Anti-Indigenous Violence in Paraguay and Brazil

Anybody even remotely familiar with Latin America history is aware that indigenous peoples were subject to horrific processes of dispossession, repression, racism, and extermination throughout both the colonial and the national periods. Sadly, destroying native lands and communities in the name of greed remains a major issue in the twenty-first century:

In a rare encounter between the Ayoreo tribe, Paraguay’s Environment Minister, and a Brazilian rancher responsible for the large-scale destruction of the tribe’s ancestral land, the rancher has rebuffed the Ayoreo’s plea to stop destroying their forest, the last refuge of their uncontacted relatives. […]

Ranching company Yaguarete Pora S.A., owned by Ferraz, has been illegally clearing the Ayoreo’s forest to make way for beef destined for the European, Russian and African markets, and was recently granted an environmental license to cut down more forest, causing global outrage.

Obviously, this is horrible on any number of levels. The blatant disregard for indigenous rights and the obviously anti-indigenous attitudes of the rancher and his company deny treating indigenous peoples as equals under the law, thus dehumanizing them and reinforcing structures of anti-indigenous racism that have operated in Latin America for centuries. And this is not just a South American problem, or an indigenous problem; that the land is being cleared to provide European markets with food really does make this a global issue, providing yet another reminder of the tragic roots that can and do rest behind much of industrial food production. And while our focus regularly (and not unfairly) falls on deforestation in the Amazon, a recent study found that the highest rate of deforestation in the world is in Paraguay’s Chaco, where the Ayoreo (and others) live. What’s happening in Paraguay is in many ways an old story – outside economic powers disregarding indigenous rights and threatening indigenous peoples while also destroying the environment, all in the name of global trade. That it is an old story, yet one we still see today, is yet another sad reminder of the ways that power structures dating back to colonial times insidiously persist well into the 21st century under new guises.

Around Latin America

-Peru has launched its biggest exhumation ever, as it tries to find victims from the violence between the Shining Path and the Peruvian state between 1980 and 2000.

-Peru is not the only country exhuming victims of violence. In an attempt to find two missing police officers, forensic scientists in Mexico got more than they expected when their search led to the discovery of 64 bodies buried in mass graves in Jalisco and Michoacán, with the bodies showing signs of torture and indicating they are the victims of ongoing violence between cartels. In spite of the discovery, the two police officers remain missing.

-In the wake of a close election and allegations of electoral fraud, Honduras will hold a recount after thousands took to the streets in support of Xiomara Castro, who allegedly lost the election to conservative candidate Juan Orlando Hernandez (who got 37% of the total vote)  and whose husband, former president Manuel Zelaya, was removed from office in a coup d’etat in 2009. The recount comes amidst outsiders’ observations allegations of chicanery and after Honduras’s electoral council was very slow to issue the data from the November 24 election, adding to suspicions of fraud.

-Rio de Janeiro governor Sérgio Cabral announced that he will leave office 9 months early after seeing his popularity plummet in the midst and wake of protests last June, when millions of Brazilians took to the streets to protest a number of causes, including political elites’ disconnect and corruption. Cabral himself became a particular target of that anger in Rio de Janeiro.

-The bad news for governors is not limited to Brazil. In Mexico, former governor of Tamaulipas Tomás Yarrington faces charges in the US of having ties to the drug cartels while he was in office during his 1999-2004 governorship.

-Costa Rica closed a probe into the 1984 bombing that killed 7 journalists and Nicaraguan Contras and wounded 20 more people, after forensics revealed that the attacker died in the late-1980s.

-Mexico’s Senate has approved electoral reform that would allow reelection and would strengthen Congressional power in the face of executive power even while approving President Enrique Peña’s efforts to increasingly privatize the state-run PEMEX oil company in Mexico.

-Francisco Flores, the former president of El Salvador for the conservative ARENA party, is under investigation for the misuse of upwards of $10 million that Taiwan donated to El Salvador during his presidency, money that apparently never made it to its intended institutional destinations.

-Finally, in Brazil, Guaraní indigenous leader Ambrosio Vilhava, whose struggle to help protect Guaraní land was documented in the 2008 film Birdwatchers, was found stabbed to death after his father-in-law allegedly killed him. While the circumstances around his death remain unclear, the fact remains that his death marks the loss of an important activist and leader in Brazilian indigenous mobilization.

Around Latin America

-Dozens of Haitians are dead after the boat they were traveling on capsized as they sought to seek refuge and a new start in the wake of recent tensions and violence in the Dominican Republic.

-For those who missed it, earlier this week a crane collapsed on a stadium being built for the World Cup in São Paulo, killing two workers. Now, workers for the union on the construction of the stadium are saying their warnings that the soil on which the crane sat could not support its weight went ignored, unnecessarily putting workers’ lives at risk.

