of other minorities, in a way that was not considered incompatible with the will of the majority. There had to be a way to deal with this without reducing indigenous rights to a correlation of forces that the Indians have within national society, where they represent only 0.4% of the population.
Up until then, Brazilian constitutions and jurisprudence had always treated indigenous rights as provisional. “Indigenous people have to stop being indigenous; they have to be incorporated into national society as generic Brazilians. Until this happens, they have special rights due to their cultural differences,” is what they used to say.
The Constitution turned this around: by recognizing rights in a permanent way, and not as transitory subjects, recognizing not only original rights (which have to do with the historical past), but also the legitimacy, the importance of the presence of indigenous people like them to the future of Brazil.
At the constitutional assembly there was the possibility of presenting grassroots amendments, proposals that were presented based on signatures from voters. Something on the order of 30,000 signatures was required at the time to be able to present a grassroots amendment, if I’m not mistaken. In the case of indigenous rights, two amendments were presented: one for the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), which featured the concept of “indigenous nations,” and the other forwarded by the Union of Indigenous Nations (UNI), with the support of other organizations, which basically gathered signatures in support of the text that was being drafted inside the assembly.
There was a moment in the process in which there was a public hearing when advocates had the right to speak in the plenary. This is where Ailton Krenak painted himself at the lectern of the plenary.
That white jacket, for example, is mine. Or rather, it was mine. It was sacrificed in this operation because it was stained beyond repair. That necktie there is also mine. You could not go up there without a tie. Ailton had the idea of not saying a word, going up there, painting his face and nothing else. But later I commented to him that it would be important to say something as well. Because if he didn’t say anything, there would be no way to record it in the annals of the constitutional assembly. It was necessary for the purposes of the historical record, but the scene was certainly much more important than the content of his speech, so much so that it became iconic.
The idea emerged as a response to the reactionary avalanche against indigenous rights. At some point, the newspaper Estado de S. Paulo unleashed a public campaign against indigenous rights, supposedly founded on documents that proved a conspiracy to succeed from the country. Later, an evaluation of the documents showed that the signatures were forged. During this wave of denunciation and criminalization of indigenous rights, Bernardo Cabral, rapporteur for the systematization committee draft of the constitution, inserted the integrationist perspective into the draft, which had been overcome during the discussion process. So this action by Ailton was a protest against all of this. This went directly to the television networks, which up until that time had said nothing about indigenous rights or had simply reproduced the version of the Estadão.
Mining on Indigenous Lands
One of our greatest efforts at the time was to produce new information: a map of mining interests on indigenous lands. The main conflicts during the constitutional assembly involving indigenous rights had much more to do with interests under the ground rather than the land itself. We argued that, if there was not one criterion, the volume of existing interests would destroy these territories. Looking at the map, this became absolutely evident. In the end, we won an overwhelming victory in the voting for this part of the constitutional text, with over 300 votes for and around 100 against. So it was a very interesting case of the use of a cartographic instrument in a direct political dispute.
Today, the dispute is over a broader range of issues and not just a matter of defending the rights of indigenous people. Therefore, it is fundamental that indigenous peoples have the ability to consolidate and expand alliances that have been formed in recent years, during this period of setbacks.
It is important to have the support of public opinion, of city dwellers, who are not directly involved with the dispute over land, because they are not in rural Brazil. But who are indirectly affected by this issue, because today it is known that natural resources and environmental services produced by the forest areas are essential for all of Brazil, for the supply of water in farming regions, as well as in large metropolitan regions of the country.
