Inaugurated half a century ago, the Trans-Amazonian highway (BR-230) tore the territory of the Arara people in half, until then without official contact with whites.
The symbolic work of the military dictatorship paved the way for colonist invasions, new diseases and violent clashes.
More recently, the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, which has been in full operation since 2019, did not comply with environmental conditions with the macaw people removing (disintrusion) of non-indigenous people from their territory and installing two surveillance bases on access roads. .
Now, in an unprecedented initiative, the Arara people (self-styled Ugoro’gmó), who live in two contiguous indigenous lands, Cachoeira Seca and Arara, created consultation protocols, with rules and conditions, to negotiate with the State large projects that threaten their territory.
“We made our protocol to have a little respect for the custom, with the belief of the Indian”, says chief Mobu Odo Arara, from Cachoeira Seca, in an interview in the Iriri village. “Our food, our medicine come from the forest, so we have to protect what we have. The idea is a protocol for the defense of the rights of the future of our people.”
The initiative has legal backing. Brazil is a signatory to Convention 169 of the ILO (International Labor Organization), which provides for prior and informed consultation with impacted communities.
According to the MPF (Federal Public Ministry), which has been encouraging the creation of these protocols, the consultation must be regulated by each indigenous people, according to their sociocultural context.
“Our intention is that the protocol of each people is the regulation of the decree that establishes Convention 169 in Brazil”, says regional attorney FelÃcio Pontes Jr.
The macaws’ immediate concern is with the paving of the 250 km stretch between Medicilândia (PA) and Ruropólis (PA). Both territories are in the area of ​​influence. The Arara TI (Indigenous Land) reaches the side of the road and suffers from illegal loggers, and the Cachoeira Seca TI is already partially taken over by hundreds of non-indigenous people.
Although the macaws were not consulted, the Dnit (National Department of Transport Infrastructure) has already signed a contract to pave 83 km in Medicilândia and Uruará (PA), in the amount of R$ 118.8 million.
According to the federal government agency, the start of the works has been authorized since the 7th of February. When the report passed by the site, in March, a concrete bridge was under construction.
Dnit states that the installation license for the start of the works has been issued, but that for some segments it is necessary to conclude studies and actions to mitigate the impacts related to the indigenous component.
In early April, macaw leaders visited the Dnit headquarters in BrasÃlia, when they delivered copies of the protocol. “The material is under technical analysis by Dnit professionals so that the steps provided for in the aforementioned protocol are adapted to the studies in progress, within the scope of the licensing process”, says the organ.
Asphalt has the potential to end decades of long journeys lasting hours and even days due to quagmire and should also help with the flow of one of the largest cocoa producing regions in the country. Easier access amid the dismantling of federal inspection agencies tends, however, to accelerate invasions, which have jeopardized the existence of macaws.
The situation is more critical in Cachoeira Seca, where a subgroup of macaws contacted only 35 years ago, in 1987, lives.
The area was approved in 2016 as one of the conditions for the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, but the federal government never removed the non-indigenous people. On the contrary, new invaders continue to convert the forest into pasture and open roads to extract wood.
The result is that Cachoeira Seca has the sad record of being the most deforested indigenous land in the Legal Amazon. According to Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), since 2008, 39,000 hectares of forest have disappeared, an area slightly larger than the municipality of Belo Horizonte.
Under the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government, Cachoeira Seca went through its most devastating period, with the illegal suppression of 7,249 hectares between August 2019 and July 2020.
The approximately 120 macaws in Cachoeira Seca describe a life under siege. In order to hunt, the basis of their diet, they need to go further and further. In the forays into the forest, they cross illegal roads and hear the noise of machines felling trees to remove wood or open farms.
“Branco never stopped chasing. There are already loggers on the porch here”, says the elderly Tatyg Arara, a teenager at the time of the contact. “We’re worried. We’re afraid of everyone falling into the water, of the white man throwing us into the water, taking the land from us. There’s nowhere else to run when the white man invades the land.”
After years of resistance, the macaws ended up accepting the presence of the white, already in the 1980s, and began to negotiate. They won the demarcation of two continuous territories along the Iriri River, a tributary of the Xingu, but this legal protection was not enough to expel non-indigenous people and to prevent new invasions by loggers and land grabbers, a process aggravated by the construction of the Belo Monte dam.
Tatyg remembers that, as a child, his group had to change from time to time to escape the white. In one of the clashes in the woods, her husband killed a logger.
The old woman also says that the macaws were fascinated by the plantain, introduced in the region by the settlers. “It was big, heavy. Our banana was small. We would steal bananas from the white man. Sheet.
The Transamazonica passed just 3 km from one of the villages of the macaws, who resisted the invasion. There were several violent episodes. In one of them, in 1976, three employees of the state-owned CPRM (Companhia de Pesquisa de Recursos Minerais) were shot dead.
Three years later, in 1979, two Funai employees were shot with arrows while trying to establish contact. One of them, Afonso Alves da Cruz, would become, in the following years, the great defender of the macaws of Cachoeira Seca.
“He protected us a lot, our father”, says Tatyg about the sertanista, who died in 2017, aged 82.
To prevent an invasion similar to that of Cachoeira Seca, boosted by the construction of Belo Monte, the macaws of the Arara TI, inhabited by about 400 indigenous people, opened two villages, Tagagem and Aradó, on the banks of the Transamazon Highway. The objective is to prevent both land grabbers and illegal loggers from entering.
“Right here, there was an extension [estrada] where they stole a lot of wood, a lot of land. Hunter came with dog. For now, it’s stopped”, says Tjitpotem Arara, from Tagagem village. There, however, the macaws struggle to get water, available about two hours’ walk away. Before, they lived on the banks of the Iriri River.
The invasion is not just physical. In Cachoeira Seca, children no longer speak the Arara language, from the Caribbean language family. For chief Mobu Odo, the presence of an evangelical church in the village, the internet and the constant flow of non-indigenous people are responsible for the advancement of Portuguese.
“The generations of today only want to speak Portuguese, they want to be only on the internet, that’s the concern. I explain a lot to them: ‘The internet is for us to spread our culture, our food, for people to see that we live from territory'”, he says.
Each of the indigenous lands approved its negotiation protocol. In common, the macaws demand that the consultation on a new project be carried out by the federal government in two major phases: the informative one, with meetings in all the villages, and the decision-making one, through one or more large meetings in the main villages.
“After we have been notified and received the initial information, our people will decide whether or not there is an interest in the matter. If we are not interested, the dialogue ends. activities”, says the protocol of the Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Land.
According to Mobu Odo, collective decision-making will inhibit attempts to recruit leaders.
“The invaders have already offered me money, a mayor has already offered me money too”, he says.
The MPF has sought legal recognition of the protocols as a way of implementing the right of peoples to self-determination. In 2016, the Federal Court endorsed the thesis by recognizing consultation protocols for the peoples of the Volta Grande do Xingu region, stage of a mega-project for gold exploration by Canadian mining company Belo Sun.
“The attempt at ethnocide was very clear in the opening of the Transamazônica highway and in relation to Belo Monte”, says regional prosecutor FelÃcio Pontes Jr. “I see the consultation protocol as a reaction, the strongest act of resilience of the Arara people in the face of so many massacres.”
The reporters Fabiano Maisonnave and Lalo de Almeida traveled at the invitation of ISA (Instituto Socioambiental).