-Though more tragic, the stadium accident was not the only architectural bad news to emerge from São Paulo this week. Yesterday, a fire broke out at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Latin America Memorial, which houses a large auditorium and a number of cultural artifacts caught on fire, and pictures from the interior of the building reveal that the damage was extensive.

-In an effort to protect the rights of LGBTI individuals in the Americas, this past week the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) created a Unit on the Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Persons. While the IACHR has long been an important instrument in bringing awareness to and investigating human rights violations in Latin America, it has not directly addressed violent acts and other forms of persecution against the LGBTI community. The potential importance of this new institution should not be understated, as it  will actively investigate reports of human rights violations against LGBTI persons throughout the Americas, even while also providing an arena for activists to make the issues facing the LGBTI community more visible.

-In a reminder both of the unequal treatment of politicians and the power of popular mobilizations in Latin America, after thousands of Paraguayans gathered outside of the Congress to protest against the Senate’s decision to uphold the parliamentary immunity to a colleague under investigation for fraud and corruption, the Congress retreated, stripping senator Victor Bogado of his parliamentary immunity and opening him to prosecution for fraud and corruption.

-Brazil has reached a tragic milestone, as the number of femicides in the country reached 40,000 in the last 10 years.

-Cuba has suspended consular operations in the United States, citing its inability to get any banks to work with it as the main reason.

-Finally, Brazil has sent in its national police to try to settle a land dispute between indigenous peoples who were awarded exclusive land rights in 2010 on the one hand, and landowners in the region who continue to challenge the ruling on the other hand.

Around Latin America

-Yesterday, Chile marked the fortieth anniversary of the coup that overthrew democratically-elected president Salvador Allende and ushered in the 17-year military dictatorship that killed over 3000 people and tortured tens of thousands. Even while the date was commemorated, the search for justice for some continues. Family members of murdered folk singer Victor Jara, whose hands the military cut off before killing him in 1973, have sued an officer tied to the murder who now lives in Florida, while former friends and colleagues of US journalist Charles Horman demand an investigation into his own death in Chile shortly after the coup (a story that was portrayed in Costa Gavras’s 1982 film Missing).

-Of course, Chile is not the only country continuing to pursue justice decades after the rise of right-wing military regimes. It recently extradited judge Otilio Romano to Argentina, where Romano is wanted for his role in cases of torture, disappearances, and other crimes.

-In the wake of wire-tapping scandals that revealed the US spied on Mexico and Brazil, the Obama administration has begun trying to patch up its relationship with Brazil in the wake of the revelations (and as President Dilma Rousseff weighs whether or not to cancel a planned state visit to the US in October).

-Thousands of teachers in Mexico continue to take to the streets in protest of a new educational law that would create mandatory evaluations, reforms they say erode labor rights.

-As Cuban doctors continue to travel to Brazil to help with medical care in the country (one of the many issues raised in massive protests throughout Brazil in June this year) and even enjoy the support of a majority of Brazilians, that has not stopped them from facing racism from some Brazilians, including Brazilian doctors who oppose the Cuban doctors’ presence, a powerful reminder of the ways racism operates within and in between Latin American countries.

-Another former Guatemalan guerrilla is set to face trial for his role in killings during the civil war that left 250,000 Guatemalans dead or missing, providing another reminder that the court system in Guatemala has gone after more than just military human rights violators.

-Brazilian prosecutors have launched an effort to prevent Canadian mining company Belo Sun mining from creating an open-pit mine in the Amazonian basin, arguing such a project will devastate indigenous communities and the environment.

Pyramids, Pavement, and “Progress”

This is sickening and horrible:

A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced on Monday.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2,300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico. […]

Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field, and lacked the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or better-preserved pyramids. But Awe said the builders could not possibly have mistaken the pyramid mound, which is about 100 feet tall, for a natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there is naturally flat.

This is not the first time the destruction of ruins has taken place in recent memory. Still, there is almost never a time where wanton destruction of valuable historical sites isn’t awful. It’s reasonable to build paved roads, but there had to be better ways to go about it than such destruction. It’s just an awful story.

Around Latin America

-30,000: that is the number of families who have been relocated as Brazil has prepared for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

-New Paraguayan President and wealthy businessman Horacio Cartes is set to reform social aid to the poor, saying the program that provides aid to 88,000 impoverished families did not “create results.”

-Joe Biden is on a quick tour of Latin America, with stops in Colombia, Trinidad & Tobago, and Brazil. In Colombia, he said that economics, and not security issues, would now be the top priority in US-Colombia relations, an important declaration in a country where the US has provided billions of dollars in military aid over the years. Meanwhile, as the peace talks between FARC and the Santos administration continue, a United Nations rep has said the UN will not support amnesty for crimes against humanity for participants in the peace process.

