BRASILIA, Brazil — The future of Brazil’s traditional Indian cultures was under challenge Wednesday as Brazil’s Supreme Court began hearing arguments on whether to break up a vast Amazon reserve.
The dispute over the 4.2-million-acre Raposa Serra do Sol reservation pits about 18,000 Amazon Indians against a handful of large-scale rice farmers who have violently fought efforts to remove them.
Indian-rights advocates say a ruling against the reservation could set a precedent that would eventually destroy policies that grant Indians land and autonomy to maintain their traditional cultures.
Politicians from Roraima state, however, say leaving the entire reservation in Indian hands is a threat to national security and strangles economic growth in the sparsely populated state.
State lawyer Luiz Valdemar Albrecht urged the justices to cut the reserve into pieces so the rice farmers can stay alongside 18,000 Indians from the Macuxi, Ingarico, Patamona, Wapixana and Taurpeng tribes.
He argued the anthropological study saying the tribes traditionally inhabited the land was a shoddy “cut and paste job.”
Attorney Joenia Batista de Carvalho, a Wapixana tribe member representing the Indians, said the reservation resulted from a decades-long effort to right wrongs that began five centuries ago during colonization by the Portuguese.
While Brazil’s 1988 Constitution mandated the demarcation of Indian lands within five years, the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve wasn’t created until 2005, and the government still hasn’t enforced its borders.
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