During Bolsonaro’s four-year tenure, the ancestral regions faced mining
and illegal deforestation in the Amazon. (Photo: PL)
BRAZILIA, Jan. 16 (RHC) – Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples Minister Sonia Guajajara announced Monday that she had reversed the measure taken by the government of defeated President Jair Bolsonaro, which exempted tree felling on indigenous land.
“Repealed Normative Instruction 12 of 2022 of the Funai (National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples) and Ibama (Brazilian Environmental Institute), which provided for the exploitation of wood resources on indigenous lands,” Guajajara said on the social network Twitter, warning not to allow further setbacks for the indigenous people .
In December, before the end of the previous government, published the normative instruction on so-called sustainable forest management in demarcated areas, which hypothetically should be protected. The rule change was sharply criticized by environmental groups.
During the four years of Bolsonaro’s rule, the ancestral regions of the Amazon were faced with mining and illegal logging, where traces of fire and destruction were recorded.
Quoting the G1 portal, Juliana de Paula Batista, a lawyer with the Socio-Environment Institute, pointed out that the previous government’s document opened up space for serious climate impacts and increased deforestation of indigenous heritage.
This, he warned, is a blatant attempt to circumvent the federal constitution and the Indian Statute, which stipulate that the resources of rivers, lakes and land belong exclusively to indigenous peoples.
For the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), the normative directive violated constitutional regulations, it was a response by the Bolsonaro government to the loggers’ demand, and the peoples living in the affected areas should have been consulted.
“In the broader context, the attacks on Indigenous lands are directly related to actions by the Executive Branch, which at the end of the mandate enacts regulations that encourage and encourage the exploitation and private appropriation of Indigenous lands by non-Indigenous peoples,” he told the APIB in a statement at the time, now quoted by G1.
He insisted that these provisions “give the invaders the confidence to pursue their illegal actions within the territories”.
Guajajara took office on January 11 and in his speech denounced that “we are facing a humanitarian crisis. For this reason, the establishment of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples of the World signals the Brazilian state’s commitment to emergency and climate justice.”
According to the indigenous leader, “These are centuries of violence and abuse, and it is no longer acceptable to accept public policies that do not do justice to bodies, cosmologies and indigenous understandings of land use.” (Source: PL)