-After Brazil’s court system opened the path towards marriage equality throughout the country, perhaps as many as 100,000 evangelical Brazilians recently took to the streets to protest against marriage equality.

-An Argentine suspected of crimes committed during the military regime of 1976-1983 was arrested in Uruguay.

-Overcrowding and poor conditions in prisons are a common, if tragic, feature of Brazil’s prison system (and of many prison systems in South America). Another problem? Ten percent of the Nigerians (500) who live in Brazil are in those prisons, a rather alarming and high rate for any social group, even given the relatively small sample size.

-There have been a number of stories on indigenous struggles throughout the hemisphere.

• In Mexico, a judge ordered the release of two indigenous men who had spent 10 years in jail, basing the decision on  irregularities in the trial and other legal issues.
• In Nicaragua, the Mayangna people are mobilizing in an effort to halt the arrival of illegal settlers and the logging that is leading to deforestation and is destroying indigenous lands and resources.
• In Argentina, members of the Qom indigenous group are asking President Cristina Kirchner’s government to help survey, set aside, and protect indigenous lands.
• And in a reminder that not all challenges facing indigenous people are tied to land issues, nine Brazilians have been arrested for sexually abusing indigenous girls.

-Finally, will the 2014 World Cup take place without any games in São Paulo?

 

On Images and the Danger of Drawing Stereotypical Conclusions

Recently, an image had been making its way around on social media. The image showed Chief Raoni, an indigenous leader in traditional dress, crying, purportedly weeping at the Brazilian government’s decision to proceed with the Belo Monte dam. However, that simplistic narrative, while employed for the causes of indigenous rights and environmentalism does a disservice to the actual culture, life, and story of the indigenous man and his people, as Angela Kristin Vandenbroek reported:

The picture is not of Chief Raoni crying and grieving about the Belo Monte Dam. The picture is not a picture of grief at all. His tears were tears of joy after being reunited with a family member, behavior which is customary among the Kayapó. Chief Raoni is not a powerless man fighting an impossible battle. In the fight to protect the Amazon and its people, he is a leader who has been working with local, national and international communities since 1978, when he appeared in a documentary named Raoni on the deforestation of the Amazon. Since then, he has befriended Sting and the President of France, has written a memoir, has traveled around the world, has facebook, twitterand a website, and although he has not yet stopped the building of the dam he and those he has collaborated with have managed to delay, hold up and tie up the project with court battles, controversy and petitions for thirty-eight years. He has also managed to rally the support of 438,707 (and counting) people worldwide using an online petition.

As Vendenbroek points out, the image alone suggests a powerless indigenous man overcome by an all-powerful state; as his actual biography reveals, he is anything but powerless.

Nor is that the only problem. Though Vandenbroek does not extend the analysis this far, the image also reinforces stereotypes that are ensconced in Latin American history dating back to the first colonial contacts with Europeans. The early decades of contact spurred a whole series of narratives and portrayals of indigenous peoples as backwards, uncivilized, and uncouth. Sometimes, these narratives were “positive,” viewing indigenous peoples as living in virtually Edenic existence; more often, they were derogatory, used to cast an “uncivilized” other that stood in contrast to the “civilized” European (a status not all Europeans were convinced applied to Europe). In these narratives, the indigenous peoples were destined (or doomed) to surrender to European notions of civilization and “progress,” be it through extermination or through conversion. Certainly, such tasks were easier said than done, but early in the colonial era, at least, Europeans imagined a world in which the “noble” or “uncivilized” native gave way to European domination of the Americas.

Though the contexts and centuries have changed, the image of Chief Raoni accomplishes a similar task; instead of colonialism or Europeanness, however, “modernity” and technology are the new unstoppable forces, but the indigenous culture defeated and forced to surrender to these new understandings of “progress” is still present. Yes, the tale is now cast as tragic, but the portrayal still draws on stereotypical notions of indigenous cultures as less technological or more “traditional,” and thus, noble, but doomed to fail in the face of “progress” (now defined in terms of “modernity” and technology, but once upon a time defined in terms of “civilization” and Europeanness). Indeed, it is fair to ask:  would the image have resonated quite as strongly with people on social media had Raoni dressed in blue jeans and a t-shirt, or even a business suit? Perhaps it’s cynical, but it doesn’t seem unfair to suggest the answer very well could be “no.”

To be clear, the impacts of the Belo Monte dam will be devastating to indigenous groups and environment alike, and it seems likely that tears have already been shed over its impact on indigenous communities and others who are already being direclty affected by its construction. But that is not what this meme is ultimately about – it’s about a mis-representation of indigenous cultures in order to advance a cause. One can agree with the cause, but it would be better if it did not rely on such stereotypical memes and narratives to bring home its point.