Indigenous leader’s killer is convicted in Brazil, but tensions over land remain

On April 17, 2020, an Indigenous leader who fought to protect his ancestral land was violently killed in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. Almost exactly four years later, a local bar owner has been convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison for Ari Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau’s murder. The ruling marks a rare case of justice for violence against Indigenous land defenders, even as conflicts over traditional territories in Brazil persist.

On April 15 this year, a court in Rondônia convicted João Carlos da Silva for double aggravated homicide of the Indigenous land defender and teacher — meaning the murder was intentional, the motive was frivolous, and defense was impossible for the victim. According to court records, Silva had offered Ari drinks at his bar until he became unconscious, before then killing him with blows to the neck and head and taking his body to a different location and leaving it by the side of a road in order to hinder the investigation.

The trial was broadcast live with the presence of several Indigenous people, including family members. Ari’s sister, Mandeí Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, testified in the trial, calling her brother “a good boy who always defended our territory.”

The crime was originally thought to have been related to Ari’s work in land and environmental surveillance, but the Federal Police ruled out a link between the murder and land defense. Instead, they concluded that Silva knew Ari and killed him due to a dislike of the victim and being bothered by his presence.

However, family members and those who knew Ari continue to suspect that he was killed for defending Indigenous territory.

Ari was part of an Indigenous surveillance team that defended the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau land from constant invasions by land grabbers and cattle ranchers. The territory covers an area of 1.8 million hectares (4.4 million acres) and is home to people from nine Indigenous nations, including four groups living in voluntary isolation. Land disputes there date back to the 1980s, coinciding with migration from other parts of Brazil into Rondônia and the subsequent expansion of agriculture in the state. Conflicts have continued even with the official recognition of the Indigenous territory in 1991.

Ari’s death remains emblematic of the threat that land grabbers continue to pose to Indigenous territories across Brazil. In January, authorities evicted 50 invaders from the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Territory. Yet soon after, the invaders returned, according to Indigenous activist Ivaneide Bandeira Cardozo, known as Neidinha Suruí, as reported in a government statement.

Neidinha reported that pressure within the territory increased after Silva’s conviction; on April 22, Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, requested backup from the National Public Security Force in light of the new invasions. “[The invaders] are angry because the Indigenous people are protecting their lands and not letting them advance,” Neidinha was quoted as saying in the statement.

Deadlock in demarcation

One of the major factors driving these invasions of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau land, as well as other traditional territories, is the “time frame” proposition (known as marco temporal in Portuguese) that was approved by Congress and written into law in December last year — despite being considered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court weeks earlier. It bars Indigenous people from claiming the rights to land that they didn’t physically occupy as of the cutoff date of Oct. 5, 1988, the date Brazil’s Constitution was promulgated.

Sônia Guajarara, the minister of Indigenous peoples, told news outlet Agência Pública that the result of the new law has been a delay in the process of demarcating Indigenous territories, undermining President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s promise of ratifying all traditional peoples’ lands by the end of his term in 2026.

“It is not possible for me, as a minister, to guarantee that in two years and eight months all Indigenous lands in Brazil will be demarcated,” she told Agência Pública.

The new law doesn’t just hinder ongoing applications for demarcation of Indigenous lands, but it’s also impacting territories that have been ratified for decades — including the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau land. In March, Lucio Mosquini, a lawmaker with Congress’s agribusiness caucus, told a farmers’ association meeting in Rondônia that he had discussed with the federal government the possibility of changing the physical boundaries of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory due to what he called a demarcation error that occurred more than three decades ago.

“In the next few days, Funai is going to make this new boundary,” he said at the meeting.

In a statement published by InfoAmazonia, Funai said it “does not plan to change the limits of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory,” but acknowledged a demand from INCRA, the national agency for agrarian reform, “referring to a possible misinterpretation of the decree” leading to the demarcation of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory.

Legal experts say that even if there were an error in the physical boundaries, the law provides a five-year period in which the mistake can be disputed, meaning the legal deadline has passed; the territory was fully demarcated in 1991.

One of the main arguments concerns the Burareiro region, where about 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) are occupied by cattle ranches but are recognized as part of the Indigenous territory. During the 1970s, when Brazil’s military dictatorship encouraged the colonization of the Amazon by migrants from other parts of the country, farmers and ranchers were allowed to occupy traditional lands. But these land titles were lost after Indigenous territories such as that of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau were ratified.

Land grabbing and invasions haven’t stopped since then. Ranches on Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau land have been linked to the supply of cattle to large slaughterhouses such as those run by Brazil’s JBS, the world’s largest meat-processing company, and to supermarkets such as those under the French Group Casino, which has faced lawsuits in France for violations of Indigenous rights.

The Burareiro region has an intense history of land conflicts. The area featured in the Emmy-winning documentary The Territory (O Território), which revealed the challenges the Indigenous groups in the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory faced from invaders and land grabbers from 2018 to 2021.

The territory is one of many across Brazil struggling under outside pressure. At the start of April, the Supreme Court overturned, by nine votes to two, an earlier decision that had allowed Funai to continue with the demarcation of the Tekoha Guasu Guavira Indigenous Territory in the state of Paraná, an area riddled with conflicts between Indigenous peoples and farmers.

In the state of Bahia, 170 hectares (420 acres) occupied by the Pataxó Indigenous people for centuries may go up for auction as part of a federal process to pay off environmental fines amounting to 36 million reais ($7.1 million) imposed on Moacyr Costa Pereira de Andrade, a local businessman and honorary consul of Portugal in Brazil. Andrade and the Pataxó have for decades asserted rival claims to the territory, which the businessman says falls partly within his Itaquena farm.

In a statement, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) said the federal court in Bahia had “authorized the auction to pay environmental debts of one of the biggest land grabbers in the municipality of Porto Seguro who defrauded the registration of the land in question.” APIB, the country’s biggest Indigenous coalition, accused the court of ignoring “the historical presence of elders of the Pataxó people in the area.”

“This question of an auction is a scandal,” Haroldo Heleno, coordinator at the Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI), an advocacy group affiliated with the Catholic Church, told Mongabay. “The Indigenous situation is turning increasingly serious.”

Grassroots efforts and an Emmy-winning film help Indigenous fight in Brazil

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