The STF decided on Thursday evening (18) that the delay was unconstitutional, but the decision opens the door to a new chapter of violence against indigenous peoples, as it maintains the points of Law 14.701/2023, the Genocide Law.
The rejection of the calendar is only a symbolic gesture to calm consciences while the real machine of destruction is put in place in the articles of the law now validated. By maintaining sections of the law, the STF gave the violence a stamp of legality.
The law is not a simple regulation, but a legal engineering of territorial emptying. It operates through deadly mechanisms that transform original rights into currency.
It establishes the understanding that the state can offer lands other than those traditionally occupied, sacred and ancestral. It is the institutionalization of exile. Exchanging the territory which shelters the spirits of ancestors, the rivers which tell the history of peoples, the forest which is pharmacy and cosmology for a plot elsewhere is not compensation. This means that a people’s spiritual, cultural and vital connection to their land is fungible and can be offset as a debt with a market value.
The law provides for “expropriation of social interest”, which removes land from the scope of original, imprescriptible and unavailable law, and places it in the domain of convenience of the State and, as we know, of agro-industry. The “social interest” becomes, in practice, the interest of large estates, mining and speculation. Land ceases to be a right of indigenous peoples and becomes a resource that can be negotiated, expropriated and redistributed according to the balance of economic power.
The most grotesque article criminalizes indigenous reconquests, prohibiting the recovery of territories until “voluntary expulsion” (non-existent) or the completion of a demarcation process that the law itself makes unrealizable. It is the legalization of passivity in the face of invasion and a license for repression: communities that resist will be treated as criminals, with the support of the police. Cases like those observed in Mato Grosso do Sul, Maranhão and Rondônia could become the norm and not the exception.
The decision explains the historical prejudice that considers indigenous peoples as obstacles to “progress”, repeating the logic of bandeirantes, loggers and miners, but now with legal provisions. The conflict goes beyond land: these are national projects. On the one hand, those who deplete natural resources and view indigenous peoples as obstacles; on the other, those who understand socio-environmental diversity as a wealth and sovereignty as dependent on the integrity of indigenous territories, effective barriers against deforestation.
The rapporteur’s vote, full of conditions, acts like a smokescreen which can produce in practice the same negative effects as the calendar. The scenario imagined by the STF and Congress aggravates conflicts: by closing the legal avenue, it pushes communities into direct confrontation. The law, instead of calming, fuels tensions, transforming the 857 indigenous territories in conflict into battlefields.
Defending indigenous peoples means defending democracy, fundamental rights and a common future.
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