August 30, 2021

09:08

Cassandra Castro – from Cenarium

BRASILIA (DF) – The Arara people of the Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Land are asking for help to re-establish peace and to have their rights to dignity and the land where they live guaranteed. The Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Land covers an area of more than 730,000 hectares in Pará, in the Middle Xingu region, and is home to some of the greatest biodiversity in the Amazon. The area is the most deforested in Brazil and suffers direct consequences from the construction of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Plant.

The trip to Brasilia takes place as part of the Guardians of Iriri Campaign, which is by the Indigenous Association of the Arara People of Cachoeira Seca (Kowit) with support from the Maíra Institute, a Brazilian non-profit organization, which has been active since 2017 in national and international territories. The goal of the institution is to contribute to the emancipation of traditional people and communities by strengthening the principle of self-determination, in which indigenous people are, in fact, protagonists of their history.

Regularization of the territorial status of Indigenous Land

The director of Maíra Institute, Daniel Lopes Faggiano, will participate in an intense agenda of meetings together with representatives of the Arara people. Visits to some embassies such as those of Russia, Canada, Norway, Belgium and Japan are scheduled. He says that the idea is to ask for support in order to give visibility to the drama experienced by both the indigenous and non-indigenous people who live in the area.

Despite having been approved in 2016 by the Federal Government, the Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Land are still the scene of tension due to occurrences of subdivision and irregular land sales within the area. According to the National Indian Foundation (Funai), more than 1,200 non-indigenous families occupy the territory.

Daniel says that not all non-indigenous people are people of bad faith. “There is a lot of pressure coming from sawmills, there are many ipê trees in the area. There are already farms there. Smaller families that can’t stand the living conditions end up selling the land to bigger farms.

The result of the lack of land title regularization in the Indigenous Lands is seen in the immense deforested area around it. Cachoeira Seca is the most deforested indigenous land in Brazil. According to the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), between 2008 and 2020, the Indigenous Land lost a total of 367.9 km² of forest. This devastation corresponds to an area larger than the city of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais (331.3 km²).

Forest Guardians

Daniel Faggiano also alerts to the importance of the way of life of these native people for the climate issue. “We know that the climate crisis is not a particularity of Brazil, but of the world, and the Arara people are committed to bringing their way of life so that people know about it and support it.

Besides the specific agenda of the Arara people, in Brasilia, the delegation will also join the indigenous movement that is still in the Federal Capital to follow the trial of the thesis of the Temporal Mark, scheduled for next Wednesday, September 1st. After that, a group with 13 people, ten of them Arara women, will arrive on the 6th and 7th to participate in the indigenous women’s march that will also take place in Brasilia.