IG professor sees “very tragic scenario for indigenous populations”
Professor Vicente Eudes Lemos Alves, from the Geosciences Institute (IG) at Unicamp, emphasizes that he is not a student of indigenous issues, although he coordinates an extension project with the Guarani population of the Rio Silveira village, in Bertioga – around 500 live there. indigenous people of the Mbya ethnic group, with the other two branches, Nhandeva and Kaiowá, being concentrated especially in Mato Grosso do Sul. Its research area, however, involves agribusiness and the expansion of the agricultural frontier, as well as its impacts on agroextractivist populations – indigenous people, quilombolas, geraizeiros –, authorizing him to give his opinion on the measures announced by the Bolsonaro government on the day of inauguration and which point to the dismantling of Funai.
“The current scenario is quite tragic for indigenous populations. As much as there is criticism of Funai, its disarticulation, which has been going on for a long time and is getting worse in this new government, ends the unity that existed, even if minimally, in the body that centralized activities related to indigenous people”, he laments. Vicente Alves, extending his criticism to the PT governments, when, according to him, there was also scrapping and a lack of employees. “Transferring the role of identifying and demarcating indigenous lands to the Ministry of Agriculture is completely unfounded, it is placing two completely different policies in the same body: agricultural expansion, deforestation for economic interest, and the other of preventing deforestation and protecting these populations on reserves.”
In his research on the Cerrado biome, the IG professor has seen intense deforestation and the disappearance of biodiversity species, creating serious problems for agroextractivist populations. “The bottom and pasture communities [which maintain agricultural activity in the valleys and community activities in the plateaus, such as extractivism and small animal husbandry] have suffered a great disarticulation of their economy and their customs, due to the advance in the production of soybeans and then cotton, especially in western Bahia, from the 80s, 90s and 2000s. It is important to remember that the Cerrado biome plays a fundamental role in the production of water for several river basins in the Amazon, Southeast and South, also supplying the Paraná River basin, which flows into the Plata River in Argentina.”
The geographer explains that the region that encompasses southern Maranhão, Tocantins, southern Piauí and western Bahia, called Matopiba, has many swamps from which the water table emerges. “In these areas of water accumulation there is a wide variety of plants, such as buriti, a palm tree whose fruit and straw are heavily used by agroextractive populations. These ecosystems are disappearing because agribusiness, in addition to deforestation, uses a lot of water for irrigation. I have data collected in fieldwork on rivers that have dried up, as irrigation water does not return to the aquifers at the same intensity. Another problem that directly affects these populations is pesticides, which contaminate water and cause diseases.”
An aggravating factor highlighted by Vicente Alves is that Matopiba, as it is a region of recent agricultural expansion, has land that is still cheap and attracts large foreign investment funds that associate with Brazilian companies. “An issue discussed in our research project concerns the extent of land sales to foreigners, information that we do not have, because in addition to the oversight bodies being disjointed, these buyers associate themselves with national capital, leaving the data even more submerged. And land is being bought or leased, not necessarily for production, the profit for some of the companies already comes from the purchase and sale of land, within a strategy to occupy agricultural frontier areas.”
The repercussion of this, observes the Unicamp professor, occurs in agroextractivist communities, including indigenous people, who are losing their territories. “Now, this new government intends to create facilities for the expansion of agribusiness (with the support of an extremely strong bench), which should occur in the preserved areas. Our surveys show that agriculture has also grown a lot in the region, in the process of deforestation, pasture is produced (which is cheaper) and then comes monoculture, such as soy, cotton and eucalyptus: in Imperatriz [MA], which is in the transition region from the Cerrado to the Amazon, Suzano Papel e Celulose has set up shop, which buys a large quantity of wood production from this plant for cellulose. But firewood from the Cerrado itself becomes charcoal for the ovens of companies such as Bunge Alimentos, Cargill and ADM, tradigns which have soybean processing units in Bahia, Piauí, Tocantins and Maranhão.”
Increase in violence
According to Alves, data from CIMI (Indigenist Missionary Council) and CPT (Pastoral Land Commission) show the intensification of conflicts caused by the advance of agricultural expansion in regions of Tocantins, Mato Grosso and Mato Grasso do Sul. “In Dourados [MS] , for example, indigenous people suffer from the loss of their lands and the process of violence. A more aggressive advance of this export-oriented economy can be clearly seen in the Cerrado region, entering the pre-Amazon region. The Unicamp Entrance Examination raised an interesting question about the increase in the number of deaths in land conflicts in Brazil: that after a reduction for ten years, deaths have now increased again.”
The Unicamp geographer considers that the option for an economy even more dependent on primary sectors is a setback in terms of worldview, demanding that we think about a national project that values the country's wealth. “The problem with this government is submission. In the agromineral panorama, this is a short-term vision, exploiting products with no added value and with great harm to both extractive populations and natural wealth. Thinking about the immediacy of the sale of primary products, Brazil is failing to make a future calculation: that not only soybeans are being sold, but also the forest, biodiversity, irrigation water, for a small value in view of the liabilities that remain for the country, for the places and for the populations of those places.”
Extension project
Through the extension project that Vicente Alves leads in the Rio Silveira village, which has been ongoing for four years, between 20 and 30 students from different areas at Unicamp have already passed, such as geography, geology, linguistics, arts and social sciences. “The Guarani of the North Coast of São Paulo went through a very complicated process with the opening of the Rio-Santos highway in the 1960s, which led to the death of many of them from diseases caused by more direct contact with the non-indigenous population. In the 90s, they managed to demarcate part of the area where the village is today and, thus, the population began to recover. As they get married very young, there are a large number of children in two schools, one municipal and one state.”
The IG professor says that the initial proposal was to build a bilingual Portuguese-Guarani atlas, which is only now being written, because priority was given to a book on local flora and fauna, also in both languages. “This material was a request from one of the Karai [spiritual leader] of the village, Sérgio Macena, and the indigenous teacher Antonio Macena, as they realized that young people no longer have knowledge about plants and animals and have also abandoned rituals. They wanted to rescue and record this knowledge, to also transmit it through schools. Indigenous people consume a lot of what we consume and a situation of cultural conflict has been created: young people use cell phones, earrings, dye their hair, watch a lot of mass television programs and resist following the culture of their elders.”
According to Vicente Alves, the Guarani support a lot of oral culture, but writing is very recent in this universe on the North Coast. “The publications created in the project are bilingual because they are Guarani speakers, including children, while all the school material is in Portuguese. Many elderly people only speak their native language, but children and young people are bilingual, due to the greater coexistence with non-indigenous people – in addition to school, they produce and sell their handicrafts on the banks of Rio-Santos, on Boraceia beach. One concern at the moment is to encourage young people who are finishing high school to enter Unicamp through the Indigenous Entrance Exam.”
